Here’s a way to stop hateful, anti-cop bias

We live in a country where large segments of the population are taught to hate the cops; to view them as the bad guys.

Now, some of that is being taught out of a historical understanding that cops used to enforce blatantly racist policies. There’s no doubt that, historically speaking, not too long ago you had police forces full of bigots of the worst kind who committed remarkable acts of terror and abuse against black people.

But things have changed significantly.

You wouldn’t believe that anything has changed if you listened exclusively to some of the anti-cop rhetoric coming out of certain elements in the activist community in Western Washington. You have some Black Lives Matter folks whining “all cops are bastards” and both openly calling for the murder of cops or refusing to condemn any anti-cop violence.

Related: Do we really want surveillance cameras in black neighborhoods?

And some of these people, as hard as it is to believe, are moms and dads who teach kids their police hatred. Then, you end up having kids who, the second they interact with cops, take on a defensive and aggressive tone that needlessly escalates the situation. Sometimes that leads to awful outcomes.

But now, thanks to a program that Seattle Mayor Ed Murray has put together, teens in the area are getting summer jobs – some with the Seattle Police Department – and they’re exposed to the reality of what it’s like to be a cop and what cops are truly like.

It’s called the Seattle Youth Employment Program and it was featured in a rightfully glowing story in the Seattle Times.

It opens with the story of a 17-year-old boy named Naji Ibrahim. He’s from the Beacon Hill neighborhood and he says in his neighborhood, with the kids he hangs around with, people who support cops are derided; they’re called names. Naji says his neighborhood is distrustful of cops.

But this kid signed up with Mayor Murray’s youth employment program and got a summer job working with the SPD.

“I used to think cops were all violent,” the 17-year-old told the Times. “On TV you see things going on in other places, and it kind of rattles you. But when you’re working with them, they’re pretty cool.”

Related: Phoenix Jones says Seattle politics bad for good guys

Faduma Edey, 15, is also a recent hire under this program. And at just 15 years old, the Times said, “She had a stereotype that police were ‘always the bad guy,’ born from YouTube videos of police violence and the perceptions of many of her peers…”

But after just a single month, her perspective is completely changed.

“We actually saw real police officers, not what the media tells us,” the 15 year old told the Times. “If more people joined this program and just told their friends and showed them who the police really are, it might spread around.”

This is fantastic!

While it’s incredibly meaningful to these kids, who now have a job, great experiences building new skills that they can use later in life when they enter the work force full time, it’s so much more meaningful to the community.

Listen: What impact are all the complaints having on SPD officers?

These kids learned something that so many adults still haven’t figured out yet: the cops are the good guys. Like every case, you have bad apples, but overwhelmingly, cops are good people who put on a uniform every single day with the mission to protect you when you’re most vulnerable.

Faduma and Naji, and all the other kids who enroll in this program, are going to now inform their community (their peers) the truth about cops. And maybe – just maybe – this kind of thing can help change the anti-cop culture that permeates too many neighborhoods, not just in Seattle or even Western Washington, but the entire country.