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Contention punctuates police forum
By Times staff writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 17, 2002
ST. PETERSBURG -- Perceptions of police relations are never a simple matter in St. Petersburg.
That was evident Saturday when City Council member Ernest Williams and political activist Omali Yeshitela, both black, strongly disagreed at a forum on policing.
Williams said residents want strong but equitable law enforcement.
But Yeshitela, chairman of the Uhuru Movement, called police presence in black neighborhoods "containment."
"My challenge to this community is not so much talking about a rift, or containment, or all those kinds of verbiage that are used out there to divide, but to talk about what can we do collectively as a group to improve our community," Williams said.
The comments came during a two-hour public forum titled "Healing the Rift Between Community and Police" at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.
All agreed that police and community relations have improved since the 1996 civil disturbances.
"If we're really looking for something innovative in terms of changing stuff, what we have to do is not attack the people who are poor but attack the poverty," Yeshitela told the audience. "Because without attacking the poverty, the only thing that you can have, Mr. Williams, is a public policy of police containment."
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