Following a successful public forum hosted by the Alliance Police Department, APD Chief David Leavitt is encouraging citizens to stay vigilant and to continue to report any concerns that they have.
The community forum, Leavitt told the Times-Herald the morning after the forum, was organized as a way to give citizens insight to changes within the department in the past few months, as well as to listen to the community regarding their concerns.
“I’ve wanted to do the community forum for a while,” said Leavitt. “Once I kind of got my feet under me and I got settled in, we began discussing it. By then, we were in the middle of summer and people were traveling and people were busy. I thought, well, let’s wait until school’s back in, let’s wait until fall when we start to slow down just a little bit, and that we be a great opportunity to have a community forum. Based on the feedback, and the turnout, there does seem to be some interest in the community in people communicating with their police department, which I’m thrilled about. My intention is to do this about quarterly, unless something in the community is really going on that we need to have one sooner.”
Leavitt said his biggest take away from the forum is understanding just how important communication is between the APD and the community.
“As we saw last night, there’s a lot of misconception, there’s a lot of filling in the blanks with ‘things I saw on Facebook,’ or ‘things I heard,’ versus things that are actually fact,” Leavitt said. “So, I think the better job we as a police department do of telling our story, of what we’re doing, how we’re doing it and why we’re doing it, the more support we’ll have from the community. The more they understand the role of the police department, the more trust they’ll have in the police department, and the more effective we are.”
Leavitt hopes that people will take away from these forums an understanding of the department and the knowledge that the officers are dedicated to keeping the community safe.
“We’re the good guys,” said Leavitt. “We’re there to help them. We’re there to support this community. There’s a lot of scary things going on in the world. Last night, the topic of school shootings briefly came up, and during my tenure in Nashville, there was a period of time where I was over the School Resource Officers program, and I responded to some school shooting calls. Now, thank God, the calls I responded to, no one had been shot. They were either, someone pointed a gun, but didn’t shoot, or it was a pellet gun, or it was a false call.
“One time, we had a situation where a huge stack of chairs got knocked over onto a tile floor, and, reportedly, it sounded exactly like gunshots,” Leavitt said. “The school was evacuated, etc., and I responded to that call, and it didn’t turn out to be a shooting at all. But the fear in the eyes of those students, the staff, the SROs just shows what a huge problem we have in this country with gun violence and school shootings specifically. So, anything we can do to make our schools safer, our community safer, support our schools, support our parents, we’re absolutely going to do that. But, the takeaway is we need the community involved, and we need the parents involved, and we need everyone to do their part because we can’t do it alone.”