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Thank you. [Narrator: It's not the most unusual place to see a police officer.]
Can I get a coffee? [Narrator: In fact it's quite ordinary.]
[But these particular cops in these particular coffee-serving]
[establishments]
[are here for more than a good cup of joe. They're here to listen to you.]
Officer: How come you're not drinking a lot of coffee?
You've been up since four! [Narrator: It's called the Coffee With a Cop program,]
[where city police officers come to local cafes and restaurants]
[and make themselves available to answer questions from the public.]
[Its goal is to improve communication between the police department and the]
[community]
This sort of goes back to the old fashion way of doing policing, really. Getting out of the
police car
and actually conversing with people, not waiting for them to call us
for an emergency or a call for service. I think it's great.
As opposed to maybe a city council meeting or having to go
meet with an officer at a police station,
I think this is a great way, a good community outreach. [Coffee With a Cop]
[has been tried in just a few other communities but]
[thanks to the overwhelmingly positive response there is now a movement to take]
[it nationwide.]
[The force behind Santa Barbara's version is Officer Casey Beutel]
Beutel: Coffee shops have become a venue to relax
relax, hang out. It's very casual and so it's just a really
nice, relaxing venue so that people come and
visit me and we can get to know each other. Some people just wanna hang out
with us. Other ones have specific concern
[And so far the variety of concerns has been as wide as the choices on the menu.]
Some we've never heard before, some really huge concerns from certain
communities that thought there was nothing they could do about it.
We're actually talking about it at these meetings. Some groups come as a group and say
"why aren't you doing this?" And that's what we want to hear. It's one thing to be
the doctor, but if you don't go to the patient and ask him what's hurting
then you're just going to be guessing and hoping that you're doing the right thing.
This is part of that process of enhancing the way we do community
policing
and going to the client and saying, "what can we do for you that's better?"
And we have to you own what we buy when we ask that question.
I like visibility
I like seeing them. I like seeing them drive around.
I like to see them talk to people. I think if I see them, criminals see them.
Quality-of-life issues that that aren't
what people consider 911 calls. Neighborhood disputes--my neighbor and I aren't
getting along. He's cutting my hedge,
he's parking in front of my house. Then we can go mediate. We can talk to them and really
help them deal with the quality like to make make it better and then
the citizens feel like they're heard which is fantastic. When we did this
downtown we had a lot of transient issues from the business owners and
businesses. Talking about that. School neighborhoods, talking about people driving
too fast during school hours so then we talk to the traffic department
we are able to deploy motor officers
in different areas where people feel like they need them, so they see them there.
[The Coffee With a Cop is about more than customer feedback.]
[It's also an opportunity for residents to get to know the person behind the]
[badge.]
Oh yeah, there was a lot of things we talked about. I asked him
about his job and what he does all day.
Where he lives--he lives around here. [And this, officers say,]
[is where Coffee With a Cop really pays off.]
We want everybody feel comfortable coming to us talking to us, so they do feel
comfortable calling 911
when they need to, or do feel comfortable contacting us and saying... Some people need
that
emergency, that 911. We want people to know, if something just doesn't seem right,
just seems off, then call us. We never mind being called.
Whether we can get to you or not depends on on the workload what else is going on
this morning.
I thought was interesting because there have been a couple of times where I go,
"You know, I really wish I can report them. Well no, they're gonna ask you what
the emergency is and there's no emergency."
So that was sort of interesting. [And that comfort level with contacting law]
[enforcement can mean the difference between a theft report]
[and an arrest.] We
recently
had a resident call us and say
"My neighbor's on vacation, I think, and there's somebody in the back yard I don't recognize."
That's a very simple "doesn't seem right."
When we got there, the guy that was in the backyard
was walking out with the jewelry. So we caught somebody that had
basically burglarized house, because a neighbor saw something and called us
because it didn't look right. [And the benefits of the Coffee With a Cop program]
[aren't limited to just the public.] A lot of what we deal with
is ninety percent of our time going to eight-percent of the population.
And as an officer, a lot of people their only contact is when they're
getting pulled over,
right?
The officers deal day in and day out with
arresting the criminals get to come and visit
have this kind of positive reinforcement. So it's good for us, too.
It's good for morale.
It's good for the officers. We love when people say "thank you for what you do."
Especially in light of the tragedies that had just occurred,
when people remember that we're here for them. [In an age when technology has diminished]
[the need for face to face contact]
[Coffee With a Cop hearkens back to a time when citizens knew their police]
[officers by their first names.]
[A time of handshakes instead of pokes, and a time when what had to be said took]
[more than 140 characters.]
[What these officers have found his often it takes just enough time]
[to share a cup of coffee.] You know people by going around talking to people.
It's not high-tech. You just gotta do it. [Interviewer: It's a bit of the old school.]
Yeah, I hope the new school doesn't
erase the old school. I never would have walked into the police department
and said "I want to talk to you about State Street."
It was convenient. It made it easy to talk about
an issue you have, if you want to.