Baton Rouge teenager Rashaud Red first outlined plans for I Am More, a program to build positive relationships between at-risk youth and police officers, during a 2015 TEDxLSU speech when he was just 17 years old.
“What if George Zimmerman had known Trayvon Martin before that fateful day?” Red asked the roughly 400 people in attendance. “What if the person who killed officers Ramos and Liu knew those officers as people?”
As 225 details in a feature from the August issue, Red’s talk directly addressed the daily discrimination both black teens and police officers face—bringing chills to audience members of all ages, genders and races. But as Baton Rougeans cheered his speech that day, none of them could have known just how deeply the divisions Red spoke of would soon threaten to tear apart their own city.
In the wake of the police shooting of Alton Sterling last month and the subsequent shooting of six police officers in Baton Rouge, three of whom were killed, Red’s work to bring together black youths and police officers is perhaps more important than ever.
Red organized the first I Am More meeting last May at his school, Mentorship Academy. He was strategic about selecting the approximately 20 high schoolers and eight police officers for the meeting. He’d insisted on bringing in youths who were the most at-risk and connecting them with officers who were black and white, female and male.
The police let the teens ask questions about law enforcement. It meant opening themselves up to questions like: “My grandmother was stabbed, and the police didn’t show up to help for two hours. Why?”
The police responded with an apology and a promise to work on their response time. They also explained that if officers are not responding, they’ve likely been flooded with calls to other crime scenes in the area. The longer the teens and officers talked, the more the tension in the room lifted.
“That’s the conversation that changes a community,” says Red. “Then you know what a good cop looks like. And you get this intellectual conversation there that [teens] can then spew out to their neighbors, to their mothers, too.”
