OPD Seeks Solutions with Community Support
BY KENDYL HOLLINGSWORTH
KENDYLH@
OPELIKAOBSERVER.COM
OPELIKA—
With rising concerns about crime in Opelika, the Opelika Police Department (OPD) took some time last week to introduce new programs — and highlight a few existing ones — that aim to benefit both students and adults.
OPD Chief of Police Shane Healey explained and introduced these programs at a meeting for Opelika parents and students held Nov. 1 at Opelika High School.
“A lot of time and effort have gone into trying to figure out what’s really going on in Opelika,” Healey said at the meeting. “We have to figure out what is going on in Opelika, Alabama. What are our needs? What do our kids need? What do our citizens need? How can we impact our community? How can we change the world in Opelika, Alabama?”
Healey said he has been working with Dr. Chenavis Evans, founder and CEO of Critical Insights, for more than two years to find the answers to these questions. Through more than a dozen community meetings all over the city, the police department collected feedback from citizens about things they didn’t understand and changes they wanted to see.
“This started right after the George Floyd incident,” Healey recalled. “Let me tell you, some of those meetings were brutal. People had a lot of pain and a lot of hurt towards the police department. We were not there to solve that problem at that time. We wanted to hear what people had to say about it.
“We started to work with them, having those tough conversations and taking those body blows to figure out, what is the real problem? What is at the center of that feeling that you have about your police department, and do you have that specific feeling about your police department here? Have we done something, or is this a general fear?”
Evans and her team helped collect and analyze the data from those meetings, and Healey said there were a few main points that stood out to him. One was that many of the changes citizens wanted to see were issues for which the city was responsible, not the police department.
“That wasn’t our lane, so to speak,” he explained. “But we immediately were able to get the city leaders involved in those conversations so that they could start to bring resources to bear on those problems, and it helped.”
In addition to building better relationships and trust with the police department, citizens also wanted education.
“People wanted two things when they talked about education with the police department,” Healey said. “They wanted to make sure, first of all, that we were well-educated — that we were training and teaching our police officers how to do things the right way. … But they also wanted us to help educate the community on what it is that we really do as police.”
That included topics like municipal court, as well as traffic stops — what police are allowed to do, what citizens are expected to do and what the laws are surrounding those situations.
“We really started taking a look at that, and the first program that we came up with was our ‘Knowledge Is Power,’ which is a class that not only do these [school resource officers] teach to every single student that goes through Driver’s Ed at Opelika High School now, but we go out and we teach it in the community,” Healey said.
Following the class at Opelika High School, Evans and her team gave the students a survey to fill out. At least 92.5% of the students who answered said it should become a mandatory class, Evans said.
Next came the “Policing and Me” class, implemented last year. Healey said this class is designed to teach citizens their rights and explain what certain laws and amendments mean.
While these programs have already seen some success, Healey said OPD and Critical Insights wanted to come up with a program that targets young citizens between the ages of 13 and 18. Thus, Healey introduced the Opelika Centers of Excellence (OCE) and ILEAD programs.
ILEAD includes two main components: the Student Leadership Development Workshop and the Liaison program. ILEAD liaisons are adult volunteers in the community who are trained to be a support system and a listening ear for students and young adults who are facing different types of crises.
Liaisons attend OCE meetings and undergo background investigations to be able to meet with students on campus at Opelika’s middle school, high school or learning center, but they may also meet with a student off campus or at the student’s home at the request of the student’s parents.
In addition to talking with these students and young adults, the program aims to connect them — and their parents — with community resources as needed.
“Some of the expectations that we have with this program is building trust with our young folks,” Healey explained. “We want them to know that we’re committed to helping them.”
The mission of a liaison is “to help the students in our community rethink the decisions they make, reshape the behavior they exhibit and redirect the path they take to increase the probability of success in the classroom and in life.” That mission hits closer to home following a string of shootings over the summer that left one 17-year-old dead and several teenagers, among others, in jail.
“What we had this summer was one kid that lost a fistfight, that started shooting,” Healey said. Retaliation ensued, and the shootings went back and forth, even involving friends and family members. “… Imagine the impact on this city if the kid that lost the fistfight that happened at [Opelika High School] knew how to lose … and didn’t have that desire to go be the winner. That’s what this program is designed to help.”
Evans and her team visited the Opelika Learning Center to talk to the students there and learn their situations and needs. That feedback helped the team develop a training curriculum for liaisons.
“They will get the same training and education that the Opelika Police Department has had, the city council people, folks in the community,” Evans said.
Thomas Sherfield, alternative program coordinator, said he believes a program like this will make a difference for students. He said the students at Opelika Learning Center mainly want to talk to someone who will listen and understand.
“We do our best, but at the same time, we’re on the inside,” he said. “We’re seen a certain way. I think if we have that community piece that just comes in and gives them an outlet, I definitely think it will make a difference.”
Often, liaisons will help teach students problem-solving and healthy conflict resolution, including how to communicate to get to a solution. The goal of the training is for liaisons to be approachable, nonjudgmental and able to “meet students where they are” — crafting a message tailored to the individual.
OPD and the Critical Insights team have also reached out to local fraternities and sororities, as well as church ministers, to join the program, but she also noted that anyone interested shouldn’t hesitate to apply.
“If you’re an African American male and you may be in your 30s, 40s or 50s, there’s a higher probability you have had some kind of interaction with police when you were younger,” she added. “… But you can still be a liaison because there are times you will work directly with a parent, or you may work directly with me … or someone else and meet them off campus. So it’s OK. This is not a judgment on what you have done. We want people who’ve had life experiences … that can help redirect these young people that need that.”
And liaisons won’t always be working in crisis situations, she said. Sometimes students just need some else to talk to, like a neutral third party.
Healey said simple things like talking and listening can be the solution.
“It doesn’t take a lot,” he said. “It takes somebody that cares. It takes somebody that’s willing to take some time out of their day to think about somebody else. What if we had a program that taught community members how to teach kids to rethink, reshape and redirect? How powerful could that be? Could we have changed what happened in Opelika this summer?”
With these programs, Healey said he hopes the community can start a movement to help the rising generation develop the tools and skills necessary to be successful, productive adults and one day take the city to greater heights.
“If we can do these little things and we can start walking towards each other and making things better, we are going to change the world from Opelika, Alabama,” he said. “We can set the bar and the example for everybody else to follow.”