Classroom 214 at Arundel Elementary in Cherry Hill has a lot of books - bins of Dr. Seuss, books about dinosaurs, books about African-American history and culture. Students come to this room for one on one tutoring sessions to help with their reading. The sessions are arranged through Reading Partners, a non-profit that recruits hundreds of volunteers to give up an hour or two every week in schools throughout the city. Many of those volunteers are city employees and the city does not take the time out of the employees’ pay.
In Baltimore, where four of out five fourth graders from low-income families read below their grade level, there’s a lot of work to do. And that means they need more volunteers.
On this day, the team from Reading Partners is getting ready to train a new tutor.
Baltimore city Police Commissioner Anthony Batts is signing the necessary paperwork as he eyes the young students filing into the classroom, settling in with their tutors, “I see them coming in. I can’t wait to get started,” he tells Alissa Ganser, the Senior Operations Manager from Reading Partners. He tells her he wants to have the largest city department participation, but she tells him that Baltimore city Parks and Recreation Department are challenging that declaration. They agree that the gauntlet has been thrown and they continue to work out the details of the partnership between the police department and this literacy tutoring program. Batts says he wants his officers sitting down with kids, face to face – as reading tutors. “It will not only help the kids with their reading, but it will hopefully mean the officers will get to know the kids so they won’t just be a young black kid walking down the street, but ‘Trayvon,’” he says. Batts and the people at Reading Partners agree to arrange it so police officers will tutor kids in the district they’re patrolling.
This is part of what Batts and others call “21st century policing”. He testified on that topic a few weeks ago before a White House policing task force. Batts talked about acknowledging the problems--about police understanding social justice, tackling racism, showing empathy – he wants his officers “sitting [with folks] on their stoops.” He said he tells his officers to “get to know grandma and the community at a larger level”. He recognized that it’s not what they’re used to hearing. He told the task force, “in a moment of clarity I had one command officer tell me when he came on a number of years ago, what the department did was to stop and frisk every African American male and search through his pockets. So, any African American male walking down the street [the officers] got out of their car and searched those pockets looking for guns.” Batts went on to explain the effect that kind of policing has on a person: “the impact of having someone stop you when you’re not doing anything and search through your pockets…As an African American man myself having someone stop you in front of your kids and what that feels like– to have your kids see you treated that way, or put down on your knees or sat down on the sidewalk – the impacts of those things, I’m trying to share that with the police department as we move forward and build a philosophy of community policing.”
Reading to young Baltimore students is one way Batts hopes to leave behind “stop and frisk” policies and start “community policing.” He also discussed various sports programs the police department has begun and hopes to expand. “Our next step is that we’re trying to go into a housing project – I’m looking for funding – where I can have officers who are stationed in a housing project every single day where they not only deal with security but also deal with the child in school, they will make sure they talk to the teachers and if they need tutoring then the officer assists with tutoring.” Experts call this shift in policing going from “warrior to guardian”. Batts told the White House task force, “when you have a hundred cities protesting, it should be a clue that you have to change.” He went on to say that in Baltimore, “there is no trust in our community as a whole.”
Of course, this is not news to many in the city. Lena Ampadu has been a professor of African American Literature at Towson University for thirty-eight years. She says her son is one of many African-American young men who have felt the sting of racial profiling. And she herself has felt tensions with city police. Ampadu says a city police officer knocked on her door once, looking for the neighbor’s son. She told him he wasn’t there, but the officer didn’t believe her. She says she was offended that the officer – who himself was African American - was suddenly standing in her house calling her a liar. “Often they interact with us based on assumptions and stereotypes – it was nothing for him to tell me I was lying, that I was covering up.” She filed a complaint, but it was taken lightly at the station, she says. The message she took away from the incident: “They’re the one with the authority and so you have to be afraid and tiptoe around them.”
There are 2800 Baltimore city police officers, 39% are African American. Ampadu says even the African American officers are prone to stereotyping young black men. She hears about it in her classes often. It’s “part of the culture, part of the power dynamic,” she says.
But Batts insists he’s going to “turn [his] critics into allies” and that he’s going to “stir the pot [by] taking on sexism, literacy, and character building,” - all in an attempt to rebuild community relationships.