Howard University News Service
WASHINGTON – In 2018, Dr. Bahiyyah Muhammad at Howard University created a first-of-its-kind education model called Policing Inside Out. It puts police officers in an unexpected place: the classroom, where they learn alongside students. The program is aimed at deconstructing biases about law enforcement on both ends of the spectrum.
For 15 weeks, students, community leaders and law enforcement officers assemble inside the classroom where they have unfiltered conversations about policing. Together, they work to challenge preconceived ideas surrounding the carceral system and venture off campus to apply these lessons in real-world settings.
“I really wanted to reimagine the classroom and create an opportunity where we could try to figure it out together,” Dr. Muhammad said. “What are the things that we can agree on? What are the things that we can’t? And so, I created this curriculum that gave us an opportunity across 15 weeks to be able to have a variety of different conversations within these conversations.”
Dr. Muhammad is an associate professor of Criminology at Howard, where she has worked for 13 years. She revealed that the curriculum was created on the heels of student grief.
Her Howard students, she said, were growing frustrated with having to attend classes as normal while regularly being confronted with tragedy in the news.
“I created [Policing Inside Out] out of a protest from students at Howard University during the time of police killings and unrest and all of the violence that was depicted on the television,” she said. “Many of the students across the Howard University campus were very outraged. They wanted to have a space to have these conversations to dissect it, and they found in the criminal justice courses as well as additional courses, they weren’t getting enough.”
In 2018 alone, almost 1,000 people were shot and killed by police officers while in the line of duty. One was 22-year-old Stephon Clark, who was shot in his grandmother’s backyard in Sacramento. He was holding a cellphone that officers claimed they believed was a weapon.
Clark’s highly publicized death sparked nationwide protests and forced advocates around the country to find ways to heal their own hurting communities. Sacramento pastors lectured from their pews about next steps in rebuilding trust with police officers.
Other community leaders like President of Sierra Health Foundation Chet Hewitt launched new projects like Build Black, a directory aimed at improving social and economic equity for Black people.
“Policing Inside Out really was this unique initiative and opportunity to bring together students – most of whom hated law enforcement and were raised that they should not engage with them or connect with them – as well as law enforcement officers and officials,” Dr. Muhammad said. “Not just any officer, but individuals that were in leadership. The individuals that determined the policies that then hit the ground.”
What makes the project different from other initiatives is that it removes everybody from their comfort zones, she said. Class participants visit the D.C. Jail, where they have conversations with people who are experiencing incarceration. Dr. Muhammad said it’s a side of policing that many officers are shielded from. Many of them have never seen the inside of a prison.
“The officers when they come in, they have to take their gun off,” she said. “They have to put it in a locker. Many of them were just like, ‘Wait a minute, I got to take the gun.’ And they’re nervous and they’re not sure what to do.”
Officers are encouraged to arrive in uniform, to not disguise their work. “You should be proud of who you are. If you’re doing good work, then why are we not excited about that?”
“They have to go to the metal detector,” she continued. “They have to get patted down like they pat people down. So now they have this understanding of stop-and-frisk where many of them may have never been patted in that sort of a way.”
The program is also different because it spans several months, designed in that way to allow participants to overcome initial hesitancy and have meaningful, recurring conversations with each other.
Policing Inside Out is derived directly from Dr. Muhammad’s own research and is not based on any prior model.
“I created it from the experiences that I had with law enforcement and the experiences with students,” she said. “I really designed it from viewing videos of police violence that ended in death. I curated it from the most successful components of the courses that I had taught across the last two decades. I didn’t want to look at previous engagements in work because it didn’t work. A lot of those models just didn’t work. And so, I really built it from scratch.”
The curriculum has now been replicated on other campuses like Coppin State University and Morgan State University with plans to expand to more historically Black colleges and universities including Clark Atlanta, Spelman and Morehouse. It’s even impacted how some police departments approach their own training.
“I’ve had law enforcement departments have an interest in it as well because it almost serves as training for their officers, because we talk about the history of policing and when they’re sworn in, they’re not really learning that information in the academy,” she said. “It really is a national and global thing.”
Dr. Jacqueline M. Rhoden-Trader is an applied social science researcher and policy analyst at Coppin University and has witnessed firsthand how Policing Inside Out has transformed community relations with law enforcement.
“I found Dr. Mohammed’s initiative to be a needed one, particularly with all that was happening across the country prior to that,” she said. “We wanted to also bring the students and community members along with law enforcement to bridge the gap. Not to fuel the discord, but to try to get people to come together and understand each other’s purview and find their common humanity, regardless of whether they were college students, community members, or law enforcement.”
Dr. Rhoden-Trader taught the program at Coppin University from 2018 to 2022, during which class participants visited different law enforcement agencies and cultural centers like the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
“We did a plethora of things, and it is my purview that the class was invaluable,” she said. “Just watching students who come in angry, upset with law enforcement officers. Law enforcement officers who come into the class with an attitude and a chip on their shoulders, angry and protecting themselves because they have been villainized also. And community members who are asking those questions.”
Bonnie Mills participated in Policing Inside Out in 2017 and shared that the program had a significant impact on her career trajectory.
“It inspired me to continue studying criminal justice post-grad,” she said. “After undergrad, I got my graduate degree in police studies at John Jay, and after my master’s program, I was a project coordinator for a victim services grant for the International Association of Chiefs of Police.”
Mills credits this experience for where she is today, as a government contractor that works alongside police officers regularly.
“The class not only introduced to my mentor and other officers. I do believe that my first full-time job at graduate school was largely due to the program I was involved with, the policing exchange program that we did with Dr. Muhammad. So I would say it not only pretty much kick started my career path, but it made me unafraid to put myself in rooms with officers and people that I would have otherwise been turned off from working with, working beside. Looking back on it, it had a pretty big impact on my career.”
Dr. Muhammed still sees areas for improvement for Policing Inside Out, however.
“When you think about a program like this, it really depends on the officers that are there at that time,” she said. “So, every single cohort looks different. When we expanded it into Coppin and Morgan, it looked different. These are officers in Baltimore. If you’re dealing with officers in D.C., they have different policies, different levels of education, different cultures, different relationships with community members. Gentrification may look different in the cities that we’re talking about.”
Still, she’s proud of the changes she’s seen in her students.
“There was one student who witnessed the violent arrest of his dad, and he was carrying all of this animosity and anger and had never had a conversation with his dad,” Dr. Muhammad said. “So, he ended up having this conversation with the dad and he kind of came back to the class, a different student, but it was very difficult for him to decide how that conversation was going to go.”
Another student had decided to cut communications with her father who worked in law enforcement in the wake of a string of police killings. It wasn’t until Policing Inside Out that she began to repair their relationship.
“I know that for some students, depending on their lived experience with law enforcement and what they think and what they’re carrying, sometimes they bring that kind of heaviness to the course,” Dr. Muhammed said.
Lauren Nutall is a reporter for HUNewsService.com
