OCU celebrated Constitution Day on Sept. 7. This year’s event was entitled Perspectives on Race and Policing and was sponsored by the Departments of Criminal Justice and Political Science. The event featured Reverend T. Sheri Dickerson of Black Lives Matter, OCU Chief of Police Dexter Nelson and City Councilman James Cooper.
At the start of the event, Reverend Dickerson said BLM is not targeting police officers, but the system itself, with the understanding that most members of law enforcement are not out to cause harm.
“Officers have not been prepared or equipped to do policing in the communities that they have been assigned to serve,” Rev. Dickerson said.
According to Dickerson, there is a cultural barrier between some law enforcement members and the communities they serve.
“There is a struggle there to interact with ones whose culture you don’t understand. The heart of most of the work is to make sure there is no more loss of life,” Dickerson said.
Reverend Dickerson said looking at statistics is counterproductive, being that even one life lost should be considered enough for action.
“Many of us are working to increase black joy and the liberation of our people,” Dickerson said. “The systems that we have are not working to do that.”
According to Dickerson, such systems as the police need to be restructured.
“In this society it is apparent that black lives are dismissed, disregarded and seem expendable because of white supremacy,” Dickerson said.
Councilman Cooper said there is a need for a national database to track police-involved shootings.
“[The issue of police brutality] has put the city council members in an exceedingly demanding situation to act,” Cooper said.
Cooper stressed the importance of teaching the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement in K-12 education.
“It’s crucial for children to know that for hundreds of years minorities were viewed as less. These attitudes don’t just go away,” Cooper said.
For the closing of the event, Chief Nelson, an investigator for hundreds of police shootings, advised the public not to come to conclusions about cases involving police brutality without any evidence.
“Only the investigators have the evidence,” Nelson said.
Nelson said that being black and a police officer gives him a unique perspective on the issue of police brutality and racial equity.
“In some situations, where an officer doesn’t know that I am an officer, I may need to act a certain way,” Nelson said. “We should all have empathy and an open mind.”
Correction / Clarification
A photo caption on Page 1 of the October 6 issue mistakenly identified its event and date. The photo portrayed the Constitution Day Roundtable on Sept. 7.
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