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.
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.
[For more of this story, written by Colby Itkowitz, go to https://www.washingtonpost.com...m-a-cookout-instead/]
Comments (0)