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Helping bring tolerance to the force

Organization closes the gap between minority youth and the police

By Jana Donovan
For The Prague Post
January 31st, 2007 issue

It’s as if destiny had a hand in bringing together Indian physicist Kumar Vishwanathan and Václav Šaroch, a Czech policeman from Ostrava, north Moravia — two people with very different backgrounds who have together worked to make police departments nationwide more tolerant to minorities.

Vishwanathan runs Life Together, a Roma rights organization based in Ostrava. The two met in 2001 at a Roma conference sponsored by the Interior Ministry. Several years of collaboration followed, resulting in Šaroch forming
Společný svět, an outreach program within his police department that is entering its fourth year in operation. It won a national competition for “best police project” in 2006.
The program targets, in part, Romany children, but also aims in general to open up communication between police and the Roma community while teaching police officers about Romany culture and history.
This could ultimately help to lower the crime rates in the Roma community in Ostrava, Šaroch says.
Šaroch’s positive results and experience from the project have influenced police departments countrywide to adopt similar outreach programs. One of the most successful is in Plzeň, west Bohemia, which has a large Vietnamese population.
“The best way to get inside [any] community is through children,” Šaroch says.
Společný svět brings members of the Ostrava police department to summer camps organized by Life Together where they interact with children.
“When our policemen started joining the summer camps, the prejudices quickly disappeared on both sides,” Šaroch says. “The policemen realized that the proclaimed cultural difference is not so big and kids are a clean slate, and suddenly they became good uncles to the kids instead of [enemies].”
Jiřina Somsiová, a Romany woman from the area, says the experience has been positive for local children.
“Many friendships have been established,” she says. “And then when the kids see the policemen on the streets, they are not afraid of them, but they talk to them, confide in them their worries. It helps in fighting crime.”
A different approach
As an activist, Vishwanathan has experienced firsthand the traditionally poor relations between police and the local Roma community.
“Whenever I was trying to solve some crime within the Roma community with the police, they were indifferent and unwilling to help,” he recalls. “Yet I was stopped almost every day by the police in order to have to show my I.D. It was always very humiliating.”
Šaroch says his approach has always been different. “I have had positive experiences because I have known many Roma from school when I was growing up. Nowadays, Roma are more and more isolated from the rest of society and a young policeman meets them only in a situation related to some crime,” he says.
Společný svět has already received 330,000 Kč ($15,300) in funding from the Interior Ministry. Besides reaching out to children, cops attend lessons about the history and culture of Roma and other minorities, and join counseling sessions to learn how to control their feelings.
Twenty-five policemen in Ostrava now specialize in working with the Roma community, working closely with organizations such as Life Together to organize things like summer camps and meetings with the community.
The project is under the auspices of a national program called Strategie. Launched by the Interior Ministry in 2003, Strategie seeks to improve the relationship between police and minorities.
Since then, each district in the Czech Republic has set up a police liaison charged specifically with minority outreach.
A 2004 poll reported that most policemen in the Czech Republic harbored prejudices against minorities.
“It is time that things begin to change,” says Radek Jiránek of the Interior Ministry. “The Czech Republic is becoming more and more multicultural. It has become a necessity for policemen to communicate with minorities.”

Jana Donovan can be reached at news@praguepost.com


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