New Haven program pairs kids with cops, with some help from Faxon Law Group

New Haven Register
Juliemar Ortiz
December 12, 2016

NEW HAVEN >> Children are often afraid of police, and officers who just want to help can feel like unwanted outsiders.

It’s a serious problem facing many communities across the nation. But in New Haven, Dan Zimmerman, CEO and co-founder of LiveKind, said he’s created a video that can help improve tense relations between communities and law enforcement, and bring them to understand each other. He titled it “Cops & Kids.”

“No one faces a more polarizing dialogue with his or her community than law enforcement and there is no issue higher on the list of importance than bringing community and law enforcement to a new place of trust and cooperation,” Zimmerman said. “The goal of the collaboration is to improve how we listen, break down the walls and throw away bias with a guided, inclusive dialogue before there’s a crisis.”

LiveKind began as a video-based, anti-bullying nonprofit. It’s Cops & Kids” program started in 2015 when Zimmerman began recording the video at New Haven’s Police Athletic League summer camp. Children in the video talk about what they see in the media, personal experiences and their perceptions of police.

“Nobody wants to see another family member die or get hurt in a shooting; it’s just sad,” one young girl said in the video.

Also seen in the video: New Haven officers describe what it’s like to interact with children who see them as a threat. Some officers talk about their own families and how they want people to see them as human, too.

“When kids sees me coming, they usually think ‘here comes this jerk again; why doesn’t he leave us alone,’” said one officer.

There are three parts to the LiveKind program, but it begins by utilizing the video storytelling to bring forth and fully address the issues participants might feel. Part two, which will begin early in the new year, is a set of workshops during which Project Director Anne-Marie Knight and Cyd Slotoroff will facilitate conversations with police and children separately, then bring them together.

“We did a short version of the program at the Police Academy recently. It included a dozen or so students from High School in the Community; Academy of Law and Social Justice supervised by Cari Strand, curriculum leader; me and the entire class of soon-to-be officers. In the afternoon the kids and cops watched videos in which the content included how much kids on the streets fear cops on the beat,” Zimmerman said. “A young recruit stood up and said; ‘I can’t believe you would feel that way about me. You don’t know me.’ The room was then ablaze with back and forth, real conversation about feelings and trust and understanding each other as individuals.”

That day ended with 30 minutes of exchanging contact information and hugs, Zimmerman said. In part three, the two groups work together to create a program to help the community.

The Cops & Kids program is ready to roll out in the city’s Westville district, thanks to a $25,000 donation from Faxon Law Group. An additional $6,000 was raised at the firm’s annual holiday party Thursday toward starting the program in the next district.

Faxon Law Group partners Joel Faxon, Eric Smith and Tim Pothin recently revamped the firm’s giving policy to focus not only on monetary funding but also social support and networking between grass-roots organizations seeking to empower the community. They said funding does not guarantee the program’s success; partnerships do.

“Cops & Kids fit perfectly with that idea,” Smith said. “The videos are very powerful in that way. You can talk about it all the time but when you see it happening, right in front of your eyes in those videos, it gives you a whole other respective of what the program is actually accomplishing,”

Pothin was a police officer in Norwalk in the 1980s before moving to a career in law. He said while Faxon Law Group is funding the program in Westville, he hopes others in the community will see the need for program and are able to fund other districts.

“We felt that anything that we could do to help make police officer’s (jobs) a little bit easier and to help them communicate more effectively with people in this community, particularly young people, is very worth while,” Pothin said.

Zimmerman said more funding and partnerships are needed to expand the program to the other nine districts in New Haven.

“The plan is to establish the program in each of New Haven’s police districts with neighborhood-specific programs,” he said. “The long-term objective is to offer the program as a way to assist communication between community residents and police departments across the state.”

The Cops & Kids initiative was created by LiveKind in collaboration with Mayor Toni Harp’s office, the New Haven Police Department and Jason Bartlett and Arthur Edwards of the Department of Youth Services,

Interim Police Chief Anthony Campbell said Cops & Kids is a natural extension of efforts to make relationships with police and youth and make them long-lasting.

“When you can reach someone at a younger age and make them see that a police officer is not simply a person that is an occupying force, but that they’re a member of the community who cares about them, who’s there for them, then the likelihood that you’re going to have negative interactions will decrease,” Campbell said. “One of the best ways to address any issues that juveniles are having is not simply to put officers in schools and make arrest, but to have officers who are better trained, who understand issues that juveniles are dealing with, to understand issues that parents are dealing with and who make connections with the juveniles.”

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