City of Joliet issued the following announcement on July 31.
The Joliet Police Department’s 2018 “Police and Children Together” (P.A.C.T.) camp was held during the week of July 16-20. Officers with the Neighborhood Oriented Policing Team coordinated the camp with the help of other officers. In total, fourteen children between the ages of eight and thirteen from the Forest Park and Joliet / McDonough areas participated in the camp.
Support was provided by the Forest Park Community Center and the Warren-Sharpe Community Center.
P.A.C.T. is a day camp program to assist youth in making the right choices in life. P.A.C.T. works to reduce delinquency and any related behavioral problems in children, by helping them develop a positive orientation towards police and their community as well as improving pro-social attitudes and behaviors. The positive police experience that the camp provides helps to guide these children when their paths become difficult to maneuver. Some goals of the program are as follows:
• To give at-risk children opportunities to see police officers in a friendly social setting
through field trips, police-related demonstrations, and fun educational programs.
• To show children that police officers are approachable and it’s ok to interact with them,
speak to them, trust in them.
• To teach kids at a young age to become familiar with police officers in a more humanizing
way through recreation and learning, and to help build and foster relationships that will
carry on later in life.
• To expose them to police work at an early age to help encourage them to see law
enforcement as a viable and attainable career option.
The Joliet Police Department has been involved in hosting the P.A.C.T. camp each year since 2013, when a $5000 grant was awarded to the department from the Law Enforcement Foundation of Illinois. The original grant allowed the camp to run from 2013 through 2017. In 2018, the program was in jeopardy until the department received a $1400 grant through the generosity of the Rotary Club of Joliet.
“This is probably one of the most rewarding community-relations programs that we participate in as a police department. Children in our underserved communities need to be able to see the police as the good-guys.” Chief Brian Benton
Original source can be found here.
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