February 3, 2000
T.C. Police conduct annual citizens academy
27 local residents get inside look at Traverse City Police Department
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
The Traverse City Police Department is conducting its third Citizens' Law Enforcement Academy this winter, giving 27 local residents a taste of the nuts and bolts of police work.
Held on Tuesday evenings from January 11 until March 28, class members have already learned about the structure of the city police department, the basics of community policing and taken a tour of central dispatch.
Getting an inside peak at the workings of the police department is both satisfying as well as educational for participants.
"I like knowing how things work," said Mary Pollock, a city resident who came on the recommendation of her sector patrol officer, Bob Sadler, who is stationed in the Old Towne neighborhood. "It was really fascinating to see how things work when a 911 call comes in."
Future topics at the academy will include narcotics and investigations, the K9 team, domestic violence, the DARE program, a jail tour and crime scene procedures. The last class, an all-day session on a Saturday, will cover firearms training and police driving. Each student will have a chance to drive a police car and fire a gun.
But what may have been most surprising to academy participants is how the face of police work is dramatically changing. No longer just going on call after call, police in Traverse City are taking a community policing approach. This means they are working with coordinated citizen efforts to find ways to prevent crime, not just solve it after it occurs.
The "Citizen's Law Enforcement Academy" is part of this effort. When this third class graduates from the academy in April, more than 70 local residents will have completed the program. They will be taking this information back to their neighborhoods and schools sharing it with others to create community solutions to problems, Chief Soffredine said.
"Seventy-eight percent of what we do is service oriented work, not law enforcement oriented," said Chief Soffredine, who noted that the seven sector patrol officers and organized neighborhoods associations are key factors in community policing.
"When you get right down to it, we all want the same thing: a better community. Our expectation of this academy is to tell them what their dollars do and enlist them as advocates in community problem solving."
The participants came from neighborhoods around the city, including Slabtown, Kid's Creek, Old Towne, Oak Park and Traverse Heights. Some residents from neighboring townships also enrolled, and will take community policing ideas back to their subdivisions.
Demonstrating a community policing success story, three residents of Traverse Heights neighborhood came to the academy at the encouragement of their sector patrol officer, Marjorie Marshall. The neighborhood association formed just last year, with the encouragement of Chief Ralph Soffredine, and has since organized a job fair and spearheaded the addition of new stop signs near the Traverse Heights Elementary School.
Putting three resident though the academy will strengthen their community and help members head off problems before they happen.
"One of the things we've noticed since Marjie has been around is that people get to know each other," said Suzette Hayes, president of the Traverse Heights neighborhood association.
"We don't say anymore, 'There goes a police car.' Now it is, 'There goes Marjie.' For us, community involvement is the key to everything and we want to bring this information back to our neighborhood, tell them that community policing is happening."
Officer Marshall is a strong proponent of community policing and helped present the concept to students at last Tuesday's class. A member of the Traverse City force for nearly a year, she draws on more than eight years of policing experience in San Diego. There, the police department began restructuring to emphasize community policing, looking for the causes of problems and bringing in members of the community to assist with the process.
"If you do community policing right, the number of calls go down," Officer Marshall said. "You cannot have community policing without the traditional police work and vice versa. Community safety and security falls on all of us."