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"It takes a special person at this point to say, 'Yeah, I want to do that,'" says police chief J. Darren Stewart in Stonington, Conn.
“这种情况下只有特殊之人才会说，‘是的，我想做。’”康涅狄格州斯托宁顿警察局长J·达伦·斯图尔特说。
As a child, Ti'Aja Fairlee knew she wanted to become a police officer. She was drawn to reading crime and mystery books and was fixated on police cars, even though she had mostly negative interactions with law enforcement growing up in East St.Louis, Ill. Her father had multiple run-ins with police, who beat him, Fairlee says, and the officers who lived near her were "rude."
提阿加·费尔利在孩童时就知道自己想当一名警察。尽管她在伊利诺伊州东圣路易斯长大，与执法部门的互动大多是负面的，但她对犯罪和悬疑类书籍很感兴趣，对警车也很着迷。费尔利说，她的父亲曾多次与警察发生冲突，警察殴打了他，住在她家附近的警察也很“粗鲁”。
When Fairlee joined Lincoln University's police academy, some of her family members called her a "traitor," as did strangers on the street who saw her in her academy uniform. For a moment, the 20-year-old says, "I felt like I'm betraying my dad." But Fairlee thinks about the constant injustices that communities of color face daily and how she has never met a police officer who is both Black and a woman. As the Black Lives Matter movement exploded last year, she knew the profession needed more people who looked like her. "It kind of pushed me to do better," she says.
当费尔莉加入林肯大学警察学院时，她的一些家人称她为“叛徒”，街上看到她穿着警校制服的陌生人也这么说。这位20岁的年轻人说：“我觉得我在背叛我的父亲。”但费尔莉想到了有色人种社区每天持续面临的不公正，她从来没有见过黑人女警察。随着去年“黑人的命也是命”运动的爆发，她知道这个职业需要更多像她这样的人。“这在某种程度上能让我做得更好，”她说。
It's a sentiment shared overwhelmingly among students in Lincoln's academy. In 2014, when Davion Waters was a high school freshman, police detained him, mistaking him for a robbery suspect in his first bad encounter with police. Waters says he was walking home from the library in St. Louis when two police officers pulled up in a patrol car, immediately handcuffed him and made him sit on the curb until they confirmed they indeed had the wrong person. Waters, 13 at the time, says he was "shaken up" by the incident. Later that year, he started an internship with the same police department that had detained him.
林肯学院的学生都有同感。2014年，当戴维·沃特斯还是一名高一学生时，警察因误认为他是抢劫嫌疑人将他拘留。这是沃特斯第一次与警察发生冲突。沃特斯说，当时他正从圣路易斯的图书馆步行回家，这时两名警察拦下了一辆巡逻车，立即给他戴上手铐，让他坐在路边，直到他们确认自己抓错了人。沃特斯说，当时13岁的自己被这件事“惊到了”。之后那年晚些时候，他便开始在拘留他的那个警察局实习。
"It's about changing the whole culture," says Waters, now 22. "In my eyes, I don't think all officers are the same. I want to change that stigma."
“这事关改变整个文化，”沃特斯说，如今他已经22岁。“在我看来，我不认为所有的警察都一样，我想摘掉这种污名。”
In 2018, when Hill pitched the idea for a police academy to Lincoln University's new president, Jerald Jones Woolfolk, she greenlighted it on the spot. Hill then went to work securing the necessary state approvals and support from local leaders. When it was time to recruit students in the middle of 2020, Hill worried that societal upheaval might deter them from enrolling. The opposite happened. With just word-of-mouth advertising and some flyers, 27 students applied. Fourteen were not admitted because of financial and background-check issues, and two dropped out in January for personal reasons, Hill says.
2018年，当希尔向林肯大学新校长杰拉德·琼斯·伍尔福克提出建立警察学院的想法时，她当场便同意了。之后希尔开始努力争取必要的国家批准和当地领导人的支持。在2020年中期招生的时候，希尔担心社会动荡可能会阻止他们入学。不过情况相反。27名学生仅凭口头宣传和一些传单便提交了申请。希尔说，有14名学生因为财务和背景调查问题没有被录取，2人在1月份因个人原因退学。
译文由可可原创，仅供学习交流使用，未经许可请勿转载。
