Activist A.J. Bohannon had organized more than 1,000 Black Lives Matters protesters to march the streets of Wichita on Sunday. But then, days before, he received a call from the new police chief with a different idea.
(WashingtonPost)- Instead of having an event that drew a hard line between protester and police, why not bring them all together for an evening of summer revelry and open dialogue?
So instead of marching, they gathered in a wooded park where the police department cooked and served up burgers. The officers played basketball with kids. They took group selfies. One officer did the “whip and the nae nae” and the “Cha Cha Slide” in a crowd of dancing girls — a video that instantly became a viral sensation.
They called it the First Steps Community Cookout, a nod to what they see as the seeds of an ongoing effort to ease the tensions heightened by the recent shootings of and by police officers. Wichita Police Chief Gordon Ramsay, who has been on the job since January, started the event by taking questions from residents for 45 minutes.
Aaron Moses, a 25-year-old officer who would go on to be Internet famous for his spirited dance moves, said he held several side conversations with people who wanted to know his thoughts about all the violence of the past month. They spoke openly about prejudices, and the need for people on both sides of the issue to address them.
Only two days later, a woman wrote on Bohannon’s Facebook wall that she’d seen an officer playing with some neighbor kids at a basketball court across the street. That was a first, she said.
“These were kids who were afraid of the police, and now they see something beyond that badge, there’s a pulse and a heart,” Bohannon said. “To see the officers taking those steps, to see them integrate it into their jobs after two days is tremendous.”