Dickinson police offer eye-opening experience

Talk about it

Thursday I graduated from the Dickinson Citizens Police Academy.

The nine-week class focused on how the department operates on a day-to-day basis and its interaction with the courts, social services, schools and the public.

Students were encouraged to ride with police officers and sit in on dispatch.

The classes were extremely honest, eye-opening and gave me a clearer vision of what Dickinson police face

every day.

Theirs is too often a thankless job that most of us couldn’t or wouldn’t want to attempt. What sets them apart from the rest of us is when citizens need help or a crime is reported, they run to the problem while most of us do the opposite.

While most of us are

nervous when we see a police car in our rearview mirror, the opposite

is true when we have to call for their assistance.

Dickinson officers are regular guys and gals that if you see them out of uniform, you probably wouldn’t know their occupation. What allows them to do their job effectively is ongoing training and the what-if scenarios they constantly go over in their minds.

What if the guy they pull

over has been drinking? What if someone is injured? What if this guy

is armed or resists arrest and on and on?

Seldom do they encounter a

problem that they haven’t been trained for or there is not a fellow

officer there to aid them. Nobody knows better than law enforcement

that our town is growing at an amazing rate. Most of the people moving

to our town are hardworking, law-abiding citizens, but there are those

who are not.

When our town was smaller, the police pretty much knew who

the bad guys were. Now there is just a whole lot more people to try and

sort that out.

The Police Academy is part of the larger citizen policing program, which is basically where citizens and police

work together to prevent and solve crimes.

How many times do we see a strange car or something out of the ordinary in our neighborhood that we ignore rather than report?

I would like to thank the

police for hosting the class and would wholeheartedly encourage everyone to take the class. I know you won’t be disappointed.

Brock is The Dickinson Press publisher.

Tags: opinion, column, columns