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Through the "Hop-Town, Our Town" program, residents came together in three rounds of dialogue focusing on these issues:
addressing racism and race relations, closing the student achievement gap, and improving police-community relations.
Tracey Williams, "Hop-Town, Our Town" coalition member and dialogue facilitator, and Mayor Dan Kemp shared their experiences:
What action ideas would you like to see the community take on?
I would like to see the community just, get behind our police chief and support the initiatives that are coming through our police department.
We do have a new chief and I think he is working very diligently on supporting our community,
he's very visible, and I think he's going to begin to change the perception of the police department.
The people in the neighborhood associations that we've established in the inner city
have been benefiting from the meetings that they've had with Hopkinsville police officers and I want to see that expand and grow.
I know they're also in process of putting together some youth programs so I think that would be great as well.
What are your thoughts after participating in the first round of dialogues?
We were able to finally feel comfortable talking about our experiences, but we didn't necessarily touch on how we can build bridges and make things better now.
We still have a large achievement gap between our Caucasian and Black students,
we still have very low numbers as far as African Americans and Hispanics in leadership in this community.
So we still have a lot of issues, but we still refer to our human and race relations as if it were something that we dealt with in the past and they're not current issues.
So I'm hoping as we continue to have these dialogues on our own that we'll begin to dig a lot deeper about what's happening now and not necessarily from a historical perspective.
What are your takeaways from the "Hop-Town, Our Town" program?
Well, it's definitely helped us kick the door down and address our concerns as a community in an organized fashion.
The discussions that we had this past fall I thought were very beneficial for the health, the overall health of the community.
We're taking away from the experience of hey, this is our opportunity to come together
and I think it's definitely helped our community a lot in this first phase of having conversations
about education, about race, about public safety and our law enforcement because we've never done this before.
So it's helped us organize as a community and Everyday Democracy has been there the entire time to help us through the process.
We're all working together in a positive manner to improve our community and make it safe and secure for everyone.
With the help of an action grant, participants decided to focus their efforts on building bridges between police and the community.
Several local organizations have embraced the opportunity to help improve community-police relations, and seven were awarded mini-grants.
Both the Chief of Police and the Sheriff are in support of the dialogues and recommendations.
The Hopkinsville Police Department already completed its first diversity training in the spring of 2010.