You’ve probably seen the efforts of law enforcement agencies this holiday season to reach out to help families in need.
A couple of weeks ago, members of the Greenfield Police Department and Hancock County Sheriff’s Department stood outside Walmart for four hours on a Friday evening ringing bells for the Salvation Army Red Kettle Campaign. They raised more than $2,000. Last weekend, Fortville and GPD officers took about 70 children to breakfast at McDonald’s and then Christmas shopping at Walmart. On Sunday, the sheriff’s department will have its version of the program, Shop with a Deputy.
These initiatives are all part of the agencies’ campaigns to improve their relationships with the community. The effort goes well beyond the holidays. Take, for example, this partial list of other programs:
— National Night Out, a nationwide campaign that has grown into a huge celebration of police/community relations. “This is a good opportunity to show everybody that we’re not just here to enforce the law, but we’re here to be good neighbors and members of the community as well,” McCordsville Police Chief Harold Rodgers said at the town’s event in August.
— Citizen police “academies,” first started at GPD in 2007 and later added at the sheriff’s department. The program, consisting of upwards of 30 hours of instruction across multiple weekly sessions, welcome civilians into an intimate, insider’s look at law enforcement.
— School outreach, which has an obvious security component but which also is being used to reinforce police/community relations. School resource officers are looked at not only as protectors, but as ambassadors.
— And finally, the plethora of 5K’s, bed races, trike races, bike trips and bean bag tournaments that almost always have a team of police officers and other public safety professionals participating.
These efforts always are a work in progress, because law enforcement — more than any other institution — comes in conflict with the public. Having a trusting relationship with the community — as well as transparency — ensure those conflicts are handled the right way.
“It’s no secret we sometimes stub our toe, and we try to do a good job getting ahead of the story to allow transparency for our community,” said Jeff Rasche, chief of the Greenfield Police Department. “Building trust with the community is an ongoing mission… Thankfully, we have a very supportive community, and we all must realize this can be crushed with one single incident.”
As Rasche notes, it all comes down to trust. A 2016 study by Oxford University researchers, based on an analysis of 911 calls in Milwaukee, found that calls dropped after a controversial police shooting. The conclusion: People lost trust in the police, so they quit reporting crime. The city’s homicide rate surged.
So, even as Rasche and Sheriff-elect Brad Burkhart stood outside on a recent chilly evening to ring bells for the Salvation Army, they were performing one of their most important duties: fortifying law enforcement’s most important relationship.
