Teens see the fallacy of the abolish-and-defund narrative
One recent July morning in a riverside woods west of Eau Claire, 13 high-schoolers took turns firing practice versions of PepperBalls at an old steel drum and un-abolishing the police.
It was, as Sgt. Mike Major of the Eau Claire Police Department put it, “the cool, the fun day for the kids, where we show them all the tools we have.”
They also saw how to work the little drone that scouts out rooms during a stand-off, and the big infrared one that revolutionizes lost-person searches. They tried out very realistic Airsoft versions of police sidearms and peered out the roof hatch of the SWAT team’s armored car.
The teens — and the half-dozen or more police running the day on the range — were on Day 2 of the week-long Junior Police Academy that the Eau Claire department’s been running every summer for a decade now. Earlier sessions were for middle-schoolers. This year, there was a week for older teens to see what patrol officers do, tour the dispatch center, and process a mock crime scene with detectives.
It’s not really career week, said Deputy Chief Ben Frederick, who led the junior academy program for years. Of about 500 kids who have gone through the program, the department has seen one become an Eau Claire officer.
“That’s definitely not our primary goal,” he said.
The main point in an abolish-and-defund era, rather, is to meet Eau Claire citizens under friendly and informative circumstances.
The program is driven by school resource officers, which the Eau Claire Area School District has in its three middle schools and two high schools. Major, who oversees the SROs and the summer sessions, sees it all as a chance for building relationships.
He described once pulling up to a crime scene and finding a civilian looking tense — until the man recognized Major as the school resource officer he knew 15 years earlier. “It just completely changed the tone of the situation. He came up, shook my hand, gave me a hug, and was like, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’”
Frederick, who used to be a school resource officer at Eau Claire’s North High School, said, “I’m so old now that my students back then, they introduce me to their children now.”
“It just builds the fabric of our community,” he said.
“They’re there to connect with students,” said Jed Stutzman, for 17 years a social studies teacher. He was at the range because at Memorial High School he teaches a dual-enrollment introduction to criminal justice class from Chippewa Valley Technical College.
Stutzman said critics err when they decry SROs as part of some “school-to-prison pipeline.” Instead, it’s about building trust, “that level of comfort between citizens and law enforcement, and that’s huge, and it starts in the school.”
The point is to head off trouble.
“One example I remember,” he said, was “an incident happening downtown with a protest, and a few former students of ours were protesting and starting to get a little unruly, and it looked like it had a potential to escalate into trouble.” One of the responding officers knew the young people from working as an SRO at Memorial. He talked the students into being peaceful.
“Because he had that relationship with them,” said Stutzman, “it kept things from escalating.” It “definitely contributed to them being willing to take a step back and reassess.”
Cops, said Major, see such turnarounds as a win. Before he volunteered as a school officer, he spent years on patrol duty, mostly on afternoon-to-midnight shifts, prime time for people making poor decisions. “After about six years, you start to get a little bogged down and you feel like, ‘Boy, am I really helping people here or am I just kind of the foot in the butt on the way to hell?’
“Being an SRO, working with the school staff, you really got to see the impact that a police officer can have on a student,” he said, “the positive impact that you have.”
“You find your purpose as to why we really do this.”
That recent July morning, the police and teens, wearing armored vests, gathered around a door in a front wall with no house behind it and learned that how police enter and clear a room with a potential shooter inside. A “flashbang” stun grenade, they were told, is always placed, never thrown, into a room, because you don’t know if there’s a child or a hostage nearby.
Earmuffs were distributed.
“Open your mouth,” said the officer running the exercise so that the flashbang’s concussion was felt — it has to do with air pressure — as much as heard.
“The room surveilling has been really cool,” said Kayce Ableidinger, a rising senior at Mondovi High School who hopes to go into law enforcement. She enjoyed the gun range, too, though “I’ve done gun range stuff before because I hunt, but I’ve never done anything like this, so this is really neat.”
Other communities in Wisconsin have career-exploration programs for youth, and some places have citizen academies for adults. But Frederick and Major know of no other city with a program as extensive and long-running as Eau Claire’s.
In a time when Wisconsin political figures have demanded the abolition of police and graffiti vandals malign police with “ACAB” — short for “all cops are bastards” — it’s almost countercultural.
“We have the support of our city council, of our city manager, the majority of the people in the city of Eau Claire because we’re transparent,” said Major.
“When I was an SRO, I was there for an evening event at the school,” said Major, greeting people as they arrived, “just dressed like this” — polo shirt on top, firearm on the belt. Some parents wanted to know why an officer was carrying a firearm on duty at the school.
“The kids that were standing around piped in and said, ‘Well, this is why. This is what he does.’ I didn’t have to say a word, and that was so cool.”
It all raises questions about why there is opposition in other Wisconsin cities to school resource officers.
In Eau Claire, “they see that we’re people too,” said Major. “We have feelings, we have families, and our goal at the end of the day is to really, really help the victims of crimes.”
“That’s ultimately why we get into law enforcement,” he said. “Explaining that to the kids pretty thoroughly is important. It seems to go a long way.”
Patrick McIlheran is executive editor at the Badger Institute.
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