Stocking Stuffer - "Know Your Rights" Visor Pouch

A friend and I are trying to interest our local police in endorsing visor pouches that summarize citizen rights during traffic stops and provide a place where the driver's license and insurance card can be kept safely. Our hope is that endorsement of the pouches will give a clear message to all police officers in our community that we are informed of our rights and leaders in our community wants us to be informed of those rights.

In the meantime, with Christmas just around the corner, I've started making some visor pouches on my own. I plan to slip them in the Christmas stockings of my loved ones. Below are some photos of my process. I've been using the ACLU handout for my content:

• What To Do If You Are Stopped by the Police, Immigration Agents, or FBI

Step 1: My supplies were the ACLU handout, self-laminating sheets, the elastic from an old nametag, cut into two pieces, and a hodge-podge of old beads.

Step 2: I used the edges of the self-laminating sheet to form a pouch where the driver's license and insurance card could be kept.

Step 3: I threaded the metal end of the elastic through a small hole in the pouch and then I added some beads before tying the other end of the elastic close to the beads to make a loop big enough to fit around a vehicle visor.

I think my finished product is quite handsome and versatile, but maybe you have a better design. Send me your pictures!

Why

One resource I keep coming back to as I read and talk to people about unequal justice and police brutality is this:

• Protecting Communities, Serving the Public, Police and Residents Building Relationships to Work Together: A Guide for Public Dialogue and Problem Solving

Over the years, I've been in several dialogue groups. Also through my job and through volunteer work I've worked on initiatives that address justice issues, particularly justice for immigrants and youth. But I have never been in a group where we were led to explore questions as simple and complex as these:

• If you are a police officer, how do you talk to your family and friends about your job?
• If you are not a police officer, how do you talk about the police to your family and friends?

To tell you the truth, I don't know how police officers in my community would respond to these questions. I don't know how I would feel giving honest answers to these questions in their presence. But I believe that this sort of dialogue can lay the basis for action steps to bring about the real change that civil rights lawyer Constance Rice described in her recent interview on NPR:

• Civil Rights Attorney On How She Built Trust With Police

I'm seeking ways to promote this type of dialogue in my home community of Memphis. But in the meantime I'm also interested in creating (or joining - let me know if I've reinvented the wheel) a virtual study circle operating according to the same guidelines as the study circles described in the Protecting Communities, Serving the Public guide. And that is the why of this blog.

I don't know the how yet. I'm working on that.