Warren officer: Citizen training is civics lesson

Ed Runyan

runyan@vindy.com

WARREN

When graduates of the Warren Police Department Citizens Police Academy complete their six-week training program next month, Capt. Joe Marhulik believes they’ll be better prepared to assist the department as crime fighters and police- department ambassadors.

The first class of 15 Warren residents will be halfway through their training Thursday night, and about 50 more are signed up to complete the course in the sessions to come.

Marhulik, the police- department coordinator of the city’s grant-funded Weed and Seed program, said the training appears to be filling in the gaps in residents’ knowledge of citizenship.

“I think people lack civics — what our Constitution is, what we [police officers] do, what we can’t do,” Marhulik said.

For example, the public appears to have little understanding of the conditions that require a police officer to notify a person of his or her rights, known as a Miranda warning.

The 1966 U.S. Supreme Court decision regarding a police officer’s requirement to tell a person his or her rights doesn’t apply if an officer takes someone into custody after witnessing him or her committing a crime or takes someone into custody on a warrant, Marhulik said.

Likewise, most people have little understanding of the procedures and length of time it takes for criminal labs to analyze DNA or other physical evidence from a crime scene.

Television largely is to blame for this, Marhulik said, because crime dramas regularly show lab results being obtained and used in a very compressed time frame. In reality, lab results take weeks to obtain, not minutes, even in large cities with an in-house lab.

One training session will put participants in simulated situations in which an officer has only moments to make a life-or-death decision. The class will demonstrate to the citizens that officers — much like emergency-room doctors and nurses — have to make tough decisions quickly, and that can lead to mistakes.

Participants also will ride along with a police officer for a couple of hours so they can see an officer at work. They also will learn some of the reasons for the things a police dispatcher does.

Most of the participants in the first class are members of Warren’s various neighborhood groups and have the ability to reach out to other members of the group to make everyone better informed, Marhulik said.

“If you have some knowledge and share that knowledge — if you’re at a community meeting, you can share that knowledge,” Marhulik said.

The police department has conducted background checks on those participating in the program to guard against the possibility that someone would take the class to become better at engaging in criminal activity, Marhulik said.

Funding for the training comes from the Weed and Seed grant, which provides about $100,000 per year from the U.S. Justice Department to weed out crime and “seed” opportunities for residents.

Its target area is Southwest Warren and areas just east and west of Perkins Park downtown.

Bob Weitzel, president of the Northwest Neighborhood Association, says his organization doesn’t have anyone in the current training class. But as the only neighborhood group that conducts patrols, he believes NWNA already is using that type of training received earlier from the police department.

NWNA has spotted crimes in progress and helped police make arrests over the past couple of years, Weitzel said, adding that Police Chief Tim Bowers has given the group credit for greatly reducing the amount of crime in Northwest Warren.

“We tell people to be nosy neighbors,” Weitzel said. “When something looks suspicious, call police.”

Weitzel said he believes the training is helpful but hopes trainees will use it to start patrols of their own.