Comedy and crime fighting join forces for police learning leadership skills

CHICAGO (AP) — Three dozen police captains pair off in a Chicago conference room to play a game: They must start a sentence with the last word their partner used.

Many exchanges are nonsensical, full of one-upmanship using difficult words and laughter. But the improvisation game eventually makes sense.

“What we are trying to do, is get you to listen to the end of the sentence,” says Kelly Leonard, wrapping up the improvisational exercise. “If my arm was a sentence, when do most people stop listening? Always the elbow! But then you're missing everything that goes after... and sometimes that's critical information.”

The police captains who have flown in from departments across the country nod. “I definitely do that," some call out.

Officials at the University of Chicago Crime Lab's Policing Leadership Academy brought members of The Second City, Chicago's storied improv theater, to teach police leaders the more diverse skills found in improv exercises — like thinking on your feet, reserving judgment and fully listening.

The academy, a workshop taught over five months, tackles some serious topics like to make data-driven decisions or how to help officers handle on-the-job trauma.

“We call it yoga for social skills,” said Leonard, the vice president of Creative Strategy, Innovation and Business Development at The Second City.

The skills might not apply to all policing situations in the field, but being a better listener or learning to take a breath before responding can make for better leaders, according to Tree Branch, a strategic client partner at The Second City Works.

The creation of improv and of The Second City is rooted in social work. Both trace their beginnings to Viola Spolin, who created some of the exercises still used in improv while she was a resettlement worker in the 1920s helping immigrant children and local Chicago children connect. Spolin was also the mother of Second City cofounder, Paul Sills.

The Policing Leadership Academy's creators believe those skills can also help meet their goals to increase community engagement, improve officer morale and ultimately reduce violent crime.

“We are trying to make the case that you can do all three things," without compromising one over the other, said Kim Smith, director of programs at the Crime Lab.

The academy is focused on working with leaders from departments dealing with high levels of community gun violence and pays for them to fly to Chicago one week a month to attend the five-month training.

Crime Lab researchers found that district and precinct captains have the largest potential impact on their colleagues, despite often receiving little leadership training for the job. A precinct could have high marks for morale, community relationships, or be making a dent in crime numbers, but if the captain changes, those gains could plummet, researchers found, even if the community, the officers and everything else stayed the same.

Professors, researchers and police leaders teach courses on topics like developing transparent policing cultures, using and collecting data, managing stress and building community partnerships. So far, about 130 police leaders from about 70 departments including tribal police departments and even a police inspector from Toronto have participated.

Capt. Louis Higginson with the Philadelphia Police Department said the academy provided a much broader training than the two weeks of police job training he got before being promoted to captain a little more than a year ago.

“The big thing for me was thinking about the things we allow to happen because they’ve been that way before us,” he said. “And the ways we can change the culture of our district by changing the thinking around why we do things.”

He said he did some of the improv exercises with his wife and daughters when he returned home and it opened up communication in a way he hadn’t expected.

“I think it opened their eyes, like it did for me,” Higginson said.

Albuquerque Police Department Commander Ray Del Greco said he’s still thinking more about how he communicates weeks after the improv class.

“When people talk to you and come to have you help solve their issues, to be able to push your ego out and worry less about your own agenda and listen, that’s an understanding of leadership,” Del Greco said. “To me that was the most valuable class we had.”

Academy leaders stressed the learning doesn't stop at graduation. They create communication channels so classmates can continue to support each other, they encourage captains to put on trainings with their departments, and participants are required to implement a capstone project that lasts well past the last day of class and addresses a real problem in their district or department.

Many of the projects implement programs to address specific crimes, like involving the community in programs to prevent car thefts or piloting drones as first responders. One previous graduate created a partnership with community groups to increase community pride and reduce gun violence by reducing quality of life issues like littering, overgrown lots and graffiti.

Stephen Donohue, a San Jose Police Department captain and recent academy graduate, is creating an early intervention system focusing on officer wellness. A typical system might flag citizen complaints or driving accidents, but Donohue's program gathers input from supervisors and peers to flag when an officer is taking on too much on-duty trauma, such as multiple murders or shooting investigations within a short time.

“It's a Venn diagram between training, wellness and internal affairs," he said. "And we can help them, we can lessen use-of-force complaints and allegations, offer better training and improve services put out by the department.”

The trainers hope in a few years more captains and officers will be saying “yes and” during improv classes. They are keeping tabs through a randomized control study on how well the overall training works. And with that evidence they hope funders, police departments or other universities will help expand the trainings to more departments.

“We want there to be rigorously tested scientific evidence behind this,” said Academy Executive Director Meredith Stricker. “We work to design a curriculum to ultimately make better leaders and better policing. The participants definitely talk about the improv class as one of their favorites. We hope all of it will work in tandem.”

San Jose Police Department Capt. Stephen Donohue participates in an improvisational exercise lead by The Second City instructors during a University of Chicago Crime Lab class that is part of the Policing Leadership Academy program, on April 11, 2025, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Erin Hooley)

Philadelphia police captain Louis Higginson puts on his equipment, on April 28, 2025, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

Philadelphia police captain Louis Higginson crosses a street after placing advisory flyers on automobiles, on April 28, 2025, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

Strategic Client Partner Tree Branch, left, and Vice President, Creative Strategy, Innovation and Business Development Kelly Leonard talk during a planning meeting at The Second City improvisational comedy space, on March 26, 2025, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Erin Hooley)

Rocky Mount Police Department Capt. James Staten, left, and Luann Pannell, director of instructional design and academic innovation with the Policing Leadership Academy, participate in an improvisational exercise lead by The Second City instructors during a Univeristy of Chicago Crime Lab class that is part of the Leadership program, on April 11, 2025, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Erin Hooley)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.

West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.

The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.

Decisions are expected by early summer.

President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.

Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.

“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”

She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.

Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.

She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.

Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.

“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.

Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.

The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.

About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.

"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”

But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.

“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”

Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”

“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.

One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.

Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”

The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.

The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.

The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.

The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.

If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.

“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)