Students of Lakeland Regional attended an assembly about bias, prejudice and stereotypes on January 12, 2019.

The assembly was lead by hate crime officer Dave D’Amico, who opened by asking students their assumptions about him. Many students responded that they knew he was a cop by his loud voice, bold presence, and just by the way he looks. He accepted this and moved on from the topic, leaving students wondering the point of asking until he returned to the topic at the very end of the assembly.

Officer D’Amico played a video on hate crimes that showed clips of well known events in history such as Nazi Germany, the KKK, and 9/11. He asked students to respond with our feelings towards these events and proceeded to show us the ‘Hate Crime Pyramid,’ proving to us that people like Hitler didn’t wake up one morning and decide to kill six million Jews. He made the connection that small acts of bias, which everyone is guilty of, can eventually lead to big ones, which was genocide in the case of Hitler.

Officer D’Amico then went on to tell stories having to do with hate crimes that he has heard about and that he has worked on as an officer. To show how far people will go to make their disapproval of certain genders, sexual orientations, and racial groups obvious, he showed autopsy photos of a man who was tied to the back of a van and dragged many miles before dying, just because he was black. This really drove home the seriousness and realness of the topics Officer D’Amico discussed with students.

Officer D’Amico finished the assembly by shocking the audience, and sharing that he was gay. This made the purpose of the beginning of the assembly apparent. Out of every assumption that we made about him, no one thought he was gay. This proved to us that you can’t tell everything about a person just by looking at them, an extreme ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’.

The message of the assembly was very impactful, and will hopefully resonate with the students of Lakeland.