The first moments of the Police Youth Challenge rarely seem promising. Teenagers and officers gather in separate groups on Thursdays in Baltimore’s Leakin Park, eyeing each other warily like boys and girls at an eighth-grade dance.
But over a day full of team-building exercises, many participants gain each other’s trust — a step nonprofit and civic leaders believe is critical to making Baltimore safer for everyone.
Since 2008, police and middle- and high-school students have played outdoor games and tackled ropes courses together through the program run by the Baltimore Chesapeake Bay Outward Bound School. The effort grew in 2015 when Kip Fulks, an executive at the Baltimore-based sports-apparel company Under Armour, made a donation in response to the death of Freddie Gray, a young black man, in police custody.
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