Cookie With a Cop considered success

By Kayse Angel, Maple Valley Reporter
Original article HERE

Photos by Kayse AngelCoffee With a Cop is a thing of the past. At least in Covington it is.

The Covington Police Department hosted Cookie With a Cop at the Chick-fil-A in Covington on Jan. 30.

This is the first time Covington PD has has hosted this particular event, according to Covington Police Chief Andrew McCurdy.

He explained this was his attempt at getting more community members together to come and enjoy cookies and coffee with police officers to get to know them on a more personal level.

“I’ve tried to a lot of different experimentation with different community events where I can interact with the public. It’s really been a struggle to get people to show up. I’ve done a lot in the evenings like with homeowner associations or other public events, or just giving people an opportunity to show up and it’s usually one or two people show up,” McCurdy said.

McCurdy said he got this idea from the Puyallup Police Department. He said that department has done Cookie With a Cop before and hosted it at the Chick-fil-A over there.

That’s when McCurdy said he mentioned the idea to the owner of the the Chick-fil-A in Covington, Marc Schuh, who then suggested having their own Cookie With a Cop.

McCurdy said he considered this event a success because more than one or two people showed up.

“It’s hard to get people from the public to show up. They have busy lives and such. It was kind of interesting, a lot of the people that showed up, a lot of them were stay at home moms with kids. That group of people typically feel very vulnerable because they’re home alone and most of the neighborhoods in Covington are pretty vacant during the day when everyone is at work,” McCurdy explained. “When a lot of crimes happen, that’s a group of people that can be our best witnesses and also because they feel vulnerable there’s a lot we can do to teach them how to be a good witness and how to not be victimized and so on.”