All About Change - Kris Henning - The Over-Policing of Brown and Black Youth

Episode Date: May 29, 2023

Kristin Henning is a Professor of Law at Georgetown University and the Director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic. She has been representing children accused of crimes for over 25 years.  Kristin Henning has been representing children accused of crime for more than 25 years, and in all that time she only represented 4 white kids. The many thousands of kids she represented have all been Black and Latinx. She spent her life trying to ensure that children whose families did not have the means to defend them against a criminal justice system steeped in bias had someone to speak up for them. In her book, The Rage of Innocence, Kris weaves together powerful narratives and persuasive data. She explores the criminalization of normal adolescence and makes a compelling case that racial disparities in the juvenile and criminal legal systems are rooted in America’s unfounded, and sometimes intentionally manufactured, fears of youth of color. In this conversation with Jay, she weaves together powerful narratives and persuasive data to expose the criminalization of normal adolescent behavior and discriminatory incarceration of American youth of color.  Please find a transcription of this episode: https://allaboutchangepodcast.com/podcast-episode/kris-henningSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

To enslave an entire group of people, one has to create a narrative to justify that. Hi, I'm Jay Rudiman, and welcome to All About Change, a podcast showcasing individuals who leverage the hardships that have been thrown at them to better other people's lives. This is all wrong. I say put mental health first because if you don't... This generation of Americans has already had enough. I stand before you not as an expert, but as a concerned citizen. And today on our show, Professor Chris Henning. Why did he take off running? Well, people who are asking that question don't live in neighborhoods where police officers are present 24 hours, pretty much a day.

Chris is a professor of law at Georgetown University and the director of their juvenile justice clinic. She's been representing children accused of crimes for over 25 years. I saw a line of children being escorted down the hallway in chains, shackles on their arms, shackles on their feet. And so many of those children were black or brown. In her long career as a public defender, the overwhelming majority of the thousands of kids she has represented have been black and Latinx. But she started her career on the other side of the bench. We go into that courtroom and I'm sitting with the prosecutor. I looked over across the room and I said to her, I really want to be over there. And I'm pointing at the defense table. In our fascinating and frankly troubling conversation, Chris weaves together powerful

narratives and persuasive data. She explores the criminalization of normal adolescent behavior and makes a compelling case that racial disparities in the juvenile justice systems are rooted in America's unfounded and sometimes intentionally manufactured fears of youth of color. One child, a white child, is not only not punished, but is viewed as creative, as intellectually curious, and is put into advanced science classes, where my client, my Black client in Washington, D.C., ends up in court for nine months. Professor Henning, welcome to All About Change. Maybe I could start off by asking you, how did you decide to become a defense attorney and focus on juvenile law?

I grew up in a family of preachers and teachers, all of whom cared deeply about young people working with at-risk youth in the community, in churches. And so I think I just saw it in my house and in my community and gravitated towards working with young people. And then second, when I was in college, I had in my freshman year an opportunity to do an apprenticeship at a local prosecutor's office. And I will never forget the very first day of that apprenticeship. I walked into the juvenile courthouse. It was in Durham, North Carolina. I turned down the hallway to go find the prosecutor. And I saw a line of children being escorted down the hallway in chains, shackles on their arms, shackles on their feet. And so many of those children were black or brown.

We go into that courtroom and I'm sitting with the prosecutor and I looked over across the room and I said to her, I really want to be over there. And I'm pointing at the defense table. And that was my aha moment when I knew this was the kind of work that I wanted to do to be a defense attorney and to be a defense attorney, and to be a defense attorney specifically for children. Can you tell me about the impact of a child, a juvenile, being arrested or even stopped by the police, and the impact that that has on that juvenile, whether it's in school or outside of school, and also their family and friends? There is a growing body of research on this very question, but there's a growing body of research documenting the extraordinary psychological trauma that police encounters have on young people, and especially on Black and Latina youth. Those have been the

subjects of this particular research. And the research shows that young people, teenagers, who live in heavily surveilled neighborhoods, who attend heavily surveilled schools, or who are the frequent stops by the police, stops, frisks, searches by the police, report high rates of fear, anxiety, hopelessness. They become hypervigilant, really, which just means that they become always on guard and not trusting police officers. What's so tragic is that that distrust of police

officers very often carries over to other adult authority figures that they began to see as sort of quasi law enforcement. So teachers, counselors, other people, all of whom might be an ally to that child. So that's really what we're seeing. And the research shows that the trauma occurs not just by becoming a direct target of some police youth encounter, but also by witnessing it, right? Or hearing about it among friends and family and watching it on television. And so a child today, a teenager today, watching the killing of George Floyd on television has an extraordinary impact. We know this as an adult, but think about what impact it has onto an adolescent and what impact it has on a Black or Latino adolescent who believes that this could

happen to me. And I say all the time, this isn't an anti-police conversation. This is just the reality of what we see and what young people are experiencing it. And so the psychological research bolsters that. You also asked about family, the impact on family. And I love that you asked that question because people very rarely think about it. We think about the impact of parental incarceration on young people. We rarely think about the impact of youth incarceration on adults and siblings and all of it. And what we find is that the trauma is real. You think about how much fear, for example, Black parents have when their children walk out the door because they're afraid of their children going to school and just being criminalized for doing the things

that we all did when we were kids, right? So you worry about their ability to get an education. You worry about them being singled out and targeted. And you worry about biased presumptions about their intellectual capacity and they're prone to violence. These are just stereotypes and myths about black children that black parents have to contend with. And then black parents always, you know, sort of live with this fear. What am I what's going to happen if I get that phone call? Either that my child has been arrested or that my child has been shot and killed. Worst case scenario. And so all of it is very painful and very difficult to navigate. We talk

about the Black parents really having no choice but to give their kid the talk. Do whatever you have to do to get home safe. You know, if you encounter a police officer, be deferential, say yes, sir, no, sir, yes, ma'am, no, ma'am, put your hands up, don't make any sudden movements, those kinds of things. And, you know, when I talk to many white parents, it's not true for everyone, but when I talk to many white parents, they never even thought about, and certainly not until recently, thought about giving that talk. It's very powerful what you're talking about. It's almost like we're living in two different Americas, where in white America, parents do not have to give the children their talk. But in black America, they're concerned, is their child going to come home? Maybe you could

talk about the juxtaposition, because I know that you opened the book about talking about Eric, and what Eric did, and what happened to Eric as a result of what he did, and juxtapose that with a talk that you gave in Connecticut, where a white mother relayed a similar story. Absolutely. Eric was a 13-year-old boy who on a Saturday night was watching a movie. And he sees someone in that movie with a Molotov cocktail. And in his 13-year-old brain, he thinks, oh, that looks cool. Let me see if I can make something that looks like that. To be clear, he does not research it. He doesn't ask anybody what's in a Molotov cocktail. He just goes to the kitchen. He grabs a glass bottle and he begins to pour in whatever liquids he can find, bleach, pine salt, water, whatever he can find. Mind you, together and some

of them separately are not flammable, but he pours them into a bottle. And my favorite part of the story is that he grabs a piece of toilet paper. Right. And he runs the toilet paper from the inside of the bottle to the outside and he closes the bottle. And we know that that toilet paper, he wants it to be a wick, but it's going to burn out before it even gets to the top. But he tapes up the bottle so that it looks like a Molotov cocktail and he plays with it for a little while, right? He's 13. It's Saturday night. He plays with it for a while, but then he forgets all about it. He puts the bottle in his book bag, right? So it will not spill out on his mother's white carpet and he

goes on about his business. He does not think anything of that, think anything about that bottle again until Monday. Monday morning comes, his mother takes him to school. He grabs his book bag and he puts his book bag through the metal detector and a school resource officer sees the bottle and says, what is this? Eric immediately says, oh, that's nothing. You can throw it away. Eric goes on to class. Little does he know this is the beginning of a nine month ordeal in our local juvenile court. Police officers and a fire department show up and pull him out of class. He gets arrested in the hallway in front of friends and held in detention overnight. He is prosecuted, formally prosecuted the next day for possession of a Molotov cocktail and for attempted arson, right? He told those officers at the school, told everybody, look, I wasn't trying to blow up

the school. This was nothing. No one believed him. No one gave him the benefit of the doubt. Fast forward several months later, I'm at a conference in New Haven, Connecticut, and I share this story when I'm talking at this conference. And someone comes up after I talk, and it was a white woman. And she says to me, my son did the exact same thing. He made a Molotov cocktail and he took it to school. And I asked her what happened. And she said, my son was put in advanced science classes. So what an extraordinary contrast, right? That for me was just another major aha moment in the work that I do. That one child, a white child is not only not punished, but is viewed as creative, as intellectually curious, and is put into advanced science classes where my client, my black client in Washington, D.C., ends up in court for nine months, formally prosecuted for this.

very powerful story. And I think many of us are faced with incidents in the news of racial disparity in America and the impact that it can have. But you go back to a basic element that once you're targeted in the system, and as a former prosecutor many years ago in Salem, Massachusetts, I experienced this. Once a child was in the juvenile system and brought before the court and charged by the police, they were sort of on the radar, meaning the police were always looking for them. And it was very common to see the same child of color in and out of the court system. Yes. Once you get targeted, and I got to say, it's not only once you get arrested, if any of your siblings get arrested, right, the whole family gets labeled or targeted.

Or if a parent has been in the system before, they are on sort of the watch list. And these are very informal watch lists, though, I will tell you that there are also formal watch lists, right, where there are created shadow gang databases. There are surveillance teams now in police departments all across the country that are following social media, Instagram accounts, Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts, TikTok accounts for certain children and only for certain children in the community. So you're absolutely right. Once you get targeted, you get followed. And what we see often too, that accounts for what you saw in Salem is the allocation of resources throughout the city so that you're allocating more police officers to certain neighborhoods. And so I talk very often

about the criminalization of normal adolescent behaviors. Well, we know, right, that the more police are present physically observing those behaviors that, quote unquote, are really adolescent, but technically meet the elements of a crime, you can always find a way to arrest a child, right? And so to be clear, I think even when police officers mean well, right, they want to keep a particular neighborhood safe, they want to be responsive to purported crime in a particular neighborhood, or they even want to take care of a group of kids, that it's still state intervention, right? State intervention that actually ultimately does more harm than good. Right, right. And I want to talk about,

first of all, what do you mean by normal adolescent behaviors? And also, what is it like to live in a neighborhood where the police are all over? Yes. When I think about clothes, let's think back to tie-dye t-shirts, right? And bell-bottom pants and the hippie era, commonly associated with hallucinogens, right? And other forms of drugs. We never outlawed the tie-dye t-shirt. Think about all black attire and short, straight black hair, the commonly associated with the golf era and also associated with mass shootings. Of course, we never outlawed all black attire. Think even today about steel-toed Doc Martens with red shoelaces, which some white supremacist groups, young white supremacist groups have claimed as their own fashion statement. We have never outlawed that. But the one thing that

we have outlawed on the books is sagging pants. And I always tell people, I don't want to see anybody's underwear either, but should it be a crime on the books, right, that allow for police youth contact? This is what I'm talking about, the ways in which we have stereotypes and assumptions about hip hop styles, for example, right? That is criminalizing normal adolescent creativity. Another example, think about music. I think this one's even more profound. Think about country music, hard rock, heavy metal, pop music, even all of those genres of music have the same themes,

themes of misogynistic lyrics, glorification of drugs, sex, alcohol, violence, all of that appears in all of the genres of music. But without consequence, you think about hip hop music and rap music, and immediately children who are listening to that music, let's say loudly in a park, are automatically assumed to be dangerous and violent. That's what we're talking about, the criminalization of normal adolescent. You think about kids who sit together in a cafeteria, and I hope all your listeners can envision what it was like. You remember to be a teenager, sitting together in a cafeteria, and sometimes, guess what? You dress alike. And if you're a black kid or a Latino kid, and you alike and you have hand signals and like maybe

tattoos, you're presumed to be a violent gang member as opposed to just being a group of friends that are in a sorority or a fraternity. So that's what I'm getting at. What I should have also said is what do we know about teenagers? Again, I could ask your audience and everybody would tell you teenagers are impulsive, reactive, emotional. They're fairness fanatics, right? Everything is unfair, right? They don't think ahead to the long-term consequences. They're risk takers.

They're boundary testers. That's what teenagers do. And guess what? That's what actually makes us successful adults, pushing those boundaries, being creative, being emotional. And they care about what their friends do and what their friends think of them. But we criminalize that for black youth. We don't allow black adolescents the privilege of testing those boundaries, talking back to a teenager, pushing everybody's buttons. I mean, even doing pranks and shenanigans,

right? And you asked about a story. I write about a kid that I represented who, this was a 15-year-old kid who was on a Saturday morning, 10.30 in the morning, gets up and he lives in an apartment building and he wants to go next door to the next apartment building over. He walks out of his apartment building, walks down the sidewalk. As he gets to the end of building over. He walks out of his apartment building, walks down the sidewalk. As he gets to the end of the sidewalk, he sees one police car in front of him with two officers in it staring at him. And when he's walking, he literally hesitates when he sees these officers. And the officers describe that as a stutter step, as if you sort of have a little hiccup in your step. And so he

stutter steps, but he keeps on walking. The officers look at him, see that stutter step, think that stutter step is suspicious at 1030 in the morning. And they begin to follow them in their car. They drive up on the curb. Our client looks back at them and he begins to run. He takes off running to the next apartment building. He dives behind a bush to hide from the officers. And to be quite frank, it's just magical thinking why he thought those officers did not see him. I have no idea. Those officers really is the funniest part of the story. But the officers grab him and they begin to yell at him. Why are you running? Why are you running? He literally says, because you're chasing me, right? Like it's just this whole symbiosis between children, particularly black and brown children

and the police officers today. And people who are listening are thinking, well, if he's not doing anything wrong, why did he hesitate in his step? And why did he take off running? Well, people who are asking that question don't live in neighborhoods where police officers are present 24 hours, pretty much a day. The young people that I represent don't see officers just once a month. They don't see officers once a week.

They don't see officers once a day. They see officers multiple times a day, parked on their street corner, stationed in front of their schoolhouse. They get stopped on the way into a convenience store, on the way out of a convenience store. Many, many of my clients have been stopped multiple times. When I say multiple times, one of the clients that I talk about has been stopped no less than 50 times, most of which for doing nothing at all, right? That's what it means to live in a very heavily surveilled neighborhood. Are the police following what they perceive as how society is looking at children who are black and brown as opposed to white? Or is don't like it when we hearken back to the founding of the country and the enslavement of Black people. But guess what? That's actually where the narrative starts, right? In order to enslave an entire group of people, one has to create a narrative to justify that, right? And so some of the narrative,

right, that was propagated during the enslavement of Black people, not only was that they were lazy and incapable and needed a master to make them productive citizens, but also the narrative was that they were dangerous and needed to be controlled. He was 14 years old when he was kidnapped, tortured, and killed. The failure to punish anyone for the crime made headlines across the country and around the world. Fast forward to the era of lynching and that narrative also in order to lynch, to lynch a 14-year-old like Emmett Till, right, or to lynch any sort of Black American, you have to propagate a narrative that they are brutes and thugs and that they are a danger to white women in particular. For Emmett Till, the trouble started here at Bryant's Meat Market and Grocery Store in Money, Mississippi.

The store was owned by a white couple, Roy Bryant and his 21-year-old wife, Carolyn, who was behind the counter the afternoon that Emmett Till and his cousins came in to buy some candy. As he was leaving the store, Emmett Till whistled at Carolyn Bryant, and she went to get a gun. These were very express, articulate, explicit narratives that were put out in billboards and flyers on radios, wherever, whatever the media was in that era, it was very explicit. So that's the foundation. Then you fast forward into the 1990s and the mid 1990s is the heart of the super predator era. young juvenile criminal who is so impulsive, so remorseless, that he can kill, rape, maim without giving it a second thought. We had a temporary, and it was temporary, uptick in crime in urban America.

And folks, Dr. or the Professor John DiIulio coined this horrible phrase called the super predator and in very explicit terms talked about black children becoming super predators who were going to basically rape, maim and kill all of America by the year 2000. We're talking about a group of kids who are growing up essentially fatherless, godless and jobless. As many as half of these juvenile super predators could be young black males. Within a year of him coining that phrase, he had to recant because his science was not founded. That is still a part of the explicit narrative that was put all over the New York Times. Black children accused, falsely accused of raping a woman in Central Park. Right. And whole full page ads about children wilding, black children, animals, wilding, all of that was still explicit. All right. Then finally,

when it becomes no longer appropriate to talk about black children in these very explicit thug, actually, though the term is still used, but it becomes less politically correct to talk about Black youth in these very explicit racialized ways. Those narratives live on in the American psyche today. And so that if you or I or an average resident of our country walks through a park and sees a group of Black kids in the park, they are afraid. You hesitate in your step because you see those Black children. That's how these narratives and that's how our racial biases live on. It's all a part of the same fabric of America. And so I just say that to say that this race relations, the racialized narrative that lead to the fears of Black children in particular,

starts at the onset of American history and is very tied to the policing of America. So let's talk about policing today. And this may be a sensitive question. Are the officers who are paying too close attention to adolescent, normal adolescent behavior, are they Black, to adolescent, normal adolescent behavior, are they black, white, or a combination? So a combination, and I want to be clear about that. For those of you who want to read more, Dr. Philip Atiba-Golf has some excellent research on this. And there is a really powerful article that talks specifically about police bias. And what they talk about is there are a series of bias triggers. One of the bias triggers is ego threat, right? That there's something about the blue uniform tied together, ego threat and masculinity threat sort of together that has a deep impact on their perception

of what's happening around them, right? Most police officers are men, right? And it's a very masculine profession. And so a lot of alleged criminal activity involves males. So you think about that contest between egos, right? Between a male on the street who's believed to be a perpetrator and a male officer, many of whom are very young. So you've got that ego threat in competition. I'm going to add an ego threat that he doesn't necessarily talk about, and that's the adolescent ego threat. Think about adolescent bravado for any of you who've studied adolescent development. So now you've got an officer, right, with the ego threat, and you've got an adolescent

on the street. It is a complete battle of the egos. The other threats relate to there's threats called stereotype threat. The ideas in which police officers are trained to do what? They are trained to look for crime. If you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So if you're a police officer, everything looks like a crime, right? And so there's a deep inability for police officers to differentiate between what constitutes just normal adolescent behavior and what technically meets the element of a crime, right? Then you add racial bias, right? That all of us have,

not just police officers. So, but you've got this, you're out on the street, you're looking for criminal behavior. Guess what? Racial bias is so strong in the area of criminal justice that it's probably one of the strongest areas. So in other words, some researchers have said, when you think about crime, you very often think of a Black person. When you think about a Black person, you very often think about crime. That's how strong that narrative has become in our society. And so that's what police officers are grappling with. And so I say this all the time, even when a police officer means well, right? Even when an officer is out on the street doing wellness checks, they are still, like all of us, succumbing

to these racial bias threats around criminality. And then add on to this the masculinity threat, the ego threat, and you've got a recipe for the over-policing of Black and brown children. Yeah, it's so true. We, the jury, find the defendant, Kyle H. Rittenhouse, not guilty. Immediately after, Rittenhouse burst into tears, overwhelmed by the moment. For many Americans who believe that a Black man who did what Rittenhouse did would have been treated differently. The verdict was painful

There is no justice in America for the oppressed This is a fact if you are pressed in America, there is no justice for you Let's take the extreme example of Kyle Rittenhouse. Yes, and then Juxtapose that to someone like Trayvon Martin. Can you talk about the difference of how we approach a white juvenile as opposed to a black juvenile? put for just one second, put race and class aside. Think about what Kyle Rittenhouse was doing that day. It's the absolute epitome of everything we know about adolescence, right? It was an impulsive act for folks who are trying to remember Kyle Rittenhouse crosses state lines with a assault rifle of some sort across his body and is walking through the streets, right? So this is a 17-year-old child who crosses state lines

and going to meet up with friends, so peer influence, right? He meets up with a friend who hands him a gun. Why are they out there? They're outside because in his 17-year-old brain, he thinks he's competent enough to protect businesses that somehow need to be protected during this Black Lives Matter protest. So number one, the fact everything he's doing, he's not thinking ahead to the long-term consequences, right? He's taking risks, testing boundaries, all the things, all under the guise of protecting these businesses. So number one, you ask, how is he treated differently? The fact that he walks through the street as a teenager with an assault rifle without any consequence whatsoever. And I know people will say to me, but that's an open carry city or open carry state.

And he was allowed to have that gun. I'm sorry, if it had been Tamir Rice in an open carry city, if it had been Trayvon Martin in an open carry city, I guarantee you they still would have been shot dead in the moment, right? So you think about Tamir Rice as the 12-year-old Cleveland boy who is playing with a toy gun. Police officers arrive, and within less than three seconds, he's shot dead, right? Whereas Kyle Rittenhouse is allowed to walk, all right? So then what happens? What else? You talk about how kids are treated differently. Kyle Rittenhouse ends up taking two lives and severely injuring another. And he, his mother, and rightfully so, his defense attorney, wanted the world to see him as an adolescent who got in over his head and had to act in self-defense. And the jury accepted that.

And so, so, so many of the public completely accepted that narrative. Kid gets in over his head. Again, I ask you to imagine that scenario involving Black children. What happens to Kyle Rittenhouse? He gets a fair trial. He gets due process. He gets to sit in one of the early interviews. I'm watching a video. He's sitting in talking to his mother. Our kids get stripped off the street, if they're even alive, stripped off the street and locked

away and don't get to see their parents until they show up in court the next time. Right. But he gets a fair trial, jury trial and gets not guilty. Right. If it were a black child, and I'm just being very honest, like we know this across the country, he would get the black child gets a phone call. Let's imagine from a friend who says, hey, I'm out here at a park and I'm really worried that something is about to go down. Can you come out just so that I have support? The black child arrives, meets up with his friend.

A friend passes him a weapon just for safekeeping. Things get out of control. Someone, you know, dies. Tragic. Right. We automatically presume that that black child is beyond redemption, is antisocial, was intentional, gun-bearing, violent criminal. We can't see the adolescent who got in over their head. We can't see any of that. I also ask people, I invite people to look at photographs of Kyle Rittenhouse and the friend as they're walking through. They're dressed just alike. They're dressed in fatigues with their hats on backwards, carrying their rifles. Nobody would call them a gang member. A black child shows up with his friends at a park and they're all gang members.

It pains me. But I think it's such an important conversation to ask us to draw a distinction between Kyle Rittenhouse and Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice. And for those who don't remember, Trayvon Martin is the kid who had the Skittles. Right. And he gets stopped by, wasn't even, it's an off-duty watch guard, right? Who shoots and kills him because why? You remember what he said before killing him or after killing him is that he was tired of so many Black children robbing their neighborhood. So he's made an assumption that the kids who are robbing their neighborhood are African-American kids, right? and that he has a duty to stop them.

And so it's just extraordinary contrast, extraordinary contrast. Can you add to that, Professor Henning, where you talk about how we as a society look at black and brown children and we don't see them as children. We see them as adult. We see them as the police see them as bigger or describe them as bigger than they actually are. That's absolutely right. And guess what? That's grounded in research also. So there is also a growing body of research that looks specifically at how racial bias operates with young people. And so there is research showing that both civilians and police officers view black boys in particular as older than they actually are and significantly older than they actually are. Some research, again, by Dr. Philip Atiba-Goff shows that civilians and police officers perceive black boys to be more than four and a half years older than they actually are. So when you're looking at a 12-year-old Tamir Rice, you're seeing a 16, 17-year-old. When you're seeing a 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, you're seeing a 21, 22-year-old. Not only that, there's research by other scholars,

empirical research, showing that individuals perceive black boys to be taller, heavier, more muscular, stronger, more physically powerful than they actually are. Again, has a huge impact. And for those of you who are listening and wondering about Black girls, there's research showing, again, empirical research showing that individuals, civilians, perceive Black girls as older, more mature, more knowledgeable about adult topics than they actually are, less innocent, and less in need of protection. All of this has a profound impact on how we discipline children in school, how we react to them when we see them on the street. And guess what? We haven't really talked about, I've been talking a lot about normal adolescent behavior. We talked a bit about serious crime, you know, with Kyle Rittenhouse. But the research also shows that even when Black children

commit serious offenses, right, we treat them truly as if they are beyond redemption. And they shouldn't barely get a trial. If they get a trial, they're sent to adult court for prosecution. They are given severe sentences like life without the possibility of parole. So even on that back end, right, in the very small percentage of Black children or any children who are committing serious crimes, the racial disparity at the sentencing level is extreme. And it's extreme because of this racial bias that you're talking about, this adultification of Black children. That is so profound. Let's shift to policing in school. And how did we get there?

And what's happening right now in terms of policing in schools? And I know after Columbine, there was an effort to put more police in schools to prevent mass shootings. But it seems like more policing is put into predominantly black and brown schools than white schools. That's right. Before I wrote the book, The Rage of Innocence, I accepted the often repeated narrative that we have police in schools because parents and teachers were afraid to send their children back to school after the mass shooting in Columbine, Colorado. in Columbine, Colorado. But when I began to do research, I realized that the first police in schools actually appeared in 1939 in Indianapolis after the first conversation about even an inkling of a possibility of integrating schools. Fast forward to the 1960s, the civil rights era, and police were sent to schools in an effort under the guise of creating a safe passage for black and brown children to be integrated into schools.

And then we fast forward again to 1990s. Remember, I already talked about the super predator era, mid 1990s. This is still mid 1990s when the super predator era was enacted or was coined, was still five years, five years before Columbine even happens. And during that mid 1990s, the federal government created the cops in schools framework. This is the framework that allowed the federal government to funnel dollars into state and local school systems that would agree to hire police in schools. Again, this is mid-1990s. Then Columbine happens, and indeed, we do increase federal funding for police in schools, but where do those police officers get sent? And you already gave a preview. They get sent to the urban schools with a disproportionate presence of Black and Brown students. They are

not getting sent in droves to Columbines, to the Sandy Hooks, to the Parkland. They're not getting sent to white suburban schools where the majority of the mass shootings had been occurring. And so the reality is more police in schools, in these Black and Brown schools, but more police in schools means more arrest in schools. More arrest in schools means more arrest of Black and Brown children. The 17-year-old girl, black girl that I represented, she got into an argument with her boyfriend at school, which is, I dare I say, dare I ask your audience, how many of you got into an argument with a partner? And during the course of the argument, she became convinced that her boyfriend was cheating on her. And so she grabs his cell phone out of his hands and begins to walk away down the hallway.

As she's walking away, she's scrolling through his text messages to see who he's been communicating with this. A school resource officer sees this and decides to intervene. Tragically, his intervention was to arrest her. child, the 17-year-old child was literally arrested in school, again, in front of friends, held in secure detention overnight, brought to court the next day, and formally prosecuted for what? For robbery, taking the property of another by stealth or force, right? Just absolutely normal adolescent behavior. And I always ask people, dare I ask you, have you ever done anything that impulsive? And this is what happens when we have police in schools. Again, that interaction looked like a robbery. Technically, probably fit the elements. But is this really

what we mean by robbery in our society? Right. It's so true. I mean, the first white paper that our foundation did, not on juveniles, but on adults, and the interaction of police with people with disabilities showed that half of the people killed by police officers have some form of a disability. In terms of the listeners, students, teachers, parents, community leaders, what should they be doing to advocate to have better policies in their school system? Do I think we will get there? And I have to say, my answer has to be yes, or I can't keep doing the work, right? I have given sort of my life work over to representing children individually in court cases, but also to doing systemic reform. And so I have to believe that we as a society can get there. Right. I will confess to you that my greatest fear as I sit here today is that in moments like this, and I could imagine some of your listeners are thinking, but crime is going up. And indeed, we are seeing more high profile shootings happening, irrational shootings

happening. But what I think happens is that we are beginning to conflate the increase of crime with our fear of young black children again, right? And that we do that to ourselves. And if we stop and we think about what is happening, where we are seeing an uptick in gun violence and shootings, who's doing those shootings? Is it the young black kid that you see in your park or is it someone else? And is it fair to criminalize, even in your mind, the statistics show that it is such an incredibly small percentage of Black and brown children or children really of any race and class who are committing the serious violent offenses that we're most afraid of, carjacking, murders, and the like. It's what gets highlighted in the news and makes us afraid, but it's still the smallest percentage. And the reason why I want to highlight that is because we are punishing the whole for the sins of the one or two, if you will. And I think that's, so my hope is, yes, we can get there, but it means we have to be honest about the data.

We have to be honest about what's really happening. We have to understand what the research says about best practices. We have to meaningfully invest in those best practices. And even when there is a mass shooting, we can't roll back all of the policy changes that we've made from the science, from the following what's in the best practice. We've got to stay the course. And so that's why I think we can do it as a country if we don't overreact to those moments, to these moments like we did in the 80s and the 90s. And we radically changed the juvenile legal system as a result of that 80s and 90s. And we cannot do that again.

We're on the road to understanding that there are better interventions than traditional law enforcement interventions. And then your last question is, what can people do? You know, everyone lives in a local community. And I urge you to pay attention to local politics, right? Local politics like who's your elected D.A., right? You're your elected prosecutor. Who is your elected juvenile court judge in cities that have an elected juvenile court judge? Pay attention to critical questions about police in schools and funding for police in schools. And what does the budget look like? Can we reallocate the funding for traditional law enforcement responses to school safety to more effective strategies for school safety? Are you paying attention to what that budget looks like?

budget looks like, advocating for mental health services. And for those of you who are listening and have children, and for those of you who have white children, know what's going on in your local school with black and brown children. And if your kid goes to a predominantly white school, pay attention to what's happening down the road to the black and brown schools, right, in your local community. What are the comparisons? And bringing attention to that, being that voice, right, around that. And so those are the primary pieces of advice. And I think my closing piece of advice for everybody, separate and apart from the policies, is someone taught me once, a psychologist friend taught me that every single child needs at least one irrationally caring adult in their lives. And I add to that, that every child would do even

better with a team of irrationally caring adults in their lives. And that simply means, you know what, when we were a teenager and when we look at our own teenagers, we know they make mistakes. They do really, to be quite frank, stupid, impulsive, irrational things, but we don't shame them. We don't embarrass them. We don't lock them up. Instead, we guide them. We redirect them. We give them whatever support they need for their trauma. We get them mental health services. And that's what every black and brown child needs too. So that's my urge and my plea to everybody. Be that caring adult for some child that's not your own. Yeah. I love that. I love that. And thank you so much, Professor Henning,

for all of the work that you've done throughout your life. And you've really made a tremendous impact on our society. And I really want to thank you for being our guest on All About Change this week. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It's a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate your thoughtfulness and your questions. Thank you. All About Change is a production of the Ruderman Family Foundation. This show is produced by Yochai Meital and Mijan Zulu. As always, be sure to come back in two weeks for another inspiring story. I'll be talking to Dr. Benjamin Gilmer.

As you know, usually, as I say at the top of every episode, we showcase people who have leveraged the hardship they have faced to better other people's lives. But sometimes it's the randomness of life putting us in weird, unexpected situations that propels and compels us to action. In our next episode, we'll dive into the truly unbelievable story of Dr. Gilmer. And I mean that in the most literal sense. It's one of those you-just-can't-make-that-stuff-up stories. Trust me, you're not going to want to miss it. In the meantime, you can check out all of our previous content live on our feed

and linked on our website, allaboutchangepodcast.com. Lastly, if you enjoy our show, please help us spread the word. Tell a friend or family member, or consider writing a review on your favorite podcasting app. I'm Jay Ruderman and I'll catch you next time on All About Change.