To know what is really going on and determine the challenges facing a community
As the executive director for the Seattle Community Police Commission, WSU alumna Fé Lopez said the most important thing she has learned about community engagement has been to “shut up.”
Traditionally engagement is thought of as “we are going to go out and tell them what we are doing,” she said. To know what is really going on and determine the challenges facing a community, she has to listen, she said.
“There are issues I would have never known had I not shut up and just listened,” she said.
Lopez spoke to a packed room on the WSU Pullman campus Monday as part of the WSU Common Reading program in collaboration with the WSU Pre-Law Resource Center.
The Seattle Community Police Commission was established in 2010 following a series of events involving minorities that prompted 34 multicultural organizations to work with the Latino/a Bar Association and American Civil Liberties Union to ask for an investigation of the Seattle Police Department by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Lopez said the nine-month-long investigation found that the SPD used excessive force, but because of a lack of data, it could not say the SPD was biased in its policing. Just because it couldn’t be shown, doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening, she said. The city accepted a settlement agreement and a memorandum of understanding, which mandated department reform, she said.