Coping With Cops

It looks like a typical high school classroom, but the question Ronald Quartimon poses to his African-American students at Bedford Stuyvesant Outreach, an alternative high school in Brooklyn, N.Y., isn't about the Civil War or Shakespeare's sonnets. He wants to know how many of them have ever been stopped by the police. Six hands shoot up. "Usually," says a student, "they just come out right off the bat and ask you, 'Do you have any drugs?'" The comment is a typical one for the 10-session course called Conflicts with Cops, run by the Harlem-based Neighborhood Defender Service. Its goal: to train African-American teens to make it through a police encounter safely.

The demand for workshops like this is one measure of the fallout from the recent wave of highly publicized police shootings and alleged abuses of African Americans and other minorities. Episodes like the fatal shootings of Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond by undercover cops in New York City have raised an outcry against brutal police tactics and racial profiling. But they have also sent a warning into the homes of ordinary families, who are increasingly taking steps to make sure their kids don't do the wrong thing when they come face to face with the police. Says Quartimon: "Today you can't take anything for granted."

Some people might call that paranoia. But learning the way to behave with cops has become a rite of passage for black and Hispanic youngsters. Just as parents warn their sons to wear a condom during sex or urge their kids to say no to drugs, now they drill them on the dos and don'ts of dealing with police. It's just a matter of time, many tell their kids, before you are stopped, for no other reason than that you are young and black. "They know it's part of their job bringing up a black or Hispanic kid," says David Harris, a professor of law and values at the University of Toledo who is researching racial profiling. Police officials don't dispute the usefulness of such efforts. Walter Burnes, a New York City deputy police commissioner, says it is a good idea for parents to teach kids proper "etiquette" for situations in which they are questioned in a car by police. "Everyone has to make their own decisions about what they should do with their families," he says.

It's a tricky balancing act, however. African-American parents want to prepare their kids but don't want them growing up thinking all cops are out to get them. Joyce Randall, a minister at First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles, tells her sons that police officers have a dangerous job. "The way you dress, your attitude, it all matters," she instructs them. "Police must be very, very careful. So if you are doing what you're supposed to do, chances are you're going to be on your way." Still, tragic events like the Diallo killing--along with alarming scandals like the reported abuses in the Los Angeles police department--have made the words of caution more urgent. "Many people felt that Mr. Diallo could have been any one of us," says Dennis Walcott, president of the New York Urban League and the father of a 15-year-old son.