Educating future cops moves beyond traditional police skills at MSU | Local News

About 40 law enforcement majors were packed into a classroom at Minnesota State University for one of their final courses before they graduate and begin careers as cops, deputies and troopers.

“I’ll remind you, your resume and your first practice POST exams are due Tuesday,” professor Pat Nelson said, referring to the Peace Officers Standards and Training exam they’ll need to pass to become licensed.

What came next in the Senior Seminar course didn’t delve at all into Minnesota criminal statutes, the constitutional standards for search and seizure, the difference between probable cause and reasonable suspicion, or any of the other concepts and facts tested by the POST exam.

Instead, it was a wide-ranging discussion of a recent performance by MSU’s Theatre Department of “Wounded Healers.” Written and composed by Timothy Berry, the music and spoken-word performance piece is described as a historical chronology — from pre-colonial Africa to the present day — of how Black male bodies physically carry neurological trauma due to structural and systemic racism and how Black men have used creative expression to survive and heal.

The members of the class had been asked to attend the performance, and Berry was on hand — along with cast members and MSU theater majors Lyreshia Ghostlon-Green and Joaquin Warren — to offer an opportunity for discussion.

Many of the future cops were ready and willing, filling the 75-minute class with questions and comments.

The first student to raise his hand, a white male like the vast majority of the class, told the performers they had an impact.

“I haven’t felt anything like that before,” he said, before noting one place where his opinion had shifted. “I’ve heard of Black Lives Matter before that, didn’t have a real positive connotation. But it really changed my outlook on that.”

Berry, interim associate vice president for faculty affairs and equity initiatives at MSU, responded in part by tossing out the final line of the poem “I, Too” by Langston Hughes.

“’I, too, am America,’” Berry said. “Why would he have to say something like that?”

It goes to the feeling of not being included, he said. And the same word is obviously implied in the Black Lives Matter movement.

“What’s missing is the word ‘too,’” he said.

Reexamination, reform

Nelson, the chair of MSU’s Department of Government along with being a law enforcement instructor, was vacationing in northern Minnesota in early June of 2020 when Minneapolis was erupting following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.

Nelson said she was watching events unfold, thinking about how it was affecting her students, when she got the call. Then-MSU President Richard Davenport wanted faculty and administrators to engage with the community about how the university was educating future cops and corrections officers.

Nelson remembered her thoughts on the idea.

“We should do more than just listen to what people have to say. We should make a plan to do something.”

Online meetings were set up and hundreds of community members participated. A task force made up of MSU officials and criminal justice professionals from around the state convened to develop specific recommendations.

“We had some real good conversations in the work group about what we’re doing, what we should be doing and how we explain what we’re doing,” Nelson said.

By this spring, the changes developed by the task force will be fully implemented in MSU’s law enforcement, corrections and criminal justice programs.

“Many of the ideas are ones we’re already talking about in the classroom,” she said.

Concepts like de-escalation, strategies for effectively dealing with people with mental illness, understanding how past interactions with law enforcement might affect how witnesses react to a police officer.

“Now we’re being much more deliberate about it and making sure everybody is doing it,” Nelson said of the criminal justice curriculum at MSU.

The changes will also impact the general education classes law enforcement students take. The general-ed classes, which aim to ensure students receive a well-rounded education that goes beyond their specific major, include everything from history and political science to ethics and philosophy to psychology and sociology to the humanities.

Under the new guidelines, students majoring in criminal justice programs must take 18 of the 44 general-ed credits in classes that have a special focus on diversity, equity and social justice within those broader academic disciplines.

And everyone majoring in law enforcement and corrections must take a pair of one-credit classes that put them in the community working with diverse populations “through activities that have nothing to do with criminal justice,” Nelson said. An example is volunteering at Mankato’s annual powwow.

The idea is to have the students learn by interacting with other cultures on a human level, the hope being that the experience will make for more respectful and informed interactions in the students’ future lives as law enforcement professionals.

Reaction, reflection

Nelson said faculty at MSU were open to changes.

“None of them really balked at the idea at all,” she said. “They just asked me to make sure the recommendations were realistic.”

Law enforcement students continue to receive the traditional instruction on criminal statutes, constitutional law, investigative techniques, police procedures and other practical skills. But a few have made clear they’d prefer not to be having discussions on race, equity, cultural competency and the like.

“We get some pushback on those conversations,” Nelson said. “And I had a student who accused me of ‘pandering to the left-wing philosophy,’ I think is the way he put it.”

Nelson said pushback is a necessary component of education, but her response was that a person, regardless of the profession they work in, is going to have difficulty if they think all people can be lumped into simple categories rather than working to understand the complexities that make up each individual.

Students are considering those concepts, based on some of the “reflection papers” students in the Senior Seminar wrote about their education and their looming entry into the real world of law enforcement.

One, who hopes to be an investigator, wrote about the “ideal officer.”

“My ideal officer would rather help bring someone on the street who is struggling with drug addiction to a rehab center than just throwing them in jail. My ideal officer has integrity and is trustworthy. … The officer’s partner and department does not have to worry about the officer not being honest or moral.”

Another recited how much she learned, including how to write a police report, conduct an investigation, practice community policing and deal with domestic violence, mental illness, substance abuse and more. But she said her education also altered how she pictures an exceptional police officer — that concepts like compassion and respect are necessary characteristics, along with knowledge, hard work and ethics.

“I can’t imagine a more rewarding legacy for myself than looking back and knowing that I spent every workday loving, respecting and serving others, to the best of my ability, in hours of great need,” she wrote.

And another wrote about setting aside the preconception that people in poverty were there because of their personal faults.

“If I am being honest, I didn’t think there was such a thing called mental illness or food deserts before I went to college. I was raised in a household that you worked for what you had. Those who didn’t have what I had, must’ve not worked hard enough.”

Repetition, relationships

If questions are an indication, students in the law enforcement Senior Seminar were interested in learning the perspectives of the people behind “Wounded Healers.” The hands stopped going up only when the time ran out.

Ghostlon-Green said she joined the performance partly to encourage the audience to move beyond preconceptions.

“The stereotype is that Black people are always angry or always loud,” she said, hoping that those who attended better understand the experiences and pain they’ve endured.

Warren asked the law enforcement students to keep exploring the history of marginalized groups of all kinds and the bigotry they’ve faced.

“Expose yourselves to more truths than you’ve ever known and don’t stop yearning to learn,” he said, later adding: “If you don’t know where I stand and I don’t know where you stand, how can we meet in the middle?”

In response to a question from a student about Berry’s comment during a post-performance discussion that the life cycle for Black Americans is cyclical rather than linear. Berry said one element of that is the presence of repeating patterns, running through a list of names that included 17-year-old Jesse Washington, tortured, lynched and burned alive in Texas in 1916; 14-year-old Emmett Till, lynched in Mississippi in 1955; 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery, chased and murdered by three white men in Georgia in 2020.

“Our past is always co-mingling with our present and our future,” Berry said. “It’s just different iterations of the same thing.”

Berry encouraged the law enforcement students to keep having difficult conversations with people of color. Like anything, it takes practice to get comfortable with the skill. And that advance work will mean fewer assumptions about those people. It will also mean “a settled nervous system,” Berry said, when they interact with similar people in their future professional lives.

“I believe in the future,” Berry said. “I believe you’re going to make a difference.”

The interaction between the Senior Seminar students and the “Wounded Healers” cast is the sort of thing that incoming MSU law enforcement students will be experiencing more consistently with the changes being implemented, Nelson said.

“Our students who start here as a freshman may get tired of hearing it by the time they’re seniors,” she said. “But it’s an important message to hear.”