‘Coffee With a Cop’: Local police push to build community relationships

By Scott Calzolaio, MetroWest Daily News
Original article HERE

Medway Police Chief Allen Tingley sat in the Muffin House on Wednesday morning, sharing smiles with customers and welcoming anyone to sit down and chat about happenings in town.

“The topics are really all over the place,” he said. “There’s no set agenda, but plenty of people have been talking about the road construction and the detours.”

“Coffee with A Cop” was launched in Hawthorne, California, in 2011, when officers there were looking for ways to interact more successfully with the citizens they served. It’s now a California nonprofit organization, sponsoring events held in all 50 states.

The key to Coffee with a Cop’s success is that it opens the door for interactions outside of crisis situations, according to the organization’s website.

Sitting down with the public for an event like “Coffee with a Cop,” Tingley said, is of paramount importance to towns like Medway, adding that showing a sense of community in their policing sometimes helps prevent crime.

During the 1990s, community policing efforts were bolstered by state grants to boost police presence and increase trust between residents and law enforcement. That changed, however, soon after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Funding for those programs was cut and used instead to fuel anti-terrorism training and enforcement, officials said. In Medway, that amount was in the range of $30,000 annually, Tingley said.

Tingley said that having coffee with a few strangers might ease public fears amid the spate of police shootings across the nation.

“People just don’t call us when they need to sometimes,” he said. “It’s like they’re intimidated.”

Franklin police Sgt. Brian Johnson said he saw the funding cuts first-hand.

“After 9/11, a lot of those federal community policing grants and things that we had in the ’90s were cut,” he said. “We used to have a community substation in town that was community policing-funded.”

The downtown substation was a small space where an officer would sit during certain hours and take questions or have conversations with members of the public.

Community service officers in Franklin are still funded, making their rounds through schools, events in town and elsewhere, he said.

Johnson said the department also gives out coupons for free ice cream to children wearing their helmets while bicycling, and has even given helmets to some who weren’t wearing them. Officers also help drivers with installing car seats properly, Johnson said.

“We serve the public, and our best source of information is the public,” he said. “Having a good relationship with them and building that trust in the community is where that information is going to come from.”

State Rep. Jeff Roy, D-Franklin, said there hasn’t been any recent request for additional funding for community policing efforts. Having seen the impact it has on the community, Roy said he would be more than happy to find more on the state and federal level.

“It’s about these police officers establishing a relationship within the community,” Roy said. “They gain this level of trust, especially in schools, where if something arises they’re not afraid to speak up. … We’re all human beings.

“We’ve all got our issues and our problems, but police have identified better ways to approach these issues.”

Medway’s Tingley echoed Roy.

“I think it’s most important to just be out there and part of the public, not just a body inside of a patrol car that people fear,” Tingley said.