Paru was a community organizer with Black Youth Project (BYP) 100. When he was not organizing, he taught Chicago Public Schools staff about restorative justice at his old high school. He also wore button-down shirts to avoid attention from police officers.
In elementary school, when Paru was twelve years old, he was playing next to an expressway with his brothers when he picked up a rock and joked that he was going to throw it over the ledge into traffic. A police officer pulled up and started yelling at him from her car. The boys told her that they never meant to throw the rock, but that didn’t stop the officer from getting out of her vehicle. She walked over and grabbed Paru by the collar. A black family passed by, and the officer turned Paru towards them, making sure to let other people know about the crime she had narrowly stopped this child from committing. Then, she got a call and headed back to her car, leaving Paru still holding the rock. He had been too afraid to let it go.
Paru and Mr. Sims both said that the police, for all the minor offenses they eagerly cracked down on, did little to prevent crime. The difference between Paru and Mr. Sims was that Paru went on to note that police officers did not behave like this in every neighborhood.
“When they're on the North Side or areas where the wealthy are, they're there to protect … and here it's pretty much they let anything happen, and then they lock people up and fill the prisons.”
— Paru Brown, organizer, BYP 100