As Officer Mike Daniliuk heads towards the basketball court at the Frisoli Youth Center, he greets several black teens with a friendly handclasp-turned-shoulder bump.
"Yo, did you see that video?" one of the teens asks Daniliuk. "The … um … the officer and the girl?"
It’s played over and over again on cable news: a white high school resource officer in South Carolina flipping the desk of a black teen and dragging her across the floor.
"Yeah, I thought his approach was way off," Daniliuk said. "I just don’t understand why they asked a school resource officer to — why wasn’t it the principal?"
The incident goes against everything that Daniliuk says he’s trying to achieve as a police officer in Cambridge. The kids here know him as a basketball coach – and call him by the nickname he’s had ever since growing up in the city – "Whitey."
“Like Officer Whitey, he helps the basketball, they do community service," said Jhkyos Neal a freshman in high school here. "Some [police officers] take time to coach for free, all that."
Neal’s seen news from around the country, about police harassment. But he says that doesn’t happen to him and his friends.
“I don’t think people really have a problem in Cambridge with the police,” he said.
Daniliuk says that’s because of more than just relationships built on the basketball court. For one thing, police are actively working to keep kids out of the court system.
“There are so many times where it’s just a dumb mistake a kid makes and we have the leeway to kind of work with that kid, talk to the parent, create a contract that the parent and the child signs,” he said.
They tack that contract and the court complaint to a wall in the police station. Six months later, if the kid stays out of trouble, it’s thrown out. Cambridge Police Commissioner Robert Haas says the department used to just arrest kids who broke the law.
"They were kind of forcing kids into the juvenile justice system," Haas said. "And we know that when kids go into that system, the propensity for them to reoffend is much higher, and realizing how much resources we have in the city, it just seemed to me that there has got to be a better way, so we started thinking about diversion."
They started providing counseling services and other programs for kids who were getting in trouble. Last year, Cambridge police arrested 16 kids, fewer than half the number in 2005.
It’s part of a larger shift within Cambridge police — a shift that came after one very bad day for the department. In 2009, Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was infamously arrested at his home by Cambridge police responding to a call about a break-in. The arrest attracted national media attention, and Gates and arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, were invited to the White House by President Obama the following month. Haas says the incident was a turning point.
“It required us to really go through a process where we spent a lot of time with our officers, and we went through what I would consider a significant cultural shift within our department,” he said.
Haas says Crowley was actually doing what he was trained to do.
“We’re trained that you need to control a situation, you need to take command of the situation, otherwise it becomes unsafe for the officer," he said.
And since they couldn’t take command, things escalated until they wound up making an arrest. Haas says they started looking for a better way, and found it when they learned about something called "procedural justice."
“The whole notion of procedural justice really challenges all our notions of traditional policing in terms of how we policed our communities," Haas said. "It really challenged the notion of authority, command and control. It really talked about managing situations, instead of controlling situations. It talked about treating people with dignity. It talked more about the process, as opposed to the outcome.”
This is not just what departments usually call community policing, Haas says. That’s built on a law enforcement model, and he says procedural justice is a kind of social policing, and isn't about enforcing laws.
"There’s been studies that have shown that when law enforcement officers engage in procedurally just practice, people are more likely to obey the law generally, they’re more likely to trust the police department in their community," said Shea Cronin, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Boston University.
They’re also more likely to cooperate during interactions with police.
Cambridge presented the concept of procedural justice recently to police chiefs from around the state, as well as at an international conference. Haas says some departments don’t like the idea, since it’s not what they’re used to. And most communities don’t have the same resources Cambridge does to train officers and do things like diverting kids into social programs.
Cambridge officers were trained specifically how to interact with teens by a nonprofit called Strategies for Youth. Lisa Thurau, the nonprofit's director, says she’s seen how police sometimes resist changing from the old model of law enforcement. At two different presentations at state police academies, she says she had things thrown at her.
“The first one was just balled up paper and the second one, I think was a pen cap at me," she said. "They seem to have difficulty accepting that authority is a nuanced thing."
Earlier this year, Thurau says she pitched her training program to the South Carolina department where the school resource officer flipped the teenager’s desk. The department turned her down, citing the cost.
“I really wish we could have trained these officers, and I’m not going to pretend in any way that every training is going to stop every bad behavior," she said. "But I think training helps change the culture of a law enforcement agency about best practices for working with youth."
For Cambridge eighth grader Tyriq Hall, the police culture in his city seems to work.
“When we, like, talk to some of the police, we know them, because they’re like our coaches," Hall said. "So we, like, get along with them, and stuff like that. They’re my role models. I look up to them, and stuff like that.”
It’s a response that other police departments would love to hear more, especially from young African Americans in their communities.
