Editor's note: This story is part of Southwest Michigan Second Wave's On the Ground Battle Creek series.

Jenasia Morris knows that establishing better relationships between police officers and the African American community in Battle Creek will take time, but she isn’t waiting to get the conversation started.

Morris, 20, is a student at Kellogg Community College majoring in Early Childhood Education. She took out petitions on Thursday to run for a seat on the Battle Creek City Commission, a decision she made before George Floyd died, and she is leading a group of young people who will meet on Wednesday, June 17, at noon with Battle Creek Police Chief Jim Blocker and community leaders to begin the discussion.

Her efforts to set a meeting with Blocker after the asphyxiation more than two weeks ago of Floyd, an African American man who died when a Minneapolis police officer held his knee on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes.

Floyd was laid to rest on Wednesday in Houston, Texas. His death has sparked national and worldwide protests calling for an end to police brutality against people of color and promoting racial justice and equity, especially for those in the African American community.

Battle Creek Police Chief Jim Blocker, left, at a May 2019 event. He will meet next week with young adults who want to better understand police practices in the city.Morris says it took several days before she could bring herself to watch the video that documented Floyd’s death.

“Fear” and “disgust” are the words she used to describe her feelings as she heard Floyd tell Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin that he couldn’t breathe and how he called out to his mother with his last remaining breaths.

“It’s hard for me to understand, how did it happen, and how did it even happen that a man kneeled on another man’s neck and people stood by and did nothing?” she says.

“I couldn’t sit back and do nothing.”

Blocker also is expressing outrage at what happened in Minneapolis.

“We’re all tired of seeing black men killed at the hands of police officers,” he says. “That’s not what we’re supposed to do and it’s inexplicable. Many things went wrong in those eight minutes and 46 seconds, but in the end, it’s an inexplicable act that has left the police profession shocked and dismayed and put us all in a position where we have to start asking ourselves the difficult questions.

“We find ourselves in this space of human cultural sensibility and sensitivity versus all of the emotional appeals.”

While the action that Morris and her group are taking comes after the most recent example of the use of police brutality against a black man, she says this has long been a topic of discussion within her family and among her friends. 

She says there are numerous examples that she’s heard about of Battle Creek police officers treating black people with suspicion. She is one of them.

Last summer she was driving home from her boyfriend’s home at about 11 p.m. when she was pulled over by a police officer who wanted to know where she was going. After leaving her boyfriend, she was trying to decide if she wanted to stop to get something to eat or go straight home.

“I was right downtown by the Kool Center and decided to turn left on Washington and head home and that’s when I was stopped. The officer literally asked me where I was going,” Morris says. “It was late at night and I was in the car by myself. I felt like I was being singled out.”

She did what her mother has instructed her and her three siblings to do – answer the officer’s questions and remain calm.

When asked if she followed-up with anyone at the police department about being stopped, she says, “I didn’t follow-up because I felt like nothing was going to come of it.”

Blocker says there are incidences like the one that Morris described and numerous crimes that go underreported. He says he has always encouraged people to come forward because that is the only way that incidents like this get addressed. But he says he also understands the reluctance fostered by an overall lack of trust in law enforcement, particularly in Communities of Color, coupled with incidences of police brutality that capture national and worldwide attention.

On Wednesday, he received a phone call from a retired school teacher in her 80s who was asking pointed questions about the situation with his police department.

“All she wanted to know is are we teaching our officers not to bodyslam people and do we have a system to get rid of the bad ones once and for all?” Blocker says. “The oldest and youngest members of our community want to know the answers to those questions.”

Battle Creek has a system for getting rid of police officers who don’t represent the values or uphold the moral code of protecting and serving people in the community that has hired them to do this job, Blocker says.

While he would like to think that every individual experience with officers will be positive, he knows that has not been and will not always be the case and he says he looks forward to discussing this and many other concerns further with Morris and her contingent. 

He also says he has hesitated to speak about what specifically happened in Minneapolis because he doesn’t know enough about the makeup of that city’s police department.

“There’s an ideology out there that’s emotionally-driven that is leading people to make misguided and misinformed decisions. While you might have the chief of police issuing certain policies and procedures, you could have an entire precinct that ignores what he’s saying and will do what they think is right,” Blocker says. “These environments create their own vacuum.  Despite what the commission or the chief says, ‘We’re going to do things in the 9th Precinct this way" is the attitude they take.

Blocker says this is a toxic cultural problem that policy won’t fix if the leadership isn’t invested and deliberate about preventing it.

“This is not the first time this has happened,” he says in regard to the death of a black man at the hands of a police officer. “The protests and riots we are seeing now are similar to what happened after Ferguson where the thought was to give it a little bit of time and it will move on by itself.”

Although the outrage continued, people did move on. Blocker says he hopes the same won’t be true now. He says conversations like the one that will happen Wednesday are necessary to healing and moving forward.

“If people are interested in being critical enough and want to learn what is being done now and what we used to do and how we’ve changed in the last six to seven years, I’m looking forward to peeling back the veil of some of those police practices,” Blocker says.

This is why Morris asked for the meeting.

“If we do this, it will be all laid out on the table and we’ll have some ground rules established,” she says. “Like, if I get pulled over, I’d like to have that done for a valid reason or when it does happen, I’d basically like to be treated with respect when I do come into contact with police. I don’t want them to feel that they have so much power over other people and that they can control what we do.

“Their job is to protect us and not control us, otherwise, they’re leading with fear.”

The end goal of her efforts, she says, is to strengthen the African American community’s relationship with the police department.

“I think we can do that by setting forth some basic ideas like being treated with dignity and as a person and if you do come into contact with police. You don’t want to feel like when they pull you over or if you’re at a park and they come over to you, that you’re in trouble. They may not threaten you, but they instill fear in people, just by being there because of things that are associated with them and their behavior.

“When I’m driving I put both hands on the steering wheel and sit up straight to dot my ‘I’s’ and cross my ‘T’s’. Why do I have to feel like I have to do that even though I’m not doing anything wrong.”

The answer is in part due to the lessons her mother, Moneeka Lee, instilled in Morris and her siblings at a very young age. In addition to Morris, who will be 21 in July, Lee has two sons, ages 18 and 10, and another daughter who is 3 years old.

“We first started having this conversation when we were in elementary school and my mom told us what to do, which was whatever the police told us to do,” Morris says. “She said ‘don’t talk back and never raise your voice with them. Move slowly and announce what you’re going to do before you do it. 

“She felt that was necessary because she had seen the way people were treated by the police and she didn’t want us to lose our life because of doing something stupid.”

Lee’s conversation is similar to the one that so many African American parents have with their children about what to do if they are stopped or have an encounter with a police officer.

“I tell them, don’t just assume that all officers are bad, however, you need to act accordingly. Don’t make any sudden movements and don’t talk unless they ask you a question,” Lee says. “If the officer asks if they can see your driver’s license you have to talk to them. Some of them are just as scared of the people they encounter as we are of them.”

Lee says she is having this conversation now with her 10-year-old, the same one she’s had with his older brother and sisters when they were about his age. She says there is a lot more checking in with each other now that her children are older and out and about more on their own. She insists that her kids let her know when they leave and arrive at their destinations.

“I’m introducing things to him now,” Lee says. “If you just keep telling them it will be in their mind that this is what you need to do. I wish it wasn’t a thing that I had to do, but times have changed and that’s no longer the case.

“I tell them that there are good officers that do care about you and are your friends. But, if you don’t establish relationships with them directly, you don’t know who this officer is.”

These warnings weren’t a part of the conversations Lee had with her own parents when she was growing up. She says the relationship with police officers was better back then.

“I never thought twice about any of this when I was coming up,” she says. “We had Officer Friendly and the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program that introduced us to officers and we were taught that they were our friends.”

It wasn’t until she was in her 20s that Lee began to notice changes in the relationships between officers and the African American community.

“I started noticing that we had people in the neighborhood who were troublemakers and they were being harassed by certain officers. They got stationed to patrol in other parts of the city due to complaints and people could be into something that was perfectly legal, but it was almost like the officers were targeting them.”

Blocker says what Lee experienced as a child came about because those programs received funding. He says that funding has slowly been taken away from those types of outreach programs and has not been replaced,  creating a huge void that leaves no opportunity for his officers and the community’s youth to develop more positive relationships.

Despite the funding issues, he has created an Explorer program that brings in high school-age youth to work with officers. And shortly after being appointed Police Chief in 2014, he introduced the Fusion Center, a collaboration among community organizations and the Battle Creek Police Department that has streamlined the way officers respond to calls while providing the resources that better address the needs of those making those calls.

It is enabling officers to focus on calls involving criminal activity while giving representatives with organizations such as Summit Pointe and Safe Place the ability to address the needs of residents who seek out the police as their first line of defense.

The work already going on with BCPD and Summit Pointe led to the creation of a local Crisis Intervention Team program that is designed to improve officers’ ability to safely intervene, link individuals to mental health services, and divert them from the criminal justice system when appropriate. Blocker says the Crisis Intervention Team approach was the direct result of the recognition throughout the United States that a better job had to be done to deal with a growing mental health crisis.

“Too many police departments continue to send the wrong tool to fix the problem,” he says.

“One of our guiding principles is to be a learning organization. We have our values and our principles. I’m not saying we have all the answers. I want to share what we’ve done and listen to what we can change. Conflict in and of itself is going to be ugly and hard for people to understand unless they’ve been in that situation.” 

Morris says she thinks that the majority of Battle Creek’s police officers “do care about us.” She cites the recent protests in the city that were met with nonviolence and respect by officers. Those demonstrations of outrage and grief, tempered with restraint, are already leading to change, she says.

“Things are already starting to happen,” Morris says. “A lot of places are doing investigations into their police departments and other places are having sit-down meetings like we’re doing. It’s because of the riots, which in their own way were a good thing because it drew so much attention to the situation.

“I see change coming because of that. I don’t how much different things will be, but I definitely see change coming.”

In advance of the meeting with Blocker, Morris asked for suggestions from the community about what they want to see. She says those suggestions will be presented during the meeting.

“I’m hoping they’re going to listen and I’m hoping their expectations are reasonable too. I hope they take our suggestions seriously because I think it would eliminate a lot of the fear in our community.”