PEACEMAKING POLICING MADE REAL
January 25, 2015
I have felt a hole in my recent
posts in prioritizing a need police and
members of communities of color they police to get to know community members as
full human beings—a need to show differences that individual police attitudes
can make. Today, I followed my usual
Sunday practice of getting up an hour early, showering and taking my walk
through the then dark and quiet streets of my neighborhood, and listening to “On
Being” with host Krista Tippett on my local 7am hour broadcast. Today, the main interview was with Thich Nhat
Hanh, with the second quarter segment an interview of Cheri Maples, describing
how Thich Nhat Hanh’s Zen training had profoundly transformed her approach from
taking charge (her example, a domestic violence call) to compassion for the
suffering of an angry father, for his full humanity (http://onbeing.org/program/thich-nhat-hanh-mindfulness-suffering-and-engaged-buddhism/74). The broadcast is transcribed; read or listen,
take your pick.
Maples has brought other police
officers through the Zen training. More
broadly, Michael DeValve, who teaches police officers among others at
Fayetteville State University, a follower of Thich Nhat Hanh himself, has just
published A Different Justice: Love and
the Future of Criminal Justice Practice in America, describing how
mindfulness has transformed is own criminal justice teaching and practice (as a
mediator). Maples graphically describes
how mindfulness transformed her policing.
Aggressive police officers can be trained, indeed train themselves to
become peacemakers, where compassion overcomes fear, anger and force. Thich Nhat Hanh’s presence and training has dramatically
transformed the criminal justice practices of DeValve, of Maples, and probably
of many of the police Maples has also drawn in.
This is not to say that all
police officers (or all people for that matter) need Zen training and
self-cultivation. It has worked for some
who have tried, but to order people to become mindful is a contradiction in
terms. For one thing, I’m confident that
compassionate, empathic policing in communities of color continues to exist now
as it did when I rode along. Like
peacemaking generally, it goes largely unrecorded and unnoticed, unrecognized
and unrewarded in popular culture, let alone in police administration and
evaluation. There have already been many
paths to compassionate policing besides that taken by Maples—a police presence
to cultivate and celebrate. Compassion
lies in all of us, police included, to be awakened as it was for Maples in
volatile settings—as here where police are authorized by law to kill unarmed
people in groups supposed in criminology textbooks as in popular and political
culture to be especially dangerous. As
DeValve and I have found in mediation, adversaries can overcome their fear of
and anger at one another in moments of safety, as they recognize one another’s
fuller humanity. And so I am led to
believe that a root remedy for police violence in communities of color
especially is to arrange non-law enforcement settings for police to participate
in the lives of the people they police, on a regular basis, to know them in
respects other than as suspects, as law-breakers and as complainants. Among all warring groups, police and
communities of color included, that ultimately is how wars abate, including the
killing. Meanwhile, my thanks to Cheri
Maples for illustrating how compassionate policing defuses violence for those
moved to try it. Love and peace, hal
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