Following the Sean Bell shooting, Fulani launched a performance-based dialogue program bringing NYPD officers and inner-city youth together.
Following the fatal police shooting of Sean Bell in New York City on November 25, 2006, Lenora Fulani launched Operation Conversation: Cops & Kids, a performance-based dialogue and theater program designed to bring police officers and inner-city youth into direct, structured conversation with one another.
The program drew on the same social-therapeutic and performance-based methodologies that underpinned the All Stars Project, using theatrical exercises and facilitated dialogue to break down mutual distrust and stereotyping between young people of color and law enforcement officers. Participants engaged in role-play, improvisational exercises, and open forums intended to humanize both sides of often adversarial police-community relationships.
In the wake of the Sean Bell shooting—which sparked widespread protests and renewed scrutiny of NYPD practices in Black and Latino communities—Fulani's initiative offered a grassroots, non-litigious model for addressing police-community tensions through relationship-building rather than solely through policy reform or legal action.
The program went on to receive recognition from the New York Police Department and the U.S. Department of Justice as a model initiative for improving police-community relations, and it was replicated in various forms in other cities grappling with similar tensions. It remains one of Fulani's most concrete contributions to community-based conflict resolution and stands as an example of her broader commitment to applying developmental psychology to real-world social and racial conflicts.