How To Address Social Justice, Covid-19 and Youth Unemployment, All At Once
In May of 1997 I left a photo shoot for the upcoming release of the Wu-Tang Forever album. I drove a friend of mine — affiliated with another multi-platinum group — back to Harlem, where he and I both lived, ten blocks apart. Parked in front of his residence, we enjoyed a long, wide-ranging discussion of current events and music. About two hours into the conversation two police cars pulled in front of us, to our right side, and then suddenly went in reverse. Seconds later, officers, with guns drawn, yelled for me to put my hands on the wheel and for both of us to slowly get out of the car. Confused, anxious but still coherent, we both followed these instructions. After a few minutes of dramatic uncertainty, the police officers — at least six in total, in four cars by my count — told me that the reason they arrived and did what they did was because a shooting had occurred earlier that day on that same street and that the suspected perpetrator had a car and license plate fitting my description.
I was incredulous and it was clear that the officer who told me this — a White woman — knew I did not believe her.
Of course, I’ll never know exactly why it all happened. But it certainly did.
That incident is never far from my mind when I encounter police and it came to mind when I saw George Floyd murdered in Minnesota.
Over the years, I’ve grown in the opinion that the root of the problem between police and communities is three-fold: 1) increasingly, police officers do not live in the neighborhoods they patrol and therefore have to rely upon thinking, communication styles and physical force techniques built for a world of anonymous contact; 2) most communities are filled with idle young people, who do not have a skill or trade that would make them employable; and 3) public safety training and education remains widely inaccessible.
The result is that our societies are volatile cocktails of misunderstanding and frustration, compounded by a cycle of poverty.
While initiatives like the “Defund The Police” movement and the U.S. House of Representative’s Justice In Police Act of 2020 have a sound basis, they do not address what contextualizes the clash between law enforcement and civil society.
They don’t build capacity of the community to police itself.
Current policy prescriptions incentivize out-of-town officers to seek police work as an ol’ boy network job programs while the most educated and professionally successful of the poor are incentivized to leave their neighborhoods for supposed greener pastures in the suburbs.
One way to reverse this situation would be to establish a public safety jobs program that would provide unemployed Black, Brown, and poor White Youth with an employable skill that would set the foundation for entrepreneurship, strengthening their investment in their own community.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in partnership with state and municipal public safety departments could easily train currently unemployed women and men in low income census tract areas to become OSHA Outreach Trainers. These new ambassadors of public safety would receive continuing education in construction and occupational safety, communication styles, negotiation, physical fitness, first aid, and CPR. They could be enrolled in apprenticeship programs, gainfully employed by the business as safety trainers (issuing OSHA 10 and 30 cards to other underemployed persons preparing them for jobs) and they could be employed by municipalities to patrol neighborhoods peacefully — accompanying the elderly while shopping, assisting in delivery of meals and mail to residences, and keeping an eye out on school children and public parks.
For about $800 and within a week, a person can receive the training necessary to become an outreach trainer, putting to rest the notion that the project is cost-prohibitive and time-consuming. At a nice round figure of $1,000 per person, within one summer month, one million people could be trained at the cost of $1 billion. Outreach trainers receive in between $150 to $300 per individual trained by them in classes they can market (the entrepreneurial aspect) or hosted by general industry or construction firms to serve their rapidly accelerating safety needs and need to comply with social distancing. With a class of 20 people, in just four days, the government subsidy could be paid for with $1,000 of revenue for the young trainer.
In one fell swoop, pressure on police departments would lighten, communities would be empowered with the support of government and the private sector and millions mired in hopelessness would be gainfully employed serving communities in the midst of crisis, making them worthy of the honor and respect shown first responders after 9–11 and during COVID-19.
If individuals like this — properly trained and rooted in their community — were around in 1997, I doubt I would have been looking down the barrel of a police officer’s gun.
And I believe, if they were here today, George Floyd would be too.
