- [Narrator] Production and distribution of City Club Forums and Ideastream Public Media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.

(energetic electronic theme music) (audience chatters) (bell rings) - Hello and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, November 18, 2022, and I'm Marlon Primes, a partner and leader of the business and tort litigation group at the Cleveland office of Brennan, Manna, and Diamond, and I'm a member of the Georgetown Law Board of Visitors.

I have the distinct pleasure of introducing today's speaker, Professor Kristin Henning, the Blume Professor of Law and the director of Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative at Georgetown Law.

Today, we are considering an important question, what happens when teachers, law enforcement, and other adults in positions of authority are less protective and more disciplinary with certain type of kids, particularly Black children?

Professor Henning has spent 25 years representing Black children in Washington, D.C.'s juvenile courts.

During her tenure, she has seen, tried, and supervised the trial of almost every offense in the juvenile code.

At the Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative at Georgetown Law, she supervises law students and represents youth accused of delinquency in the D.C. Superior Court.

From 2017 to 2020, Professor Henning served as the law school's associate deans of clinics and experiential learning.

In Professor Henning's new book, "The Rage of Innocence: "How America Criminalizes Black Youth," she points to America's manufactured and irrational fear of Black youth as a fuel for the nation's crisis in juvenile justice.

The adultification bias to dress code coding natural Black hair and fashion, Professor Henning points to institutional mechanisms that criminalize normal teen behavior in Black youth.

Today, she will discuss our country's troubled relationship with Black children, and the long-term consequences of this racism in the communities of color.

If you have a question for our speaker, you can text it to 330-541-5794.

Again, that's 330-541-5794.

You can also tweet your question, @thecityclub, and the City Club staff will try to work it into the second half of today's program.

So without further ado, members and friends of the City Club in Cleveland, it is my pleasure and distinct honor to welcome Professor Kristin Henning.

(audience applauds) - All right, thank you so much to Marlon.

I know you had something to do with bringing me into this space.

Thank you so much to the City Club of Cleveland, to the Fowlers, to Saint Luke, to the Legal Aid Society, to friends that I know personally in the audience.

I am really honored to be here with you to talk about this very important conversation.

You know, as Marlon said, I have been representing children in the nation's capital for the last 26 years, but here's the most shocking data point.

I have only represented four white children in that entire time.

That's it.

Every other child that I have represented has been an African American.

For those of you who are not familiar with D.C. might be thinking, well maybe there're no white children (chuckles) in the nation's capital proper.

- [Technician] Just lower that.

- Great.

Or that white children don't commit crime, and we know that neither one of those are true, right?

And so it really became hard to continue to do this work on the ground, in the courts, without really wanting to dismantle the whole system, but short of that, at least wanting to ask the really hard questions, right?

Questions like, why do these extreme disparities exist, not just in Washington, D.C., but all across the country and in places like Cleveland, right?

And also wanting to understand whether or not the disparate, the differential perspectives and treatment of Black children from other children is somehow justified, and if it's not, what do we do about it?

Without wanting to know how the criminalization and the disparate treatment of Black children in particular affects those children developmentally, right, mentally, psychologically, and even physically, and so that's what my book is about, "The Rage of Innocence: "How America Criminalizes Black Youth," and I have to say that I am more than anything just honored to be in a space with so many young people here in this conversation, and I'll start here and I'm gonna end here which is, if you wanna know how to make the world a better place for Black children, ask them, okay?

(audience applauds) And we'll come back and talk about that.

So let me be clear, when I talk about the arrest, prosecution, and detention of children in our nation's juvenile courts, people automatically assume that I must be talking about serious violent offenses, murder, rape, robbery, carjacking, but the data shows that very few children of any race and any class are engaged in the types of crimes that we fear most or that we hear about most on the television.

Instead, our nation's juvenile courts are populated with children who are engaged in normal adolescent behaviors, right?

What do we know about adolescents?

I could ask you, right?

(chuckles) And you would tell me, they're impulsive and reactive and emotional, right?

They are fairness fanatics, right?

It's not a myth.

They do what their friends do or at least what they think their friends are doing, right?

And they don't think ahead to the long-term consequences.

That is the nature of what it means to be a teenager, to be an adolescent, but yet, time and time again, we see racial disparities in the number of children who appear in our courts.

And so I think the best way to bring that to life for folks in the room is to tell you a story about a client that I call Sharice for purposes of the book, and Sharice was a 17-year-old child that I represented with my law students at Georgetown, and Sharice one day got into an argument with her boyfriend at school, and she was convinced that her boyfriend was cheating on her, and so she grabbed his cellphone and began to walk away.

As she's walking away down the hall, she's scrolling through his text messages to see if he's been texting with someone else.

A school resource officer happens to see this and decides to intervene.

What was his intervention?

To arrest her.

She was arrested in the hallway, detained overnight in a detention facility and prosecuted, formally prosecuted the next day for robbery, taking the property of another without right, right?

So now on paper, you've got this 17-year-old girl who looks like a violent felon, when in reality, she is a teenager engaging in normal teenage behavior, and we have to ask ourselves, why is it that we have children in court for that type of engagement?

And so here's what's important for our conversation about race and adolescence, right?

The research makes clear that children act like children all over the world, no matter what they look like, and no matter where they live.

It's not just a US phenomena, right?

The developmental features of adolescence are found throughout the world.

So there's no good adolescence, there's no bad adolescence, there's no Black adolescence or brown adolescence, right?

Adolescence is just adolescence, and yet, disparities are evident throughout every city in our country.

And even when we get annoyed, right, annoyed at the recklessness of adolescents, right, the impulsivity of adolescents, for the most part, right, we still treat most children with tolerance and grace and forgiveness and redirection, right?

But Black children are criminalized for virtually every feature of adolescence, right?

The clothes they wear, the music that they listen to, Black girls even are punished for the type, for the ways in which they style their hair, talking back to adults, coming home after curfew, even experimenting with sex and drugs, and no, I don't want any child to do those things, and I won't ask you in the audience how many of you (laughs) engaged in these behaviors, and yet you're here in this community at the City Club, right, and you came out just fine.

This is the nature of adolescence.

And so I could pull any one of those threads, right?

So just take for a moment, right, think about music, right?

Think about heavy metal, country, pop music, right, rock music, all of these genres have the same sort of misogynistic themes, glorification of violence, sex, drugs, right?

Almost without critique.

But then when we talk about rap music and hip-hop music, it's treated as if it is the most dangerous music alive, right?

We could pull a thread on the clothing, think about, for those of the older folks in the room, you remember the tie-dye T-shirts and the bell bottoms, right, from the hippie era, that were commonly associated with weed and hallucinogens.

We never outlawed the tie-dye T-shirt, right?

Think about the all black, I love it how some people are just laughing, that really resonated with some of you.

(audience laughs) I'm just gonna leave that alone, right, right?

But think about, right, the all black attire and the straight black hair that was associated with the goth era, right?

But that was also associated with mass shootings.

Of course, we never outlawed all black attire, and even, if I wanna push the envelope, think about steel-toed Doc Martens with red shoelaces, which some supremacist groups have adopted as their own, right?

We've never outlawed that, but what have we outlawed?

There are cities across the country that have outlawed sagging pants.

Again, I have no desire to see anybody's underwear.

But should we make it a crime that allows for police to come in contact with a child, in an encounter that can go from zero to 100 in an instant, right?

And even without criminal laws, what else have we criminalized?

What else have we penalized?

We've penalized the hoodie, right?

You walk through a park and you see a Black child with a hoodie and people are afraid, right?

This is what we're talking about, the ways in which the key features of adolescence are criminalized.

And even when children do commit serious crimes, right, we treat them as if they are beyond redemption.

Black children are far more likely to be prosecuted as adults instead of as children, right, far more likely, we are far more likely to impose a severe sentence like life without the possibility of parole.

We're far more likely to put a Black child in solitary confinement, right, for serious behaviors.

And I gotta say, pressing the envelope again, if we really wanna understand, if we really wanna think about how Black children for example and white children are treated differently, we should look at the case of Kyle Rittenhouse, right?

And I know Professor Hardaway has, you know, given extraordinary commentary on that case, and there is so, so much we could say about that case, but if we put race and class aside for just one moment and recognize that Kyle Rittenhouse's behavior was the epitome of everything we know about adolescence, right?

He's a 17-year-old child, crosses state lines with an assault rifle across his body in public view, right?

And he's got minimal experience with a weapon at this point, in his 17th year, but somehow in his teenage brain, he thinks he's competent enough to go out and protect businesses in this protest, right?

And he's impulsive, he's reactive, he's risk-taking, he's doing exactly what his friends do, because his friends called him over and gave him that gun, right?

And he's not thinking ahead to the long-term possible outcomes, and what happens?

We know he ends up taking the lives of two people and severely injuring another.

And he, his mother, and rightfully so, his defense attorney, want everyone to see him as a teenager, as an adolescent who just got in over his head.

And you all know that he then is found not guilty.

We can do the contrast, so many contrasts come to mind when we think about comparing Kyle Rittenhouse's case to right here in Cleveland, to Tamir Rice.

In less than three seconds, Tamir Rice is shot dead for having a toy gun in a park.

He's 12, right?

12 years old.

There's so much more we could say about that, Kyle Rittenhouse's case.

Also thinking about the ways in which we would never think to label Kyle Rittenhouse as a gang member.

But let's put a different, you know, lens on this, right?

Imagine the exact same scenario if it had been a Black child.

Imagine a scenario where a Black child gets a phone call from a friend, "Hey, something's about to go down "on the corner, can you come out and show us some support?"

Kid being loyal to his friends, comes out, shows up with his friends, friend passes him a gun, things get out of control, and someone dies.

Would we ever think of that as self-defense?

Instead we would label that gang activity, right?

Notwithstanding the comparisons to what, you know, Kyle Rittenhouse has done, and in fact, when you look at photographs of Kyle Rittenhouse, they're all dressed alike, all the markers of that sort of gang activity, right?

They're in fatigues, it's all the things you think of.

We don't think about, we did not process, as a country, Kyle Rittenhouse's case in the same way we would process a case involving a Black child.

So why is it, why is it that a, why is it that both civilians and law enforcement, all of us are more likely to perceive Tamir Rice or to perceive my client, Sharice, as a threat, as a danger?

There are so many, you know, layers to that, but part of it lies in the very answer, to be quite frank, that one of the officers gave in explaining why Tamir Rice was shot.

They talked repeatedly about how Tamir appeared to be, what?

Older than he actually was, right?

They talked about how appeared to be standing five feet, seven inches tall, weighing, wearing a size 36 pant and an extra large jacket.

Well guess what?

The research shows that Tamir Rice is not alone, that individuals, both civilians and police officers, are more likely to perceive a Black child as significantly older than they actually are.

There's some powerful research by Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff that I commend that all of you look at, showing that folks tend to perceive Black children, Black males in particular, as more than 4 1/2 years older than they actually are.

That means you see a Tamir Rice and you see a 16 or a 17-year-old, and you see a 17-year-old Black child and you see a 21 or a 22-year-old child.

That has a profound impact on how we engage with them.

Also there's research showing that we perceive Black males as older, I mean excuse me, as bigger, taller, more muscular, right, heavier, than they actually are, and heavier than a white male, a young white male that's the exact same size, exact same height, exact same body build, and with the exact same strength, upper body strength, the exact same.

You perceive, you look at that Black child, young Black male, and you see them as older.

Similar research has been done with young Black girls, showing that individuals, adults, are more likely to perceive Black girls as older, more mature, right, more knowledgeable about adult topics than they actually are, less innocent, and less in need of protection, all very powerful research.

So, but we cannot talk about this criminalization of Black youth without understanding how young Black children perceive and experience their encounters with the police.

Again, I think the best way to bring that to life is to share one more story, a story that I, about a client that I call Andre in the book.

So Andre was a 15-year-old boy who's walking down the street with a friend that I call James.

As they're walking about, they're literally engaged in no activity out of the ordinary, they're not loud, they're not roughhousing, they're not using drugs, but a police car drives up, actually an unmarked car drives up and rolls down the window and says to them, "Did you hear any gunshots?"

At which point both boys say, "No," and they keep on walking.

The officers are still unsatisfied, so they continue to follow the boys and they say, "Well, can I see your waistband?"

And what they're asking the boys is to just lift up their shirts so that the officer can make sure they don't have any weapons.

Both boys lift up their shirts, and they keep on walking, the officers don't see anything.

Officer still not satisfied and says, "Well, can we search you?"

At which point, the boys say "Yes."

Officers out of the car, put the boys against the wall, and began to frisk them.

And I'ma tell you as a long, gonna stop touching myself, but as a defense attorney, I am always baffled, right, I'm always baffled, why do you say yes?

Why did you agree to be searched?

Why did you agree to lift your shirt?

And Andre says to me, "Well, Ms. Henning, wouldn't you?

"Because if we didn't, if we said no, "they were gonna frisk us anyway, "and if we tried to run away, "they would've shot us in the back."

Whether that's true or not is of no moment.

It's the perception, it's that child's perception in that moment.

There is a growing body of research documenting the extraordinary psychological trauma that policing imposes on Black and Latino children.

That's, the studies have been done with those two populations, but demonstrating the ways the trauma that Black and brown children experience in contact with the police.

The research shows that Black children who live in heavily surveilled neighborhoods or who have been the target of significant stops and frisks report high rates of fear, anxiety, depression, hopelessness, they become hyper-vigilant, meaning simply that they're always on guard, and that distrust, that distrust that they begin to form for police officers transfers to other state actors, teachers, counselors, other folks who might be their ally.

What's so powerful about this research is that it shows that the trauma occurs not only from being the direct contact with a police officer, but also from hearing about, witnessing, these types of encounters involving friends, family, or someone that they're close to, even watching these incidents, even isolated incidents of police violence on television, is just as traumatic for many as being there, and so researchers have found what they call a significant association between traumatic events online and depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other types of depressive symptoms among Black and brown children.

On one end of the spectrum, they're constantly at a state of hyper-arousal, and then for some children, they're the opposite, they're despondent, they're numb to it all.

And so I always say, when I do, you know, have conversations and trainings and workshops with police officers, I always say, this isn't an anti-police conversation, right?

This is, and I say to officers who engage with young people, and do so completely meaning well, even a wellness check, right, that that in and of itself is, becomes a source of trauma for many Black and brown youth, and I remind folks, right, that the blue uniform carries with it a history of tension, of tense race relations in our country, and so when we approach young people and we think about strategies for safety, that we have to keep that in mind, right?

Really have to keep that in mind.

And so before I move on from policing, I just wanna say a word about policing in schools, because it's such a critical issue, and I will tell you, until I wrote this book, I bought into the often repeated narrative that we have police in schools today because parents and teachers were afraid to send their kids back to school after the mass shooting in Columbine in 1998, right, in Colorado, right?

But as I did research, I realized that the first police in schools appeared in schools in Indianapolis in 1939, at the moment of the first inkling even of a conversation about the possibility of integrating schools.

Police presence in schools increased exponentially in the Civil Rights era, right, under the stated intent of creating a safe passage for Black and brown students who would integrate schools, but we've seen, unfortunately from the iconic photographs and some, and from the historical record, that far too often, police presence became an impediment to true and meaningful integration of schools.

Fast-forward to the mid-1990s, the federal government, in the mid-1990s, created the federal COPS in Schools program, which is the framework that allowed the federal government to pour money into local and states' school systems that would indeed hire police officers, right?

What was going on in the '90s?

Folks remember?

That's when we had that temporary uptick in crime, and Black children flat-out, explicitly became the target, the poster child for all of crime in America, and in fact, the super-predator myth came about, right, and predicted that by the year 2000, Black children would run amok and rape, maim, and kill all of America.

We all know that never happened, right?

Not only did it not happen, but the Princeton professor who put forth the super-predator myth had to recant within a year, right, because it was so faulty, but that narrative lives on today, and indeed, when, by the time Columbine happens in 1998, then you see that there is indeed an increase of funding for police in schools, but you all, where did police get sent to schools?

They didn't get sent to the suburbs, they didn't get sent to the, right, the Columbines, they got sent to schools that have a predominantly Black and brown presence.

That's the evolution of police in schools, and so now, more police in schools means more arrest in schools, more arrest in schools means more arrest of Black and brown students, and since I told you the story about Sharice, here's a data point for you.

Black girls are 3.6 times more likely to be arrested in their school than a white child, a white girl, right?

Black boys are 2.4 times more likely to be arrested at their school than a white boy, and these disparities are even more disturbing when we consider research showing that traditional law enforcement strategies for school safety and for public safety are far less effective, and often times they're more harmful than helpful.

We've seen that police were present in Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde, right, the presence of traditional law enforcement responses has not been sufficient to interrupt or to prevent mass shootings.

So that's a lot of information, and I know y'all wanna end on hope and ideas and understanding about what do we do with that, and so, you know, there's so many things that we know about what works, and I'll start this way, which is to say that we have to radically reduce the footprint of traditional law enforcement in the lives of all children, right?

(audience applauds) All children.

But especially Black and brown children who have been so disproportionately overrepresented, right?

And so when I talk to police officers, you know what this means?

It doesn't mean we're, what it means is that we're reimagining what policing is for, is that we are, all come together and we think about, what is it that we really need police to do, and then we relieve them of all of those responsibilities that we don't need them for, right, like raising our children in the school system, right, or you know, intervening in a mental health crisis, or intervening in a drug overdose, right?

Think about what we do need police for, and relieve them, right, of the extra burden of those things that they don't need.

But the big thing here, and this is what I want the takeaway to be, it is, the fundamental way forward is about investing in alternatives, right, alternatives to traditional law enforcement strategies, and so that means adopting a public health approach to both school safety and to community safety.

What is that?

A public health approach, number one, is attentive to developing meaningful relationships between children and adults, right?

That's the starting point.

It's also, a public health framework is also one that is trauma-informed and trauma-responsive, it recognizes that children today are experiencing significant levels of trauma, right, and that we have to be ready to engage with that.

It also calls for a restorative response, right, that seeks to repair relationships that have already been broken, and most importantly, a public health framework is one that has to be racially equitable, right, that treats all children like children, right?

So what does that look like on the ground?

It looks like counselors and social workers, it looks like a continuum of mental health providers for young people, it looks like peer intervention and positive youth supports.

It also looks like social emotional learning in the classroom, and it looks like smaller class sizes.

In schools, and I'm not naive, right, I live in Washington, D.C., in schools where there is real evidence of violence, and let me be clear, the robbery committed, allegedly committed by my client Sharice, is not real evidence of violence, okay, but in schools where there is real evidence of violence, we look at credible messengers, right, violence interrupters, folks who look like the children in the schools, right, that go out and intervene and negotiate and restore relationships.

That's what a public health framework looks like.

So the bottom line is that we have to, have to treat all children like children, and we have to invest in children, in families, and in communities instead of our traditional law and order response.

So I thank you all for having me.

(audience applauds) Thank you.

- We are about to begin the audience Q&A.

I'm Cynthia Connolly, director of programming here at the City Club of Cleveland.

We are joined by Professor Kristin Henning, the Blume Professor of Law and director of Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative at Georgetown Law, and author of the book, "The Rage of Innocence: "How America Criminalizes Black Youth."

We welcome questions from everyone, City Club members, guests, students, and those joining via our livestream at CityClub.org, or our radio broadcast at 89.7 Ideastream Public Media.

If you'd like to tweet a question for our panelist, please tweet it @thecityclub.

You can also text it to 330-541-5794, that's 330-541-5794, and our City Club staff will try our best to work it into the second half of this program.

May we have the first question, please?

- Hi, thank you so much for coming today.

I work at Wickliffe High School with these lovely people, and I consider myself an ally or an advocate for anyone that will allow me to.

I think a common theme when someone of color gets into trouble, either with school or the law, well why didn't they just listen to what they were told to do?

And I find myself getting highly emotional when I try to argue with them, so what would be a common way to address someone that says that?

- Yeah, so I feel you and I feel your emotions 'cause I share them, that we tend to blame children for being children, and so part of what I say in response to that is really urging people to see themselves in those moments, right?

So if the child had just not listened, do you remember when you were a teenager, and did you listen, right?

So part of, and I, you know, very much, very intentional in the book for example, of telling stories.

My desire was to have every single reader find themselves somewhere in the story, to remember what it was like to be in that moment, right?

Or to see their own children in that moment, and so that's part of what I give back, is an urge, a desire to, or a way to kick back and let them see themselves, and for people who don't, you know, can't reach back and can't somehow remember that moment, (chuckles) of transgression in their own lives, it's honestly to share the research, the research on adolescent development, shows that, I love y'all to death, but children don't listen.

(all laugh) Okay?

I mean it's there.

I have really, this journey of this book, and actually not even this book, it's not about the book, it's about, you know, representing children for 26 years, that journey, I have really made many friends who are developmental psychologists.

I have learned so much about what is considered normative, what's normal, right?

And guess what?

Children who don't listen, that's actually, it sounds, you know, as a parent, you're like ah, I wish my kid would listen, well guess what?

It's actually healthy, healthy adolescent development.

They're pushing boundaries, they're testing limits, right?

That's how children grow up to be leaders, right?

And so we have to learn to flip the frame.

So I feel you, I hear your pain, greatly.

Yep.

- So we just had cash bail on the ballot here in Ohio last week, so could you speak to the impact that cash bail might have on disproportionality of youth within the criminal justice system, with a case like Kalief Browder being the most extreme case?

- Oh, absolutely.

I, you know, I am a staunch opponent of bail for children, right, for many reasons.

You know, first and foremost, that who's paying that bail, right?

It's not the child.

So the idea that we are gonna impose bail on a child as a, number one, as a deterrent, right, that's what people think, this is a, you know, sorta the legal concept, if I penalize you, you won't do it again, that's not how the child's brain works, right?

You know, they don't know anything about deterrents, they don't know anything about, oh, when I get out, my momma might have to pay bail later, you know, if I do something else that's wrong, so it doesn't, as a criminal theory, it doesn't work, right?

Children are impulsive, they're not having a rational calculus, (laughs) if I commit this crime, this is what will happen.

So that's one, it just doesn't work.

The other thing is it also drives an extraordinary wedge in the family at a time when we most need children to have the support of their parents, right?

Even when there's that friction, that normal teenage parent friction, guess what?

Kids are still paying attention and love their parents, right?

So then you put a bail, you impose bail on a family, who pays it?

The parents do, right?

Or the family has to raise that money.

Extraordinarily punitive for the whole family, and so it becomes less effective, it actually becomes more harmful than helpful because now you've created an argument, you've created tension in the family, you've created discord, so that's another major problem.

The other, you know, maybe even should've started there, you talked about the Kalief Browder story, guess what?

People, Black families, many Black families who end up in the criminal legal system can't raise that money, right?

So you talk about the heart of racial inequity, right?

You cannot, you know, detain or incarcerate a person simply by virtue of their poverty, right?

And that's what bail does when you can't raise that money, so we had Kalief Browder, right, folks remember him, from New York, he actually spent three years in Rikers Island pending trial.

That in and of itself is an outrage, right?

Pending trial, guess what, for something he didn't do, and even more thinking about like how the system really failed him, the complaining witness, the victim of a real robbery, not saying the victim was not robbed, but the victim of the real robbery actually left the country very, very soon after the alleged incident and made it clear he was never coming back.

So for three years, three years, they knew he wasn't coming back and they still pursued that case, and as to the bail question, his family couldn't afford it.

So if you all have watched documentaries and have seen Venida Browder, his mother, interviewed, I mean she can't talk about it without crying, without sobbing about how she couldn't come up with that money, right?

And then when they couldn't come up with the money fast enough, guess what?

The court then said, well you know what, we're gonna actually remove the bail anyway, and we're gonna hold you, what we call in the law, personal, like we're gonna hold you in detention based on the severity of the crime, separate and apart from whether you could have come up with the bail, right?

So they removed even the opportunity for him to post bail, so those are three sort of reasons why I'm really opposed to it in youth court.

Yeah.

- You know, the media has written about riots and horrible behavior, horrible treatment, and then we haven't really had, the community has not been outraged, and so my question, in all your research, have you found any detention centers where the community has been successful in changing the conditions within that detention center?

- So I would say look at the work of the campaign, formerly known as the Campaign for Youth Justice.

Liz Ryan is now the head of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and so she had an organization called the Campaign for Youth Justice, and then they closed that and they opened another organization called Youth First Initiative.

Both of those organizations were designed to close facilities, right?

And so in the District of Columbia, we closed, our facility was previously called Oak Hill, and it was dilapidated, it was, you know, regimented, it was too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer and all of those things, and they led a community-based campaign to get that closed, and that was the name of the campaign, so I would commend you to reach out or to look at the work that they've done.

I'd be happy to connect you with that, so there has been, I have to say that the way work and reform gets done, it gets done from the community.

It gets done from outrage, it gets done because, you know, folks come together at church rallies, really, and recreation centers, and they fight, you know, for all of this.

Didn't you have a closing here too?

Yeah, I was gonna say, I remember Gabriella Celeste, talk to her afterwards, you know, has done some work around, huh?

What'd you say?

- [Audience Member] I talked to her already.

- Okay, okay, right, (laughs) you're like, you want more, right?

There's more to be done.

There is always more to be done.

But I would say at that national level, thinking about Liz Ryan, and some of the work of Campaign for Youth Justice.

Yeah.

- Hi, I have a question that was texted to us.

How do you as a defense attorney advise Black and brown adolescents to respond in a police situation?

- Oh, such a, I don't even know, I wanna say painful question, 'cause I get it all the time.

So look, I wanna say, I'll just say it, that we've, the first question has to be, how do we prevent (chuckles) so many children from coming into contact with the police, right, like why is that we call the police as the default, so that they now have to figure out how to make those responses?

I just have to say that.

But accepting the question, you know, as it is, which I respect the question, in chapter five of the book, I talk about how parents, Black parents in particular, have an extraordinarily difficult, almost impossible task of figuring out how to prepare Black children for those inevitable moments of discrimination, right?

Didn't have to be about policing, but just period, those inevitable moments of racial injustice if you will, and that's on the one hand, so that they can stay alive, right?

But yet on the other hand, not over-preparing them so that they live their lives in fear, and they live their lives in a perpetual state of trauma, right?

And so that they don't live their lives believing that there are no allies that don't look like them, right?

We don't want that, so it's a very difficult and delicate line to watch, or to walk, and so what I say is like, I don't think, honestly, that any Black parent can afford not to give the talk, right?

You know, I just don't think you can let your children go about and not ever have the talk, but at the same time, we've gotta pair that talk with all of the things about Black pride and about Black resilience and about how Black and brown children have a right to live and thrive in our country, right?

And acknowledging that sometimes, things will happen to you that you didn't deserve, right?

But that doesn't make you less of a person, right?

So you pair that talk, right, that preparation, with the narrative of Black pride, to be quite frank, right, reminding them about a people of resilience, right?

And the research has shown, right, that racial socialization, a fancy word, right, for the ways in which we instill that race pride and race identity in young people, actually serves as a buffer to these negative moments, right?

And you give them the tools, right, we sit down and we create space for them to talk about what it feels like, right, to have been stopped, what it feels like to walk into a convenience store and have a civilian look at you like you're threatening, create space for those conversations, and then give them the skills and the outlet to talk about it so that they can, you know, be able to engage well with police officers or others without the underlying emotion that's never been unpacked, so that's the suggestion that I offer there.

- My name's Eliza Wells, I'm a junior at Wickliffe High school, and you mentioned how we needed, like, to reform our schooling and to transform our schooling, so what would you say is the very first step to get people to show empathy and become allies, and want to see the change in our school that we personally could bring back to our school and all the other schools that are here today?

- Oh, I love it, I think every one of you all sitting at tables together as students, you know, should get together, like so I'm not kidding, I started off saying, if you wanna know how to make the world a better place for children, ask them, okay?

So that means it's, and let me also be clear, I don't wanna put all the burden on children, right, that it's adults have to do better, right, but in response to your question which I just, you know, I really value, is like, set your own agenda, right?

Set your agenda, figure out, like if I come together as a club, those of you who came, you came for a reason.

If we set down, what are the top three priorities that you want to see for change in your school?

What does it look like, right?

And we've done some of that work in D.C., for example, where there're organizations that, you know, have roundtable with youth, right?

And let them draft an agenda.

What is it that you wanna, what change do you wanna see?

I would say to teachers, partnering with, you know, students, and sitting down and saying, what is the number one priority for change, and having teachers, you know, work with the students as a part of a class assignment to come up, what's the agenda?

What does that agenda look like, right?

It's creating space.

So you know, I was at a wonderful one of those little roundtables with young people, and this conversation about social emotional learning, teaching young people how to engage, you know, with empathy with their classmates, and one of the young people that was talking to me sorta raised her hand and she said, "You know, we really need to tell our teacher "to move our social emotional learning class "to before lunch."

(laughs) "Because after lunch, we're all tired "and nobody's paying attention."

I mean, just the smallest thing, right?

It's like sitting down and problem-solving with young people at the table.

I think too much of the conversation about reform is top down, so I think the first thing I would say is, you know, form a club.

(laughs) Ask your teacher for a sponsor, and number three, identify your top three concerns, and when I say concerns, what do you wanna see change?

It's as simple as that, and then figure out a way forward.

Yeah.

- So I wanted to know that with representing Black children in Washington, D.C., about the George Floyd protests, I wanted to know that, was there any time that children were being incarcerated for peacefully protesting and did you ever, what was like, what was up with that?

I wanted to know.

- Oh, that's so great, oh my goodness, so we're gonna make sure you get a copy of the book, 'cause I actually tell this story.

Again, I'm not gonna tell you, but the big, I'ma answer your question, but the story at the beginning and the end of the book close with just that, this idea of what happened to one of my clients who was protesting, so here's the, so a couple of things that your question makes me think of, one of which is that I have been so moved by the outpouring of and activism of young people over the last several years, and it included the activism after the Parkland shooting, right, in Florida, right?

Those folks, those students rose up.

And let me be clear, they were very adamant that they wanted their schools to be safe, right?

They didn't want any more violence, but guess what they said?

We don't want police officers to make it safer, right?

That wasn't the strategy, so one, there's that.

In the District of Columbia, another example, we had a, and this goes to your question about what young people can do, we had some really, what we consider disturbing legislation, laws being proposed, that would erode confidentiality of juvenile court.

In other words, it would make public, if a kid got arrested, it would make it public to everyone, not just, you know, kept confidential in the court, and I gotta tell you, over 300 students from our local high schools showed up at City Council and testified against that bill, right?

Just powerful, powerful, powerful, they had set the hearing, City Council had set the hearing for two hours, it ended up being literally two days, because they wanted the students to have an opportunity, so those are examples of protests.

Then George Floyd happens, and absolutely, children showed up, right?

Showed up in D.C., came, they were bused in from other parts of the country to Washington, D.C., you know, to walk the streets, right, at Black Lives Matter Plaza.

And here's the thing, I would say, by and large, in D.C., the young people were allowed to protest, however, and this is what I talk about in the book, there was a moment, right, that the protest in D.C. lasted a long time.

Folks set up camps.

I don't know if y'all know that, they set up tents out there, and there came a point at which the city made the decision to tear down the tents, right, the tent cities that had formed up in response to the George Floyd protest, and people got arrested then.

People got arrested for not leaving the tents, for cooking food out in public, things of that nature, and so one of the clients that I represented was that.

Somebody, and what's so disturbing about that, I think that's such a powerful question, why do we arrest children when they're protesting?

It is the heart of civic engagement, the heart of civic engagement, right?

Civic engagement has now become part of like the new, you know, the new wave of what needs to happen in education, but yet, you know, we've got children, you know, Black and brown children who go out and protest and they get arrested, right?

The other thing, it's the last thing I'll say about that, and this actually goes to the title of my book, "The Rage of Innocence," and I'd say the title of my book is the rage that every single one of us should have any time any one person is deprived of an opportunity to be a child, all right?

But in addition to that, it is also the rage of Black and brown children who are told over and over and over again that they are to be feared, that they are somehow dangerous, and I say, you know, with a teenager, you know, they're not gonna say, you know, to, "Mr.

Officer, "I don't like the way you're treating me today."

(chuckles) No, they're not gonna give a dissertation and a lecture, they're gonna speak out of emotion, out of impulse, and sometimes it's gonna sound like profanity.

Sometimes it's gonna sound aggressive and it's gonna sound loud.

Guess what?

That's another form of protest, right?

And that we have to make space for that, right, for young people to protest in different ways.

So yeah.

(audience applauds) Thank you.

- So I wanted to see if you can speak to something that, so I've coached youth sports for a long time and served as a youth minister, have three young adult children myself, I've had this conversation with various youth over the years about the fear.

One of the things that they've shared is that as Black youth, they'll say, well, when there are events where there are Black youth, whether it's a game or a party, that violence happens a lot.

There's a lot of fighting, and these Black youths will say, you know, we don't have any issues going to an all-white game or all-white party, but a lot of, whether it's at a mall, where there's large gatherings of Black youth, it is not false that a lot of violence does happen.

I'm not saying it happens all the time, I know there are Blacks that won't go to certain all-Black youth, like no, you know, something may jump off.

There's this fear, this perception that something's gonna happen.

So can you speak to that?

Is that a false, or would you say, eh, that's reality, that does happen often, and you're right, there are Blacks that probably don't go to all-Black things for youths because of this, and is that where the fear is coming from, whether you're a police officer or you're white or Black, that there's this fear, if there's a large Black contingency of people, you fear it's gonna happen?

And if you do believe that, then how, what can the community do, what can parents do, what can organizations do to try to help educate on violence?

- Yeah, so I mean this idea that violence does happen, I will never stand and say that violence doesn't happen and that violence, you know, doesn't happen at like the party, right?

Here's the point that I really don't want us to lose when we acknowledge that, and that is, again, it is like 2% of the people at that party engaged in that violence, and that our response is a over, it's a draconian over-response to all Black children because that 2% who went to that party and engaged in that shootout or that violent crime, and so that we cannot make a policy, right, criminal justice and juvenile justice policy based on that 2%, that's one thing.

The second thing is, so yes, I want my, I wanna be safe, and I want my kids to be able to go to parties where they can be safe, and so we have to then ask, what's the root causes of that, right?

Like where can we allocate our dollars?

I feel like violence persists in our country because we've allocated dollars to traditional law enforcement that we've seen hasn't worked, right?

And so that instead, like where are we as a community providing resources and outlet?

So if you've got teenagers who are worried about going to a particular party because they're worried about a shootout, do we have spaces that those kids can go to and play, where they are welcome, where they won't be discriminated against, where they won't be looked at, you know, as if they are a threat or if they are criminal, right?

And so like, you know, Black kids wanna go to the neighborhood recreation center, well let them go to the neighborhood recreation center without cops parked in front, you know, of it, right?

And so you know, so kids, I feel like, and we see it in the qualitative research, meaning the anecdotal studies, that Black kids end up going to the house party where the violence is more likely 'cause they don't have other outlets, they don't have other places where they're allowed to go and play and have recreation and leisure without adult supervision, because we haven't created those safe spaces.

So what I'm saying here is it's an, like our strategy for safety has to be that public health safety, which is gonna reduce the 2% of kids who are engaged in criminal behavior.

The third thing I'll say about it, so to the extent that we do need police in our society, that's where you need police, to do the laser-sharp investigation to figure out who is really engaged in that criminal behavior, and then once we've investigated and figured out who those kids are, we provide them with the services and the resources, and guess what?

There's evidence-based best practices for what works, even with the most violent offenders, right?

And so that's what we've gotta do.

And then the final thing is just the narrative that, you know, I just, be honest, like the idea that it's more likely that at a Black party that a violence will happen, we forget that at, this may sound controversial, but at parties, right, all the way through college where white children predominate, the crime is there, it just looks different, right?

It's rape, it's, you know, think about all the stories that come out, they just don't come out in the same way.

It may not be a shooting, but it is other violent criminal behavior that is just as devastating to the victim as shootings.

This is not to say that we, that means we care less about violence in the Black community, but I really, I push back on the narrative that somehow a Black party is more dangerous than a white party, so I just wanted to throw that in there.

(audience applauds) So thank you.

Should I go take my seat?

- Thank you, that was amazing.

- Thank you, appreciate it.

- Thank you Professor Henning.

You came with the energy and our audience certainly matched that energy.

We had so many questions lined up.

We're so sorry we couldn't get to them all, but you're welcome to follow up with Professor Henning at the book signing immediately after the forum.

Today's forum was part of our Health Equity series in partnership with the Saint Luke's Foundation, our Criminal Justice series in partnership with the Char and Chuck Fowler Family Foundation, and our Authors in Conversation series with Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, the John P. Murphy Foundation, and the Cuyahoga County Public Library.

Thank you to each of you for your continued support of these consequential conversations here at the City Club.

We'd also like to welcome guests at the tables hosted by the Char and Chuck Fowler Family Foundation, the centers, Delta Alpha Lambda Foundation, the Georgetown Club of Cleveland, John F. Kennedy High School, the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, MC2 STEM High School, the Positive Education Program, the Saint Luke's Foundation, Shaker Heights High School, the Thurgood Marshall Oratorical Debate Education Project, that is a mouthful, and this is a lot of tables, Warrensville Heights High School, and Wickliffe High School, such an incredible roster of organizations and schools.

Thank you all for being here today.

Next week we're off on holiday break, but we'll be back here at the City Club on Wednesday, November 30th with Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women's Law Center.

She'll be in conversation with the YWCA of Greater Cleveland's new CEO, Helen Forbes Fields on the changing landscape of reproductive rights.

Tickets are still available and you can find out more on our website at CityClub.org, and that brings us to the end of today's forum.

Thank you all for being here today.

I'm Cynthia Connolly and this forum is now adjourned.

(audience applauds) (bell rings) - [Announcer] For information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of the City Club, go to CityClub.org.

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