Baseball cards and police officer aren’t words one often sees in the same sentence. But for School Resource Officer Jeremy Weiss, these two things are heavily intertwined.
When officer Weiss was first hired by Gary Tyler, the police chief at the time, he was very big into the community outreach. He issued every officer baseball card-sized pictures of themselves with their name on them to hand out to members of the South Windsor community while on patrol. The idea behind the cards was to help build rapport with the people that police officers serve, especially kids – a demographic that might be especially intimidated by police officers.
“The Chief that hired me back in 2001, Gary Tyler, took community engagement very seriously. Chief Tyler did all he could to reach out to community members, and get us involved in any way. This was one of the methods he developed for officers on the street to build relationships with youths specifically,” Weiss explained.
After being out of the police academy for just two days, the department asked Weiss to take a picture, which he did, and didn’t tell him what it was for. A few weeks later, he was handed a stack of baseball cards with his name and picture on them.
Weiss would keep his cards in his office and use them as conversation starters and to help build relationships.
It’s initiatives like these that are meant to bridge the gap between police and citizens and build trusted relationships between the two.
Weiss believes that, unfortunately, the public perception of police has gone downhill in recent years. He thinks that every bit of community outreach helps, but feels that rebuilding public trust in the police department requires large-scale assistance from mass media and proper education.
“One of my biggest messages to everyone I speak to about policing in America, is that in every line of work there are people who don’t have good intentions,” Weiss explained. “ It is of paramount importance that we don’t demonize an entire industry or group, due to actions of one or two individuals.”
Nevertheless, Weiss’ baseball cards served as a good reminder of a community outreach initiative done by the South Windsor Police Department.
Weiss was issued the cards in 2001 and has changed quite a bit since then. He only recently found them in his basement and was able to reflect on the memories that he’s made with them.
“It [the cards] brought back a lot of memories from when I first began in this line of work, and lots of contrasts to how it is today. I showed them to my kids who are still laughing to this day. I told them I would sign a bunch and they could hand them out to their friends at school and they laughed even harder,” Weiss said.
