Plymouth Discussion of Public Safety in the Beloved Community

Session 1:  Commissioner Harrington’s 1st Police Encounter Dilemma

 

Thursday, March 3, at 7 pm

VIA ZOOM

Commissioner Harrington is working with Interfaith Action of Greater St. Paul to engage faith communities throughout the state in a series of three or four public safety discussions.  Each discussion will be inspired by the question of how the values of our respective faith traditions should guide the response to a specific police encounter dilemma that Commissioner Harrington will create.

 

Plymouth’s role in this project

 

In late January, Commissioner Harrington introduced the first police encounter dilemma to Reverend Davis and our RiCS team. Harrington will introduce further dilemma scenarios to faith-based communities in late March, late May and possibly in July. Interested Plymouth members will then engage with each other in conversation about each of these dilemmas. These conversations will be structured as follows:

 

(i)  We will give our immediate and visceral reactions to the police officer’s dilemma, without the benefit of thoughtful reflection — remembering that the officer confronted with the dilemma does not have time to engage in thoughtful reflection.

 

(ii)  Reverend Davis will introduce us to a text from our faith tradition, either from the Bible or from other learned faith texts, inviting us to consider the best response to the dilemma from the perspective of the core values illuminated in this faith reading.

 

(iii)  We will break out into small groups to discuss the dilemma again in light of the faith reading.

 

(iv) RiCS will harvest and summarize the responses from each of these discussions and send this summary report to Interfaith.

 

(v)  Interfaith will collate reports from all of the participating faith communities for Commissioner Harrington and share those reports with the participating faith communities