Understanding of people who are different than us begins at home. Morgan cautions parents not to impose their ‘isms’ onto their children.

“Think about when you drop your children off at school and you come back and you see them out at recess playing with other children of all different kinds of hues and colors and they are just having fun and embracing and smiling with one another,” Morgan said. “Let’s pay attention to what we are teaching our kids. Are we teaching them racism? Are we teaching them to discriminate? Where else are they going to get it? It’s not born in them. Monitor what you allow them to see on TV screens, what you allow them to engage in on the internet. That’s part of your accountability as a parent, to take care and raise and love and protect. ‘Well James, I have to work all day and so forth and so on.’ I understand that. Let your first priority be your child. Work with your employer if you need to. But take care of your child. And if you stay engaged with them, they are going to love you. They will remember you for generations to come. They’ll sit down and say, ‘I remember when my mom showed me this or did this for me and my dad.’ It’s not that the parents just bought them a pair of gym shoes and all of those things.”

The important thing is for one’s children and grandchildren to know that you are there for them. And it’s never too late to become that positive force in their lives.

“My daughter was born six months after my incarceration,” Morgan recalled. “I really didn’t get to bond with her until I got out and she was an adult 24 years old with two children of her own. My relationship with my daughter is strong. I’m getting the opportunity to parent and adult, watching my granddaughters go off and be independent. One of them is doing great. The other one is struggling a bit. But what they do know that their grandfather and their father loves them. And I’m going to be here for them. I’m not going to be the person who is trying to kick down the doors to demand a space in their lives. But yes, I’m here for them. I need them to move forward.”

And Morgan feels that we need to bring a greater understanding of human nature when talking about police reform. With law enforcement, it’s about more than knowing the societal rules. It’s about knowing yourself.

“We have these levels of expectation when we meet people in law enforcement and other places,” Morgan said. “And we have different higher expectations of them. We expect them to be professionally trained, to be able to respond to situations and not react. But not everyone has the capacity to do that. That’s just the reality. You can go through the training. You can go through the academy and come out with an A+ rating. It doesn’t mean that you are prepared to engage in a community that you are not familiar with, a culture that you are not familiar with or that you have even dealt with your own issues.”

Criminal justice reform also calls for one, in essence, to walk in the other person’s shoes so that you get the whole picture. In today’s society, people from all walks of life experience trauma.

“When I was incarcerated, I talked to a lot of Dept. of Corrections staff officers who came to work,” Morgan recalled. “They took work home with them. There were high rates of divorce. There were suicides. Some of them even ended up incarcerated. They weren’t emotionally, mentally prepared to deal with the traumas that they were experiencing. Those things were compounded when they came into that system. I don’t see that being too much different than what some law enforcement officers may encounter. My brother served two tours of duty over in Iraq. He was a marine. He sat in the trenches with other men with whom he built close relationships, that brotherhood. He sat there one minute talking to a guy. The next minute when he turned his head, that man’s body parts were all over the place. That hurts. How do you come back and engage when someone says, ‘Okay, we’re done. Here’s a paycheck. Go be normal.’ I know some law enforcement officers here, particularly here on the south side. I have a great deal of respect for them because I’ve engaged with them. I understand their philosophy of policing, what they can and cannot do. And that increases, for me, my level of respect for them and my trust in them. So we need to have more of those types of engagement.”

And it is important to understand the organizational culture that many law enforcement agencies have in order to push for reform.

“One of the things that I understand when you’re talking about law enforcement, whether it’s the sheriff or the police chief, there’s a culture there,” Morgan said. “And those who are the leaders of those organizations — I think Chief Patterson is an astute person and I know he wants to see some change — are battling a culture that has been around for a very long time. So when he comes out and speaks honestly and professionally about what is needed, the community needs to be paying attention. And they need to support those things that create a space that is safe for all of us. I get it. There is a lot of rhetoric that comes out, particularly when people are impacted by incidents like the one that just happened. There’s a lot of emotion there. There’s a lot of anger. There’s a lot of grief. And so it’s difficult to formulate a clear pattern of thinking to even be able to address the realities and what the solutions may look like.”

One possible pathway is bringing people from different personal and professional pathways together in order to share diverse perspectives and could possibly lead to solutions.

“Let’s have these conversations,” Morgan said. :Let’s meet with people who have the lived experience. Let’s meet with those people who compiled this data. At a meeting at the Community Justice Council, we had some people here from Harvard University talking about how we could prevent people from not showing up at their court hearings, failure to appear and things of that nature, the data says one thing and the reality is something different. But it’s