TULSA, Okla. — About 100 Tulsa Public School students spent Friday morning learning about law enforcement in an effort to build trust between police and teens.
It’s an annual event hosted by the Mayor’s Police and Community Coalition along with Tulsa police and the Tulsa School Police Department. High school and some middle school students learned what to do in the event they are pulled over, how to avoid gang and drug involvement, got information on community policing and got a chance to ask their questions of officers.
During the 2-hour forum, students heard speeches from a TPD sergeant and had a table talk discussion where students asked officers about several topics including mental health, police brutality, police protocols, and what police do with things they confiscate like drugs.
Select students from different TPS schools attended the session, Memorial High School sent its soccer team.
“They knew that we were going to come here and learn a lot and be attentive and go back to school and share with it all the people there because we are a big group and we have friends in all sorts of groups,” said senior Conner Crowl.
The hope is to demystify policing in teens eyes.
“Cops are humans. We all make mistakes. Being in high school everybody knows that," Crowl said. "People really are not as bad as they seem and there’s only a few black sheep in the world."
Hannibal Johnson, the facilitator of the Mayor’s Police and Community Coalition, says this isn’t just for the students since the officers learn themselves from talking with the teens and from the evaluations they leave. Johnson says they’ve been doing this forum since 2008 and every year it’s fulfilling seeing the evidence of transformation in the teens at the end.
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