Any young person facing a police interrogation has the legal right to ask for a lawyer before answering questions. Youth have faced coercive police interrogation tactics for decades. The problem is particularly acute for youth of color. This was the main focus of this week's Stay Woke meeting, The youth Interrogation Bill. This Amends procedures required for the custodial interrogation of children to provide additional protections and for taking juveniles into custody. This has been a continuous problem in our society and along with the members of this meeting, I also believe there should be a solution that comes with evident change and progress. After reading these reports, you the reader(s) will most likely have the same opinions as the writers.

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Today we did an icebreaker, for the icebreaker we had to introduce ourselves as usual and state our favorite borough . I introduced myself and said my favorite borough is Brooklyn because that is where I am raised and where I grew up. After that we watched a video documentary about police interrogation . The video I saw was police interrogating a teenager . The police were also aggressively questioning the teenager . The teenager more than likely is not educated on his rights to remain silent and the police doesn’t seem too concerned about his rights . I feel like we should be taught more about our rights in school . That teenager wasn’t being supervised by an adult nor a lawyer. After the video We were asked what we thought about it . This also reminded me of something I had to watch in school for an assignment . For my anthropology class we had to watch a video that spoke about the dark side of the 13 amendment which abolished slavery but also allowed it as punishment in prisons . Also the “war on drugs” , which caused many African Americans to be incarcerated . Many of them were teens ranging from as young as thirteen to their early twenties . Things like the story we were shown happen all the time without being shown to the media . The media needs to cover and bring awareness to things like this so we can work on fixing and changing policies that allow things like this to happen .

—Raphael Moreau

10/22/20

During this zoom meeting we talked about how we are going to start a campaign for a bill. The bill name is youth Interrogation Bill. They ask us why this bill is important. I said that this bill is important because it will help kids be more aware of their rights and it will also stop the police from abusing their power. They then asked us what we thought was going to happen when this bill comes into effect. I said once it comes into effect people will be aware of their rights and the police won't be able to try to intimidate kids into doing what they want.

We also talked about why it is important to vote. They said how our votes matter and how the youths need to vote because we are the next generation so we need to fight for our rights. We then started to brainstorm names for the campaign. We came up with quite a few names but the one that stood out the most was 2young2talk. I like this one better because it was short so a lot of people can remember and it has a good meaning to it. We then said how we should post more about this campaign on social media to get more people aware of this. We then watched a video about how the youths vote will impact the 2020 election. I found this video quite interesting because it talked about how a majority of the young people were in favor of trump getting re-elected. This showed that we have to educate the youth on how these candidates will impact our Community not just following what other people do.

—Gabriel Moreau

10/30/20

This meeting we talked about the youth interrogation bill and Miranda rights. As we discussed before when cops apprehend individuals they are supposed to state their rights . For example they say " You have the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. Rather police are starting to bribe and get early/ forced confessions out of people which may get them wrongfully convicted for crimes . The main group of people being affected by this are teenagers . This is why we decide to start a campaign and create a social media hashtag to bring awareness to this because many young teens don't know about this at all . We made a list on whether the sayings would be powerful , clear and also brief so it can be easily remembered. The options we had were Protect and serve our Miranda rights , No youth interrogation without legal representation, # 2Young2Talk, #Right2RemainSilent and # WhyITalked . The last two we came to an agreement on was #2Young2Talk and #Right2RemainSilent. I decided on the later one because it gets to the point and it is a popular saying when it comes to police apprehending people . It also is easy to understand and one of the Miranda rights that we have . After we voted we ended up choosing #2Young2Talk . This is a valid saying as well because it gets to the point even more thoroughly because the issue is youth interrogation and teens are two young to talk and also more likely to get convicted because of police poking at them without an adult or a legal lawyer being there .

—Raphael Moreau

10/30/20