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Miami Beach Police Department Goes Through Diversity Training

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danielvalle5 (https://flic.kr/p/a17DDB)

The shooting of Corey Jones in Palm Beach Gardens is the  most recent in a growing number of deaths at the hands of police officers in South Florida and throughout the United States. One of the many conversations prompted by these deaths is how officers systemically interact with and treat men and women of color in the community.

Earlier this year, the Miami-Beach Police Department was the subject of that conversation locally when it was discovered that hundreds of racist and graphic emails had been circulated among some of the officers. One  officer was fired for his involvement in those emails. 

In September, at the insistence of  Miami-Beach Police Chief Daniel Oates, the department started providing diversity training for the entire department.

“It’s part of… our collective recovering from the event of the spring,” said Oates. “And it’s something I’ve wanted to try that’s focused around us getting to know ourselves better and working well and more collaboratively as sort of a family.”

Part of the challenge with training like this, explained Oates, is that officers tend to shut it out.

“We deal with very real and live examples of all the tensions in society out on the street every day in a way that sometimes the people we work for and the people we serve don’t understand,” said Oates. “And they need to have someone who speaks to them coming from their background and their perspective on what the real world is like.”

Credit Walter Michot / Miami Herald
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Miami Herald
State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, Miami Beach Police Chief Dan Oates and Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine hold a news conference regarding inappropriate emails by the Miami Beach Police Department on Thursday, May 14, 2015.

Someone like Rick Caldwell, a former Marine who used to conduct similar training for members of the military. He has been doing diversity workshops for companies and police departments with his company R Cultures for eight years.

“I think [the officers] are very aware of why we’re doing this,” said Caldwell. “I was kind of shocked that they were like ‘hey, let’s do this.’ ”

About half of the department has been through one of the four-hour training sessions; all officers and un-sworn civilian staff members are required to attend one of the sessions that will run through the end of the year.

The training is not designed to give officers a check list or a step-by-step chart on how not to offend people. Instead, the training gets officers to talk to each other. The hope is that those channels of conversation will stay open beyond the training so that officers can be frank with each other when one of their own does something insensitive or hurtful.

“Some of them, if they’ve been in the police department for 25 years of whatever, do you know how many diversity trainings they’ve been through?” said Caldwell. “Most of them say,  ‘This is wrong and this is right’…  and you go out offending people more than you did before you went to diversity training.”

He says open dialogue is the antidote to that, an open dialogue he’s trying to promote.

Neither Oates nor Caldwell is under the  impression that this training will fix the department, but they see it as a step in the right direction. Oates is thinking about bringing Caldwell back next year for another  training session  that will be more in-depth and probing.

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