**Supreme Court of the Youth / Police Project: Graham v Connor, July 2019**

The Youth / Police Project’s primary objective is to build conversations with teenagers about how their lives are affected by the character of the police presence in their neighborhoods. Each year, we meet weekly with a set of teenagers, discuss their questions about constitutional law, and commit to being a regular presence in their lives as they grow into young adults.

We called a session of the Supreme Court of the Youth / Police Project to review, de novo, the question of whether excessive use of force should require the officer had evil intentions. The Court immediately inquired into whether Dethorne Graham, the plaintiff in this case, was black. We had to look beyond the opinion for contextual reporting and analysis in order to determine that yes, Dethorne Graham was a black man. The Court could not determine the race of the officers, to their unending frustration.

In a review of other landmark Fourth Amendment cases this omission proved consistent – race is not preserved in the record. Ultimately, Supreme Court of the Youth / Police Project agreed with the Supreme Court of the United States that an officer’s intentions need not be malicious in order for the force to be excessive.

It is nearly impossible to prove someone is a racist in court. However, that should not prevent an inquiry into the mind of the officer. For the historical record we must note whether any explicit racism (or other prejudice) is involved. Or we won’t know the whole story.

The opinion published here reflects the logic of that position.

How Black Chicago Youth Perceive Police, ABA Human Rights Association, May 2019

Keyonne Barnes graduated from a neighborhood Chicago Public School. She is interested in media / broadcast technology, journalism, and law.

In October 2019, civil rights attorney Chaclyn Hunt sat down with Chicago public school student Keyonne Barnes. They talked about Keyonne’s experiences as a young black woman living in the heavily policed South Side of Chicago.

“They Have All the Power”: Youth/Police Encounters on Chicago’s South Side

Public conversations about urban police practices tend to exclude the perspectives and experiences of the young Black people, the citizens often most affected by those practices. The aim of the Youth/Police Project--a collaboration of the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic of the University of Chicago Law School and the Invisible Institute--is to access that critical knowledge and ensure that it is represented in the public discourse.

This paper, published in 2016, describes what we have learned from our ongoing project. In contrast to the attention commanded by high profile incidents of police abuse, we focus on the routine encounters between police and Black youth that take place countless times every day in cities across the nation—interactions that shape how kids see police and how police see them.

Our methodology is straightforward. We ask Black high school students to describe their interactions with the police. And we listen.

“When I call what’s going to come? A good cop or a bad cop? Are they going to be effective, do their job, ask questions and investigate, or criminalize and penalize me before even knowing me?”