Page 370 - NIXBOOK

POLICE VOLUNTEER PROGRAM

In the mid 1990’s our department decided to start a citizen volunteer program and I was put in charge of it. This was because I
was also the crime prevention officer specialist which included neighborhood watch organizations and things like that. By the
way, we never really had any effective neighborhood watches because there were never enough residents in one place who cared
enough to take on the whole thing. It requires a group of motivated neighbors, one of them being a “captain” who makes lists
and maps and figures out who lives in which houses and what their phone numbers are. I went to a lot of meetings to set up
neighborhood watch programs, but when people found out that the police department’s involvement was limited to basically
just setting up one meeting and all the work after that was on them, well, nobody ever stepped up. I remember one meeting was
called to order after a resident’s house was burglarized and enough alarm was raised to gather some of her neighbors into a
meeting at the fire station conference room. Where we heard the victimized woman describe how she came home to missing
jewelry and missing money and artwork, and even one of her pillowcases was stolen. “Was it a big pink frilly pillowcase?” asked
one of the neighbors. The victim said “Yeah! How do you know?!?” The other neighbor explained “Oh I saw some weird guy
walking out of your house that day, it looked like he was carrying a large pink pillowcase stuff full of things. Boy did that sure
look weird..”
So when our department decided to start a citizen volunteer program, I was the natural selection to the
leader/coordinator/manager. The whole idea had come from a local resident who had been a member of a volunteer program
somewhere in California; when he moved to Poulsbo he suggested our PD should try out a similar idea. So we did. Originally
designed as a senior citizen program, we recruited (only) older, retired people.

I developed and wrote a policy and procedures manual from scratch. I interviewed all of the applicants and hired the best ones.
I was in charge of that program for almost ten years, managed our monthly meetings, and I had to recruit and hire a lot of
replacements for the older ones who died. I went to a lot of funerals over the years as they died off from old age, cancer, and in
one unfortunate instance, a rare and freakish fatal case of flesh-eating bacteria.

The volunteers patrolled around in old repurposed patrol cars, in 4 hour shifts during the day. They checked on houses when
residents went on vacation and wanted somebody to keep an eye on their place for a week or two, and the volunteers got a
limited police commission that gave them enough authority to write parking tickets. They helped direct traffic and block roads
and watch crosswalks during our big annual community events that included blocking off downtown front street for a few hours
every Halloween night so several hundred little kids and their parents could go door to door at all the business there. The
volunteers could also be used to help direct traffic around large car crash scenes or detours for other kinds of road closures.