Building coalitions to solve problems is what women do best, Harrington asserts:
This is where women shine—working with the community and trying to listen. You can’t go in and just say, ‘This is the way it happened and this is the way it’s going to be.’ You have to go in and you have to listen. You have to let people vent. … You’ve got to show that you understand how they feel. You have to have empathy for what’s happened. Then you have to bring them around [to talk about] how to make sure this never happens again.
It’s going to take a lot for Ferguson’s residents—black, white and otherwise—to trust their city’s police officers again. While the black community is understandably angry—residents have lost a son to police violence and have watched those meant to serve and protect them threaten and intimidate them instead—Harrington says non-minority residents have also lost faith in Ferguson’s police:
The police department needs to be out not only in the minority communities, but in all the communities. Because it’s not just the minority communities that are angry about what happened. Everybody wants to know, ‘What if that were my son?’ … The whole community needs to be reassured that things are going to be looked at closely and improvements are going to be made.
To move forward, Harrington suggests engaging wo
