Several local citizens are getting a firsthand look into how law enforcement works.
The Grovetown Police Department is currently hosting its first citizens academy. Police Chief Jamey Kitchens said they have seen other agencies hold the academy and finally decided to hold one in Grovetown. To prepare for it, he and Assistant Police Chief Major Robert Eastman visited several other academies to get some ideas. The 10-week course started in May with 10 participants, but some had to drop out. He wanted to keep it small since it’s the first one.
“The first night when I got up and spoke to them, I told them listen the purpose of this is not for us to 10-weeks from now to come out of here with a whole pack of cheerleaders for law enforcement,” Kitchens said. “That would be disingenuous if we did that, if we went in there trying to solely just convince people that you don’t ever need to look at law enforcement with a jaded eye or whatever. But we hope that by showing them and being holy transparent and saying this is what happens, this is how it happens, these are the things we deal with that perhaps it will at least come away with a different train of thought or a different (perspective).”
During the 10-week class, participants will learn about a variety of topics, including road patrol function, crime scene investigation and hearing from the city attorney, Kitchens said.
“We also brought in the city attorney who is also our city court prosecutor, and he explained in-depth what takes place from the time you get a citation on the side of the road to the processes that it goes through,” Kitchens said. “Then we had one of our DUI officers did a really in-depth presentation on DUI detection, showed the field sobriety and the standardized testing that we do.”
At the June 1 class, participants learned about the types of items police use, such as a battering ram and shield, along with learning about criminal investigations with hands-on activities, including doing latent finger printing and investigating a mock crime scene.
“One of the things they’re going to do tonight is separate fact and fiction because a lot of folks for the past 20 years have watched CSI, NCIS and all this other stuff,” Kitchens said. “…there’s a lot of technology in investigations now a days, but a lot of it is still very rudimentary, you know just step by step by step. It is time tested and tried and true.”
One of the classes will be a scenario-based class where the participants will go through a real-life scenario that the police have gone through,” Kitchens said.
“We’re not creating some pitfall for them to fall in,” Kitchens said. “These are things we’ve actually experienced first-hand, or we know, have knowledge of and we’re going to have those folks, the attendees in the academy, they’re going to be the police, or we will be the bad guys or the people we encounter. The purpose of that is to kind of give them an idea and understanding but to also dispel a lot of the police are just out here to shoot people, to kill people, to maim people, whatever.”
The attendees will get the information that police officers receive from dispatch about a call, Kitchens said, and then have them go in and let the scenario play out based on the decision they make. Because law enforcement handles a variety of calls, including mental health calls, so there will be a mental health component to the scenarios as well.
“It’s not any trick on our part that we’re going to intentionally bait them in, we’re just going to let them play out,” Kitchens said. “That I think is the best teacher…when you are put in that position and you are given the same information we’re given when we’re dispatched to a call and you see how fast something can rapidly unfold or sometimes nothing happens at all, sometimes you, it’s a car that was broke down and they pushed it off so it wasn’t in anybody’s way.”
Participants will also get to go on a ride along with officers to learn about traffic stops and the decisions that go into making one, Kitchens said.
“This will give them a firsthand to seeing and understand that us stopping drunks benefits everybody,” Kitchens said. “Us stopping people who have been driving for six months benefits everybody.”
Nicolette DeRamus, one of the students, said she wanted to participate because it sounded like fun.
“I remember growing up my mom participated in one in our town, and she came back just all excited about how much fun she had, and I was like oh, I get to do it too,” DeRamus said.
As for how the classes are going, she said they’ve been interesting. During the June 1 class, they learned about the K-9 unit and got to hold the battering ram and find out how heavy it is.
“You see it and it’s like that’s not light because it’s busting down a door, but it’s really heavy, it’s got some serious weight to it,” DeRamus said.
For Michael Dollar, who owns Dollar Pawn, he wanted to participate because he believes as a business owner it’s good to get involved in the community and meet new people.
“Very educational,” Dollar said of the academy. “You know you see a lot of stuff on the news about cops and most of it’s not real good, so we kind of get to see who they are as people and how they operate as a department. It’s pretty cool.”
Because this is the first one, Kitchens said they will be looking at the feedback from the participants for the next one to make improvements or changes.
As for if she’ll recommend others participate in the citizens academy, DeRamus said yes.
“It’s good to get an idea of what the police are doing and how it works,” DeRamus said.
The citizen’s academy is set to wrap up on July 13.
Stephanie Hill is a staff writer covering Columbia County government for The Augusta Press. Reach her at stephanie@theaugustapress.com.
