BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) - When U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch met with a group of Birmingham youth and asked them why it’s difficult for the general public to empathize with police officers, 16-year-old Ramsay High School student Taylor Sellers gave it to her straight.
“It starts in your household. When you come up, you automatically hate the police, I’m just going to tell you like it is,” Sellers said. “Most likely somebody in your family went to jail, so they’re like, “Man he went to jail for no reason,’ so you already have this mindset that they’re bad people that always want to shoot you, so you grow up with this mindset, and everybody around you has this same type of thinking. “
“So immediately when you see a police car, you start thinking, ’Oh my gosh I’ve done something wrong, they’re going to arrest me,’ then you get all nervous,” Sellers explained. “That’s just the way we were set up to be. It’s taught from when we’re young to not like or respect the police very much because they’re bad people when, in all actuality, they’re just people.”
Sellers, one of a group of students taking part in the Birmingham Youth Citizens Police Academy through the Community Policing Revitalization program, became so emotional in talking about the change in her perspective that she couldn’t even finish her sentence while talking to Lynch.
“They’re helping us, and they die for us every day,” Sellers said before she was unable to go any further.
Lynch met with the group, police officers and other community leaders at the Woodlawn Foundation as her first stop in the day-long visit to Birmingham on Wednesday. She had a frank discussion with the teens, and said she learned a lot of from them.
Sellers’ emotion wasn’t surprising to the attorney general.
“People’s emotions speak for themselves and clearly it was a moving experience for her because at a young age she experienced a shift in a certain perspective, and that is often moving for a lot of people,” Lynch said later. “I thought it was very gratifying. I think kids are very open and it’s an excellent example of how all of us can be open to meeting people who things differently than us, whether they are in law enforcement or not, whether they have a different respective or world view from us and how we can be open to them.”
She said the teens were candid, and seemed to now understand what police officers face in a way they had not before. Asked what she took from the conversation, she said: “That we can, in fact, improve this fractured relationship with law enforcement and the communities that we protect and serve with greater communication, with finding many ways to build that connection.
“It’s certainly not limited to students,” she said. “The more people work together, the more people will come to an understanding in what both sides are saying in all of this.”
Lynch’s stop in Birmingham was her second in a six-city tour focusing on community policing. Birmingham is one of six cities serving as a pilot site for a national initiative on restoring relationships between law enforcement and citizens.
The program is a partnership between federal officials and criminal justice experts focused on providing training, policy and research to address distrust between citizens and law enforcement.
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