Cedar Hill Police Launch New Effort To Connect With Children
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CEDAR HILL (CBS11) - Call it community policing—for the 'pint-sized' constituents. Police in Cedar Hill have launched a new effort to connect with the city's kids—simply by talking to them over lunch.
"This is absolutely where you have to start," said Lt. Colin Chenault, working the cafeteria crowd at Waterford Oaks Elementary. "This is where minds are changed, where minds are formed. By the time these kids get to high school a lot of them have their minds made up about who we are and what we represent, so this is where we have to start."
According to Lt. Chenault, the goal is to give the children information to "make up their own minds about who we really are."
Once a week, police from the city and school district police departments visit an elementary school to talk and visit with the kids over lunch. There's no power point, no presentation, no agenda at all - just conversation. Although the presence of police officers at the school was initially confusing for some of the students.
"I thought somebody was in trouble," said 3rd grade student Grace Alvarez. Later, when she learned that it was just a lunch visit with the officers she said, "I wanted to know if their job was fun, because I probably want to be one when I grow up."
Still, the weekly visits to the Cedar Hill elementary schools aren't all about public relations for the department. There are difficult moments as well.
"We've had stories where the kids have asked us: `my mom or Dad has been arrested, did you see them at jail?'"recalled Lt. Chenault. "It brings the realism to what we're here doing."
Still, the Cedar Hill officer said those uncomfortable conversations still provide an opportunity for police to present a different perspective on the family's crisis.
"That they are able and willing to open up and talk to the people involved in their family members' arrest, still speaks volumes," said Lt. Chenault. "We still have a chance to turn it into a positive situation: it wasn't us being the bad guy, it was bad decisions that were made and this was the result and we just happened to be a part of that."
And while the visits are completely unscripted—conversations with kids, well, can be unpredictable. Lt. Chenault recalls this funny story:
"A young lady said to me, 'do you have handcuffs? I said, yeah, I have handcuffs. Well, I know all about handcuffs. Well, how do you know about handcuffs? My Dad bought pink handcuffs for my Mom and put them on her… Stop right there! I think we're good!"
"We have fun when we come here. And we leave exhausted… but, we leave satisfied. We leave satisfied."
And that has nothing to do with the lunch.
"Kids coming up and giving us hugs, giving us high fives, shaking our hands, coming up making sure that we would come to their tables—so it was totally unexpected that we were being loved on like we were, when we had sort of an opposite expectation."
The elementary school visits have become so popular that Cedar Hill middle schools are asking when they can be added to the rotation.
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