What’s the last conversation you had with a police officer?
Chances are it wasn’t about the weather. Or your favorite local cover band. Or their kid’s youth soccer game.
Chance are … it was more stressful than not.
All that’s about to change, if Sergeant Chis Cognac has anything to say about it. Operating under some simple guidelines (“no speeches, no agenda”), the co-founder of Coffee With a Cop has set out to shift the timbre of police-citizen interactions.
“You can talk about crime or you can talk about football,” Cognac says, “that doesn’t really matter. The important thing is the actual back-and-forth. As cops, we’re used to the traditional talking at you form of communication, so we sometimes have to remember — or learn — how to talk withpeople. This isn’t a town hall.”
The concept behind Coffee With a Cop is a deceptively simple one. Once a month or so, police officers gather at a local restaurant and offer free coffee for community members who’d like to chat. That’s it. There’s no real playbook, no presentation, no line of demarcation between officer and citizen. Instead, the restaurant becomes a neutral ground — a neighborhood Switzerland of sorts — for building rapport and, hopefully, trust.
[For more of this story, written by Sarah Baird, go to https://psmag.com/can-a-fresh-...a52856dc2#.e0dfsq29p]
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