Community Partner Project: Fishers Police Department
For my Community Partner Project, I, along with three other members of my innovations class, worked with the Fishers Police Department in trying to solve their problem with people not reporting suspicious activity. When deciding which business to partner with, I was immediately drawn to the FPD because my dream job is to be a Forensic Scientist. In this I would be working hand in hand with police officers and when I saw that I could get the opportunity to help out the police I thought it would be great for learning more about the department. Also, when I saw the challenge I thought about how cool it would be to be able to impact our community through the Police Station by solving a problem that in hopes wouldn't be a problem anymore for when I become a police officer myself.
In our initial meeting with Officer Dunbar we unpacked the true issues behind his stated problem. There we learned that often times when a suspicious thing happens in the Fishers community, instead of people calling the Police, they either ignore it, call a friend or family member and tell them about it, or they post it on social media and never end up calling the police. This is a major problem for Officer Dunbar says there have in fact been times where because nothing was ever reported a true crime happened that could have been avoided if the witness would have called 911.
In our initial meeting with Officer Dunbar we unpacked the true issues behind his stated problem. There we learned that often times when a suspicious thing happens in the Fishers community, instead of people calling the Police, they either ignore it, call a friend or family member and tell them about it, or they post it on social media and never end up calling the police. This is a major problem for Officer Dunbar says there have in fact been times where because nothing was ever reported a true crime happened that could have been avoided if the witness would have called 911.
For our final proposal, we proposed a few different options for the Police Department to use to solve this issue. First, we created a survey and sent it out to some Fishers residents to see why the were not reported suspicious activity (some of our results are shown above). With this, we also emphasized that the FPD should create and send out a survey as well to get an even broader understanding of the subject. Second, we created a poster with the Non Emergency number on it so therefore residents could put the number in their phone and call it when they see suspicious activity instead of calling 911. Lastly, we created two storyboards for videos that the FPD could make in order to spread awareness of the issue and these storyboards are shown above as well.
Overall I really enjoyed working with the Fishers Police Department. It was a great opportunity to meet some Officers in the community as well as get to see the new police station and what happens in these officers daily lives. My favorite part was when my group got a tour of the new police which really motivated and inspired us to think of some of our proposals in order to help the people that serve our community day in and day out. Throughout this project the main struggle we faced was how to efficiently get out our survey and other information to the community, but we ended up utilizing our resources and sending things out to many different people. If I were to do this project all over again I would have liked to come up with an idea for maybe an event that would have gotten the community more comfortable with the Police Department itself, but overall I am very pleased with all that our group came up with to help solve this problem in our community.
Overall I really enjoyed working with the Fishers Police Department. It was a great opportunity to meet some Officers in the community as well as get to see the new police station and what happens in these officers daily lives. My favorite part was when my group got a tour of the new police which really motivated and inspired us to think of some of our proposals in order to help the people that serve our community day in and day out. Throughout this project the main struggle we faced was how to efficiently get out our survey and other information to the community, but we ended up utilizing our resources and sending things out to many different people. If I were to do this project all over again I would have liked to come up with an idea for maybe an event that would have gotten the community more comfortable with the Police Department itself, but overall I am very pleased with all that our group came up with to help solve this problem in our community.