Last year, Rashaud Red had a solution that might have changed everything.
Standing on the stage of an LSU auditorium, he asked 400 Baton Rougeans to ponder, “What if George Zimmerman had known Trayvon Martin before that fateful day? … What if the person who killed officers Ramos and Liu knew those officers as people?”
These were the opening lines to the then-17-year-old’s TEDxLSU speech in 2015. In it, he outlined his plans for I Am More, a program to build positive relationships between at-risk youth and police officers.
Rashaud got a standing ovation that day. His talk, which addressed the daily discrimination both black teens and police officers face, brought chills to audience members of all ages, genders and races.
But as Baton Rougeans cheered that day, none of them could have known just how deeply the divides Rashaud spoke of would soon tear apart their own city.
Eleven days after Alton Sterling was killed by police, Rashaud sits in a coffee shop, spending his Saturday afternoon defending police officers.
His friends and family are grieving. His mom, who used to buy CDs from Sterling, has been crying. In the days following Sterling’s death, she joined protesters in condemning police violence. His 8-year-old brother once dreamt of becoming a police officer, but now he’s changed his mind because police “made Mama cry.” One of Rashaud’s closest friends, Jakayla, is also Sterling’s niece.
“I’ve been feeling a lot of emotions this week,” he admits. His brother’s change of heart about what he wants to be when he grows up seems to especially hurt him. “See,” he says. “That’s just another testament to the misunderstanding taking place. I want him to change his mind. I want him to be a police officer, to have this truly noble, inspiring job.”
At around 5 feet 6 inches tall, the 19-year-old is small but mighty. He’s still a teenage boy who has braces and totes around an iPad, but he speaks with the eloquence and intelligence of someone twice his age.
“Some people think that all cops are bad, and we need to change that. We need to open cops’ minds to how these kids think—what are the norms for African-American kids? Some things can be seen as a threat and they’re not, they’re just normal to us,” he says. “Me, as a human being, I felt so bad for those people in Dallas. It hurt me deeply,” he says.
Rashaud doesn’t know then—sitting in this coffee shop—that a day later, a gunman will ambush and shoot six Baton Rouge police. But he is just as eager to prevent that kind of attack against officers as he is to prevent police killings like Sterling’s.
“Community policing is the answer,” he says. “People should know the names of officers who patrol their community … and police officers should know the old lady across the street.”
Last May, Rashaud introduced his classmates to police officers. He organized the first I Am More meeting at his school, Mentorship Academy.
He’d been strategic about selecting the approximately 20 high schoolers and eight Baton Rouge Police officers in the room. He’d insisted on bringing in the youths who were most at-risk and connecting them with officers black and white, as well as female officers.
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?”
That teen told his grandmother’s story through tears, one of the officers rubbing his back.
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,” Rashaud says. “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.”
The mood at that first meeting grew light-hearted as participants played get-to-know-you games. Two kids shared how much they love football but mentioned they couldn’t afford the equipment because it was too pricey.
The boys’ words moved one of the officers, who was a little league football coach. He offered to buy the teens’ gear for them on the spot—about $600 worth of equipment, Rashaud says. But the bond the cop created with those kids was undoubtedly worth a whole lot more.
Officers, too, left the meeting with a greater understanding of the norms for black teens and men.
“Some fail to realize the experiences that I have that are different from my teacher, who is a white woman. … She had to learn a lot about how black kids express themselves,” Rashaud says. “My body language can seem violent, but when you get to know me, you’ll see that it’s friendly.”
The aftermath of the Alton Sterling shooting has proven to Rashaud that there is a stronger need than ever for the program, and he feels rapid expansion is a necessity.
So far, he’s organized quarterly meetings at Mentorship Academy, but he is now in talks with several other Baton Rouge high schools, including McKinley High, Baton Rouge High and others to get I Am More meetings started there. He wants to go to a different school every month so he can reach as many students as possible. He’s also been talking to the New Orleans Police Department about starting a similar program.
Rashaud feels so responsible for the progress in his city that he’s thinking about giving up one of his biggest dreams: Brown University. He has a full scholarship to start as a freshman in the fall. But after the tragedies in Baton Rouge, he’s thinking about attending Tulane or Xavier so he can be closer to home.
“I haven’t seen scenery like that,” he says wistfully, picturing Brown’s campus in Rhode Island. He quickly snaps back to reality, his voice pained. “And then a bomb goes off, and you see your city obliterated. … I feel like, honestly, I have a lot of work to do here.”
That work is rooted in his own personal experience. The neighborhood he grew up in was surrounded by violence daily.
“Unfortunately, I saw a lot of death happen right in front of me,” he says.
Rashaud contrasts his experiences with those of a boy growing up in a wealthier neighborhood, whose father was probably his role model. In neighborhoods like Rashaud’s, he says, many of the successful men were drug dealers.
“You can’t deny people’s experiences … because I definitely didn’t walk out of my house with people mowing their lawns and planting flowers.”
As one of four children to a single mother, Rashaud’s family struggled with money. But his mother protected him the best she could, and always encouraged him to focus on school. “My mother filtered me with her words,” he says. “If not for her influence, I would be someone else.”
Rashaud admits that his upbringing gave him a bleak perspective on law enforcement. In his crime-ridden neighborhood, seeing a police officer meant something bad had happened.
But instead of children associating law enforcement with violence, he wants them to remember an experience they had painting a mural with an officer instead, or building a house together.
“Nothing bonds people together like building something,” he says.
The grieving families channeling their emotions through protest—Rashaud gets that. But he says protesting is not for him.
“It does more for me to be on the phone with Officer Dunham, getting him to understand the reality of kids like me.”
Rashaud says he and Baton Rouge Police Lt. Jonny Dunham have been in constant contact since Sterling’s death about fast-tracking the program’s expansion.
In the days following the death of three local police officers, Rashaud says he is devastated.
“No city has had assumptions of police brutality and attacks on police in the same year or in such a small time frame,” he says. “But I feel there’s no better time to talk about these issues.”
Implementing the program in more Baton Rouge schools is going to be an even greater challenge now, he admits. “It was already hard when nothing was happening,” Rashaud says. “Now kids are going to look at me cross-eyed.”
But he doesn’t seem scared. Because at the end of the day, there are lives on the line, and if his program spreads quickly enough through Baton Rouge and beyond, it might prevent more pain and sadness.
“I have a solution, and I am ready to change the conversation,” he says. “And I would really like people to see it come from my city.”
This article was originally published in the August 2016 issue of 225 Magazine.
