Rebecca Lee teaches at the KIPP Tulsa College Preparatory School, where Terence Crutcher’s daughter is a student. She describes in this post (which appeared on Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet blog at the Washington Post) how the children in the school reacted to the terrible news of the unjust death of their schoolmate’s father.
Weep for the children. What lessons are they learning from these events?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s so hard for someone who is white to understand what living with this is like, especially for children. The fear, hopelessness, and powerlessness are just hard to fathom. Trying my best to fully understand, but I think it takes a lifetime I’ve seeing the world from a black body to really understand what it’s like.
So sad for this family, school, and city. I only hope that these very public cases, with video that substantiates what in the past could be too easily rationalized away, fans this national conversation and makes a real difference.
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I agree. And I respect KIPP for speaking out about this and not doing the “safe” thing.
Your post reminds me of seeing so many small-minded people who respond to the BLM movement by insisting “All Lives Matter” and (deliberately?) misunderstanding that BLM means “BLM too”. Because far too often it seems that they do not matter and that is the problem.
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Well, at least we agree on one thing ;-).
The analogy that works for me is the person who goes to the doctor with a broken arm. The doctor looks at every bone in their body, saying “all bones matter”. The patient says “Yes, of course, but my arm is what’s broken right now, so let’s work on that.”
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We probably agree on a lot!
But you don’t seem to understand why I would feel so much outrage when I see Families for Excellent Schools and the like spending sickening amounts of money in a PR campaign to convince the public that charters suspending so many 5 and 6 year olds is necessary to keep schools “safe” and not simply an excuse to get rid of students charters find too hard or too expensive to teach. Who are rarely white.
The undertone of such a campaign is to appeal to the public’s racism — the very same racism that says a man sitting in his car waiting for his son’s school bus “might” suddenly decide to kill a bunch of police out of the blue. There is no understanding that anyone sitting in a car minding their own business might need some time before demonstrating whatever “proper” reactions seems to be required if they are not white so they can assure the police holding guns on them that they aren’t dangerous. There is an assumption that they would be violent in the response to these incidents. Both by the police and members of the public who always think the shootings are justified.
Too many of the public have a knee jerk reaction that it’s the fault of the person for not reacting in whatever way non-whites are supposed to react in that situation. Because normal actions are always read in the most threatening way possible with only seconds to decide.
Do you think it helps when FES and charters are justifying out of school suspension rates of up to 20% of their 5 and 6 year olds by claiming those young children are violent? Especially when the people pushing this notion know full well the students being suspended are rarely middle class white kids and if they were, the public might not be so quick to say “oh sure, we know lots of children in Kindergarten do violent things, so of course we won’t question your suspending so many of them”.
That kind of public relations may help charters to brag about high passing rates, but at a huge cost — convincing lots of white people that 5 year olds in charter schools that serve nearly all minority students are frequently violent. We both know that if anyone said that about mostly white suburban children in Kindergarten, they’d be treated as liars.
Think about it.
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The shootings are difficult. But I worked with police and there is often fear and mistrust there as well. It seems like after every shooting, we see riots as a response which only feeds into Trump’s narrative about law and order needed to remedy a violent America. Certainly, the proliferation of guns and growing inequality is at the root of America’s problems.
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If people who feel that “law and order” is the solution to this problem win, we end up with gated communities and ghettos.
People who suffer repeated demonstrations of the ultimate form of disrespect can’t be expected to hold the rule of law to the same level of regard as those for whom it works all of the time.
I wish looting wouldn’t happen, because it appears from the outside to be people taking advantage of a bad situation for personal gain. But if you feel a system isn’t treating you fairly, I wonder if clawing back something must feel like a small amount of justice.
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I would imagine Trump supporters who feel they’ve been wronged by the System would agree with your point as well. The sense of justification for violence was the motive of the sniper in Dallas who shot the police officers for doing their job. If everyone decides they are wronged and the law doesn’t apply to them, or violence and looting are justified, or a certain group is inherently evil – gated communities are the least of America’s worries.
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“What lessons are they learning from these events?”
Aren’t these shootings similar to the no-excuse methods in many charter schools? Police are trained for 6 months. Similarly to undertrained teachers, they only know one way how to handle a stressful situation: end it asap.
It’s time to realize, policing is a difficult, complex work, requiring a thorough understanding of human behavior, and cannot be learned fast track.
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No, Máté, this has nothing whatsoever in common with school discipline, and using this tragedy as a way to lamely attempt to score political points is disrespectful and trivializes it.
And, this problem is not about the amount of training or even experience, it’s about culture and whether the police officer feels an obligation to deescalate and use force as a last resort or feels challenged, takes it personally, and overreacts. That’s what the indictment said. That’s what we saw with Sandra Bland. That’s what we see over and over again.
With great authority comes great responsibility and a requirement to serve the public, even when that is hard to do. Most understand that. Some, I fear, like the authority more than the public service. Most police officers I know are professional and conscientious, but we’ve all met some who aren’t, and while that can be annoyance in our comfortable suburbs, it can be lethal in urban areas. Now, there’s video.
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Maybe. It’s also possible that the police officer simply panicked and prematurely pulled the trigger—perhaps even accidentally.
How does questioning proper training trivializes the issue? Similarly, how does lack of training of TFA and Relay graduates trivializes the problems with the educational problems in many charter schools?
It’s another question, why some higher ups think, insufficient training is enough.
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Police are trained in more than one way to handle stressful situations. I’ve sat in on some of the classes. Mentoring is also part of the training. Many now have criminal justice degrees. Our city’s police department is very difficult to be hired on and the vetting is extensive. But like any job, until you are in a situation, you never are fully prepared and experience counts. I would agree some of the county and small town departments need better training. And there does need to be a way to support the many good officers while addressing the few bad ones.
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John “Police are trained in more than one way to handle stressful situations. I’ve sat in on some of the classes. Mentoring is also part of the training.”
TFA and Relay say the same thing about their graduates.
Consider this
The length of time required to complete academy training averaged 19 weeks as of 2006, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The Memphis Police Department Academy usually takes 21 weeks to complete, while San Diego’s program lasts six months.
from
http://work.chron.com/long-train-cop-21366.html
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Ok, so what would you change in police training? And like teachers are blamed in education, are police the sole problem and the communities and individuals bear no responsibility?
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“Ok, so what would you change in police training?”
I don’t pretend to be an expert in police training; I am only speculating. I certainly see similarities to the teaching profession: since you have to handle people, and you have to handle them in extreme situations, you definitely would need to put in a few semesters of practical psychology to be able to evaluate people’s behavior. I also know that it takes at least a year to learn to shoot well enough just at target. Add to it another year to handle shooting in stressful, fearful situations.
I went to some “living wage” protests, and the only way the police seemed to know how to handle even such completely peaceful demonstrations was aggression. I had to conclude, this was the only method they were taught to communicate with: they always had their hands on their handguns. When I found out that they were trained only for half a year, I wasn’t surprised anymore.
“And like teachers are blamed in education, are police the sole problem and the communities and individuals bear no responsibility?”
Probably. I never said it to the contrary. I brought up possible lack of training because people immediately bring up motives that are far less obvious, like racial profiling.
It’s probably not just the Police which make decisions about their training.
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Glad to see you reprinted this. We have so far to go in this country.
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Yes, it is a tragedy, no doubt. The officer involved has been properly (at least from what I can tell) charged with first degree manslaughter.
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