Monday, August 6, 2007

Peace Counts

Peace Counts aims to discover role models for peacemaking around the world and to bring them broad exposure by creating fascinating features and photo essays. Peace Counts is looking to provide answers to the question: How does an individual actually “make peace”?

Peace Counts publications focus on role models for peace throughout the world. Peace Counts depicts people, groups, and institutions that have supported peace processes with especial creativity, credibility, long-term commitment, and success.

The following is an excerpt from ... and on Earth Peace to Men of Good Will:

Peace has come to the once unruly streets of New Haven, Connecticut. Today children play where the bullets of gang shoot-outs once flew. Geraniums bloom in the window boxes of former crack houses. Many gang members are either behind bars or have become upright citizens who sweep their sidewalks on Saturday mornings. Since the 1990s, crime rates in New Haven have fallen by more than 60 percent. The success can be credited to an unusual style of police work – “community policing.” “Community policing” sounds harmless enough, but it was a cultural revolution. It began in New Haven’s police academy, a former precinct house on Sherman Parkway.



Along with law, criminology, and firearms practice, the future cops learn standard English, read poetry, and rehearse nonviolent conflict resolution with role-playing games. They write plays about racial prejudice and produce them with inner city kids. The calligraphy of the greeting-card rhetoric outside is set forth in the classroom. “It’s never too soon to be friendly – you never know when it might be too late.”

The “recruits” became “students” and were drawn from every conceivable walk of life: homosexuals, single mothers, Latinos, African-Americans. In the school day, the firing range ceded time to soup kitchen visits. Kay Codish brought prostitutes, hustlers, abused women, the mentally ill, and the homeless into the classroom. She drilled her students nonstop in the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. A police officer needs to remember that, almost more than anyone else.”

Source: http://www.peace-counts.org/eng/practice_146_start.html
Check out this website for more peace stories around the world!

How can we as individuals make peace in our community?
-Sarah

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