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Street Law Summit not what the students expected
RICHARD WEINER
Legal News Reporter
Published: May 5, 2015
Nearly 150 high school students from seven local schools last Monday packed the large ballroom at the Quaker Square Inn for the 13th annual Street Law Summit.
“It was not at all what I expected,” said Simone Green, a Buchtel High School student who plans on attending Lake Erie College. “I thought that it was going to be really boring,” she continued, “but it was really interesting.”
The event, which kicked off the Akron Bar Association’s 2015 Law Week activities, followed the theme Public Safety vs. Controlling the Public: The Role of Police in Our Democracy.
The theme was “ripped from the headlines,” as the topics of discussion among the students and from the various presenters covered the last few months’ national stories of police-citizen confrontations across the country, and which corresponded in real time with the riots in Baltimore.
The students came from Buchtel, Coventry, Shaw, Stow, Revere, Tallmadge and St. Vincent-St. Mary high schools.
Several Tallmadge High School students echoed Green, including Logan Dawson, who said that, “it was really interesting to have all of those different points of view.”
The various points of view came from the keynote speaker, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio Steven M. Dettelbach.
After opening remarks from event coordinator Raeed Tayeh and Akron Bar Association president Ann Marie O’Brien, Dettelbach talked and entertained a few questions for about 45 minutes.
Dettlebach opened his remarks by exhorting eligible students to register to vote at the League of Women Voters’ booth, a request that was met with success throughout the course of the event, as a score of students registered during their various breaks.
Dettelbach than gave a history lesson, starting with the Boston Massacre, that attempted to put the recent national news into perspective. He pointed out that John Adams, the second president, was the successful defense attorney of the British soldiers who fired on the crowd.
He then brought the discussion to the present.
“The past few weeks have raised the question of police officers’ conduct,” he said, pointing out that one of the primary differences in the newer awareness of these events with the past is the omnipresence of cell phone cameras.
Dettelbach discussed the, “disconnect between police officers and the community, which I see every day in my job—many different ways, from both sides.” He said that he sees modern technology as good for all parties involved.
And, following a theme that most of the rest of the day’s presenters followed, Dettelbach called for more and better training of police, and encouraged the attendees to “get involved in law enforcement.”
Following Dettelbach’s remarks, the students participated in a round robin discussion. Divided into 17 different tables, the students discussed two issues. The first involved a police chase with cell phone footage. The second was about a police union strike. While most of the students seemed to agree about the first scenario, they were evenly divided about whether or not the police have a right to go on strike.
Up next was a panel discussion that really caught the students’ attention. Participants were Akron attorney Walter Madison, who is representing the family of Tamir Rice, the Cleveland pre-teen who was killed by a police officer, Akron Police captain Daniel Zampelli, Akron Beacon Journal writer and Pulitzer Prize recipient Bob Dyer and The University of Akron Criminal Justice Technology professor David A. Licate, who specializes in studying and training police departments.
All four panelists, in one way or another, basically agreed that one of the current problems with police-community relations is a lack of training on the part of the police. The panel disagreed about whether police-community relations are better or worse since the 1992 Los Angeles riots, with Dyer, in particular, stating that those relationships are currently far worse than they were even back then.
The students seemed, for the most part, enthralled by the panel discussion. One Tallmadge student, Latrele Moore, said that, “Walter Madison is my idol,” and all of the students interviewed for this story agreeing with Green that the day was far more interesting than they had expected.
Following lunch, the students were treated to a live 9th District Court of appeals argument in a search-and-seizure case, and the event adjourned, leaving a group of high school students far more interested in the process of law than they had expected to be.