<p>Joey Thurman: I swear, I'm not arrested, right?<br /><br />Sergeant Scott Carter: You're not arrested. Not yet, anyways.<br /><br />Joey Thurman: He must have figured that out. What do we have going on here today?<br /><br />Sergeant Scott Carter: Tonight is our Citizens Police Academy Class. This is our 50th class actually. What we teach is that our best weapon is our verbal communication skills. If people aren't communicating well, the situation's going to go worse for them.<br /><br />Joey Thurman: This is something that's pretty unique to a police department, where you bring in the citizens and you pull the curtain back and you guys have been doing this for quite some time, correct?<br /><br />Sergeant Scott Carter: We have been doing this for a very long. This is our 50th class and we do two classes a year.<br /><br />Joey Thurman: Okay. Math, there. Let's go 25-ish years.<br /><br />Sergeant Scott Carter: 25 years.<br /><br />Joey Thurman: And I think some people who would see this, they might think that in light of the past couple of years, like, "Oh, we're doing this", but you guys have been ahead of your time right now.<br /><br />Sergeant Scott Carter: We have. We've been doing community policing since the eighties here in Aurora. We've taken on the community policing theory and embraced it. Every officer is considered a community policing officer here. We have a community policing unit with 17 officers and three sergeants, but all of us embrace the community policing theory. We all go out in the community and do different things on a daily basis with the community.<br /><br />Joey Thurman: This goes on and you have 10 different class sessions, correct, that they go through and they learn all sorts of different things?<br /><br />Sergeant Scott Carter: Right. It's a 10 week Citizens Police Academy. I call it a miniature police academy. It's not too physical. We've had 80 year old ladies go through/.<br /><br />Joey Thurman: I've seen some 80 year old ladies that could take their purse.<br /><br />Sergeant Scott Carter: Yeah. This lady's a pretty good shot too. I wouldn't mess with her. But yeah. It's a fantastic program just so the community can see what we do and really explain why we do certain things. People ask questions, like, "Why can't you just shoot them in the leg", kind of thing. Well, we're trying to stop a threat, if it has to come to that.<br /><br />Sergeant Scott Carter: It's not trying to kill someone, it's trying to stop their action. If you shoot somebody in the leg, especially if they're on drugs or something like that, they can keep continuing that action. Just as an example, we explain things like that and they get to see these situations that we're put in on a daily basis and really feel it for themselves. Some, of them, "Man, I was really scared and it's not even real."<br /><br />Joey Thurman: Yeah. Well now they know how to deescalate because you're right, people see things and a car driving by, like, "Why don't you just shoot out the tire or shoot them when they're running", where it's obviously not that easy, correct?<br /><br />Sergeant Scott Carter: Right. Right. We just don't want to send bullets in unknown directions.<br /><br />Joey Thurman: It's probably not a good idea. That's frowned upon in all police.<br /><br />Sergeant Scott Carter: It is. It really is.<br /><br />Joey Thurman: All right. Well, I'm really excited to check out the class and hopefully I don't get arrested today.<br /><br />Sergeant Scott Carter: I think you're going to be all right. We can probably give you a pass.</p>