Cops, Kids and Culture

"Performance is a means of growth because it gives people the license to make new choices of how to relate to oneself, to others and to the world."

In this paper, presented at a conference called "The Police and Our Young People: What is their Relationship?" (held in New York, the United States (US), by the All Stars Project), Lois Holzman explores the often strained relationship between young people and the police, and puts forth an alternative approach for improving it.

To explain the need for such re-thinking, Holzman describes a US study of young people's attitudes toward police in which youth told interviewers "they were upset and disappointed that most adults - and they included police, guards, social workers and educators - view them as suspect, untrustworthy and potential criminals. In addition, increased surveillance techniques made them more upset, adding to their feeling of betrayal and of not being welcome in public spaces." According to Holzman, attempts to close the gap between youth and police are usually based in the mainstream goal of changing behaviour. Some programmes, for example, "seek to provide one or the other side with glimpses of the other as real human beings by playing sports together - the assumption is that if the two groups play sports together they'll begin to see each other as less threatening and be more understanding and better behaved. And some of these programs do accomplish those discrete behavioristic goals. But rarely do intervention begin with the relationship, and with the invitation to qualitatively transform who they are together."

Holzman's alternative vision rests on the following claims:

1. Human beings are not individual passive objects but, rather, social creators of culture. By culture, she means "the entirety of how we live our lives, including how we see and understand and relate, where our understandings and beliefs and practice came from and how we as people might transform them....This broader understanding of culture means that we need to understand and explore relationships, such as that between the police and young people, as cultural phenomena. And since no one creates culture but people, it also means we need to take responsibility for the culture we've created, rather than looking elsewhere to place blame or give credit."
2. People are to be understood not in terms of behaviour but, rather, in terms of human activity, by which she means "the qualitative transformation that is development and that is culture. Activity draws attention to our capacity to create something new out of what exists, to engage in a process of transforming where and how we are now into something and somewhere other - without knowing what or where we're going to wind up....Human development is not something that happens to us. We create it through our activity. And if we stop creating together, then development stops."
3. There is more to play than games. Holzman elaborates: "When little children play they usually have no goal other than playing what they’re playing. If there are any rules, they're usually made up in the playing rather than beforehand. In play, children creatively imitate and amplify other people in their lives. They create scenes and stories. Unlike later game play, in their pretend play, children are who they are and, at the same time, other than who they are....This performing kind of play and these spaces for performance are what's essential - it's when we're performing - doing things that are new to us and that don't feel natural - that we are able to break from the tyranny of the normal and create ourselves, our relationships and our culture."

Having fleshed out these new concepts of culture, human activity, and play as performance, Holzman looks at the research findings cited above in a new light. Describing youth culture and police culture as 2 subcultures, she notes that "[t]he ways they perceive each other both comes from the broader culture they exist in and reflects and reinforces their separate subcultures. They view each other with suspicion. They have their own definitions of who the other is. Their ways of interacting are scripted. The gap between them can seem vast and uncrossable."

This type of lens spotlights the following question: "What is there in the broader culture that might help to bridge the cultural divide between police and young people?" Play in the form of sports might come to mind; however, what is missing from sports, Holzman argues, is "the improvisational performance aspect of childhood play - the being other than who you are, the taking of risks, the looking foolish, the not knowing what you're doing or where the road you're creating might take you." In contrast, if police and young people performed together - created a skit or play together, or an improvised dance or movement together - "[t]hey will have created a new piece of culture out of something in the broader culture and their separate subcultures. They will have added a new element to their overworked scripted ways of relating to each other." She cites several examples to illustrate this approach, one of which is that of Live Bait Theater in Chicago, Illinois (US), which brings teens and police together through improvisation and creative writing. After learning theatre games and sharing and writing stories, a joint teen-police group eventually wrote and performed their own play. Young participants in the programme said that "it creates a place where they and the officers are equal. Where both the police and the teens risk embarrassment when they perform in front of each other or a larger audience. Where each is reliant on the other for the scene to succeed. Where together the two groups invent different ways of relating."