School of Law

Shortly after a high school student boarded a bus in Washington, D.C., in November 2003, police officers came after him with their guns drawn. Terence didn't look like the suspect who had just robbed a nearby pharmacy, the officers acknowledged. But he was the only black man on the bus. That was reason enough to take him in for questioning.

The students in Courtney Donovan's class at nearby Wilson High School weren't surprised to hear Terence's story. "There wasn't anger," said Donovan, who taught at Wilson during her final year as a Georgetown University law student. "It was just expected. They had an attitude of, 'Law enforcement is going to mistreat black people; there's not a lot we can do about it.'"

Donovan recalled the moment later that November day in a journal about her classroom experiences: "I got a rude awakening from my comfortable white existence," she wrote. "How can the police expect people to be cooperative and be respectful when they condone behavior like this?"

Across the country in a Portland, Ore., classroom, Portia Hall's students squared off over the recent shooting of an unarmed black motorist just 24 seconds after police stopped his car. Police pulled the man over because he didn't activate his turn signal soon enough. And, according to news reports of a public inquest that followed the shooting, police decided his car was too nice for the neighborhood.

Well into the discussion, a quiet student offered, "You guys also have to consider whether race was involved. The cops are white. The victim is black."

Racism easily comes to mind when youth in this and other classrooms think about law enforcement. Portland police killed two unarmed black citizens in traffic stops during a 10-month span, prompting drivers in one neighborhood to display "Unarmed Motorist" bumper stickers and adding to the Police Bureau's reputation for freewheeling use of excessive force. Similar stories of aggressive police tactics across the country inflame the public and erode already-fractured trust between teens and cops.

Donovan, Hall and other teachers are dealing with this growing problem using a program called Street Law. Along the way, students learn about the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, personal responsibility and the tools they have to protect themselves from over-the-top cops.

Street Law accomplishes this by balancing empathy with education and expertise.

"If the kids' experiences with police are negative, you don't try to justify it or deny it," said Richard L. Roe, director of the Street Law program at Georgetown University Law Center. "You try to get kids to see all sides of the picture."

Tools for change
Street Law was born at Georgetown in 1972. Every year, it sends two dozen law students like Courtney Donovan into Washington, D.C., high schools to help teach the yearlong course. Street Law meets five days a week, with law students teaching three or four of the sessions and the regular high school teacher overseeing the other classes. Some Washington, D.C. judges even offer minor juvenile offenders the opportunity to have their record expunged if they successfully complete a Street Law course.

When a student has a run-in with police, or members of any given community of color clash with the cops, it becomes part of the lesson plan. In fact, Donovan was teaching her students the basic rules of search and seizure when Terence told his story about being pulled off the bus at gunpoint. "Is this OK?" he asked.

"With Street Law, you are giving kids knowledge of their civil rights, and how police are supposed to behave," Donovan said. "Knowing about the law is very powerful. It gives students the tools they need to make changes."

Donovan told Terence how to file a complaint over his inappropriate detention by police after the pharmacy robbery. "I think that knowing that what the police did was totally illegal made the students feel better," she said.

This illustrates a key benefit of Street Law. The class is well received by students who feel disenfranchised or disengaged because "it is a place where people care about what they think," Donovan said.

The practical experience serves students long after class is over. Portia Hall gives every student in her Introduction to Law class a wallet-sized copy of the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment. "I tell them to keep it with them for the rest of their lives," Hall said.

It has paid off.

A police officer knocked on the door of one of Hall's students in the course of investigating a loud music complaint. "He asked, 'Can I come into your house?'" she said. "The student said, 'No, it's a violation of my Fourth Amendment rights.' The cop said, 'You don't even know how to spell amendment.' And the student pulled out his copy of the Bill of Rights, showed it to him and closed the door."

That was the end of it.

Uneasy alliance
Even with these successes, schools can be difficult places to make peace between students and police. One key reason: the increasing number of cops on campuses – called school resource officers – and decreasing tolerance for what once was considered routine misbehavior.

"When officers are located in the schools, minor infractions are relabeled as criminal actions which leads to the greater criminalization of children," said attorney Isabel Raskin of the Juvenile Justice Center at Suffolk University's law school. "Additionally, children are no longer primarily seen as learners in an educational context, but as a potentially violent, dangerous population in need of managing and containing under the threat of criminal removal."

Schools call police far too often to handle routine fights or when there's any excuse to eject underachieving students who drag down a school's overall academic performance — and thereby threaten the school's federal funding, added attorney Lisa Thurau-Gray, who is special projects director at the Juvenile Justice Center and represents many of these defendants. When one student kicks another, they even end up being charged with assault with a deadly weapon.

"It's out of control," Thurau-Gray said. And study after study shows students of color disproportionately receive the harshest punishment.

As a result, "my sense is that, in some poor communities of color, schools are the last place you could expect people to trust in terms of dealing with law enforcement," Thurau-Gray said.

All of which makes Street Law more important, said Barbara Rost, program director of the Classroom Law Project, which runs the Street Law program in the Portland metropolitan area.

"When we train school resource officers, it is not how to make a constitutional arrest," Rost said. "Rather it is how to work with teachers in the classroom so that ultimately students will have the opportunity to discover the 'resource' in school resource officers."

That concept works, said longtime police detective Bill Cross, who spent the last nine years of his law enforcement career working as a school resource officer in a Portland suburb.

"When you are a police officer, you get a call and you see (a teenager) who matches the description, you stop them," Cross said. "Of course, students think you are harassing them. And out on the street, you don't have time to explain the situation.

"Not every officer out there will be Officer Friendly," Cross said, "and one negative attitude will carry a long way."

As a school resource officer, "I was able to explain the way things happen and talk about why officers do what they do," Cross said.

And after a few years, even the most die-hard skeptics in his police department reported better relations between students and law enforcement out on the streets.

Cross credits Street Law for helping heal student attitudes about law enforcement. Among other things, "It gave kids a chance to role play police roles, to put themselves in another situation."

Critical analysis
Many teachers draw upon current events, including hometown allegations of police problems, to build these interactive lessons. But they also push students to critically analyze all sides of the picture instead of merely reinforcing their own stereotypes.

"It's a balance," Portia Hall said shortly after her students finished their discussion of a Portland police shooting. "I don't want them to start vilifying cops. And I don't want cops to vilify people of color." To that end, she said, "I ask, 'When your job is to protect people, what mistakes can you make? How can you tell who's good and who's bad?'"

Janell Sowers, who weaves Street Law into her Constitutional Law and Legal Issues class at a high school in Lake Oswego, Ore., put it this way: "Street Law teaches them about their rights. It also teaches how they are fulfilling their responsibilities with these rights. We talk a lot about individual liberties and the safety of the community. I think they understand that law enforcement and the courts are trying to keep that balance."

In the end, Roe said, it's about more than upholding the law: "You want them to uphold society – to be civic contributors."