AURORA | Decked out in new Aurora police T-shirts, the group of about a dozen children joked and laughed as they lined up in the gym at Moorhead Recreation Center.
As they formed lines, Aurora police officer and kung fu instructor Andy Eways took his place at the front of the gym.
“Lau ching,” Eways said. “Hoy lai.”
The words basically translate to “come to attention,” and “bow.”
Giggles and whispers stopped immediately. The once-bustling gym was silent and all eyes in the room were fixed on Eways.
Seconds later, the children had their knees bent, feet a bit more than shoulder width apart, backs bowed and grimaces on their faces as they struggled to perfect horse stance, one of many kung fu poses Eways is teaching them.
The class is part of an almost year-old effort by Aurora police to build closer relationships between cops and area children. Rather than rely solely on the DARE Program — which has come under criticism in recent years — the department is broadening its efforts to connect cops and youths with other programs that officials hope can be more successful.
“I don’t think we were doing enough to reach out to the kids and give them tools and ideas and help them figure out how they can solve their problems,” said Aurora police Sgt. Shelley Owens.
Last year, the city created Aurora For Youth, using the more than $300,000 generated every year by court surcharges once tabbed for DARE to cover a variety of programs.
Owens and Dawn Barrett, one of the department’s civilian employees, oversee portions of AFY. The programs include the Aurora Police Activities Club, which features activities like the kung fu classes at Moorehead Recreation Center. Those programs are open to any kid who wants to participate, but AFY includes other more-intensive programs, too.
One of the more-intensive programs is Aurora’s Gang Reduction Impact Program, A-GRIP, which works with minors who are already embroiled in gangs or at high-risk of joining a gang and tries to get them on a better path. Another is Power Up, which focuses on youths who have substance abuse, truancy or other issues.
“We, like a lot of cities in the country, have decided that we can’t arrest our way out of the gang problem,” Barrett said. “We need a more comprehensive approach to address gang issues.”
To do that, Barrett said it requires people from a variety of different segments of the community trying to tackle problems.
DARE, which stands for Drug Abuse Resistance and Education, has met harsh criticism from academics in recent years who say the program has done little to steer students away from drug use or violence.
Beverly Kingston, director of the CU-Boulder Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, said the program has undergone changes in recent years and beefed up its focus on developing life skills instead of simply teaching an anti-drug message. But still, Kingston said, research continually shows DARE has little impact when it comes drug use.
“If law enforcement says our goals are to reduce drug use, our goals are to reduce future violence, then DARE isn’t an effective program to do that,” she said.
Kingston, who has a Ph.D. in sociology, said the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence aims to be something of a Consumer Reports for information about what violence prevention programs work well and what ones do not.
She said it makes sense for police to try to build relationships with young people. But, she said, police need to be open to trying different programs if the research shows that current efforts aren’t effective.
“I just think its really important that law enforcement really looks at what works and puts those things into place,” she said.
Aurora police Chief Dan Oates said it’s not that the department doesn’t believe the DARE program has value. They still support the program and have several officers teaching it at various elementary schools in Aurora Public Schools and Cherry Creek schools, but the program is fairly rigid, Oates said, with a curriculum that officers must hew to closely.
And, Oates said, the academic research pointing to the program’s ineffectiveness was a factor to some degree in the department looking at better ways to help keep kids out of trouble.
One of the most effective tools the department has in doing that is simply building positive relationships between police and children, Oates said. Too often the first contact a child might have with police is a negative one, where a family member is being arrested or some other scenario.
Oates said the benefit of all the programs under the Aurora For Youth banner — including DARE — is that they put police in contact with kids, sometimes children at risk of getting into trouble, in a positive situation.
For Eways, that’s exactly what the kung fu classes do.
Up until last month, when he was appointed to a position training other officers, Eways worked patrol in the neighborhoods around Moorhead.
The north Aurora community includes some of the city’s rougher neighborhoods, where poverty and crime rates higher than other parts of town are common.
“A lot of those kids don’t really have positive interactions with the police,” he said.
But every Tuesday afternoon, a few of them get to learn kung fu with Eways and other officers, interactions that are always positive and a far-cry from what the students might see if they get tangled up with police on the streets.
Owens said AFY plans to expand in the coming months to include a program called GREAT, which stands for Gang Resistance Education and Training. That program can be used in elementary school and middle school, she said.
At its core, as with the other AFY programs, Owens said the program helps police make lasting, positive connections with children.
“It’s important for the kids to see us as people, and out of uniform and see a totally different side of us,” she said.
Our city has a “pot panel” now. Colorado supports the use of a gateway drug. Then we scratch our heads and wonder what is going wrong with our youth in America today?