ABSTRACT
Baltimore City is not foreign to the historical provocative relationship between police officers and Blacks. More recently, the death of Freddie Gray while in the custody of Baltimore City police led to a federal investigation and development of a consent decree agreement between the United States Department of Justice (USDOJ) and Baltimore City—to examine the policy and practices of the Baltimore City Police Department. Preliminary results revealed that Blacks were victims of excessive force in approximately 90% of the cases reviewed—mostly attributed to inadequate training and discriminatory practices. Hence, training of police officers became an important aspect of the consent decree agreement. Cultural awareness training for police officers is not a new phenomenon in the United States; these trainings grew in the mid-1960s being highly influenced by the civil rights movement but intensified after the Rodney King incident in Los Angeles in the early 1990s. The majority of these trainings were placed in one of the three categories: Race-Relations, Cultural Sensitivity, or Cultural Awareness models. However, none of these models took into consideration the intergenerational aspect of the community as well as the police officers nor have they considered using an Africentric framework. This chapter justifies providing cultural awareness training to police officers and community members using an innovative adaptive Africentric I-Ma’at-Way Model. This model uses intergenerational dialogues rooted and grounded in the seven cardinal virtues of Ma’at to engage police officers and community members in Baltimore City in a discussion about culture and race in regards to community policing.
