This article is based on the inaugural Safety Seal Program, a community-policing initiative developed through concepts explored during the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy Public Safety Executive Leadership Program. The program reached approximately 700 elementary school students over the course of a school year and may provide a replicable model for small and mid-sized agencies seeking to build trust with youth without a dedicated school resource officer program.
Years ago, I was invited to speak to a fourth-grade class about what it means to be a police officer. As the students filed into the room, their teacher jokingly announced, “Now, be good or she’ll arrest you.”
My heart sank.
Before I had spoken a single word, I had inherited one of law enforcement’s oldest public relations problems. For generations, children have been taught to fear police before they have ever been given the opportunity to know us.
I spent the next hour trying to undo the damage of a single sentence. Instead of talking about arrests, handcuffs and consequences, I talked about helping people, solving problems and serving the community. But the moment stayed with me long after I left that classroom.
Years later, it became the foundation for a program that would place approximately 700 elementary school students face-to-face with police officers throughout an entire school year — not during a crisis, an arrest, or an investigation, but during relay races, soccer drills, fitness challenges, conversations about how to ask for help and moments of genuine connection. Because if community policing truly matters, we cannot wait until children need us before we introduce ourselves.
Why one-time visits weren’t enough
In May 2025, I attended the five-month Public Safety Executive Leadership Program at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. One of the benefits of executive leadership education is exposure to ideas and perspectives outside of our daily operational responsibilities. During a presentation on online exploitation and cyberbullying, the speaker discussed the importance of educating children before they become victims and the need for trusted adults to intervene early.
As I listened, I found myself thinking about my own childhood. Remember DARE? Like many of us who attended middle school in the 1990s, I don’t remember every lesson that was taught. What I remember is having uninterrupted access to a police officer. I remember asking questions. I remember learning that police officers were real people. Then I started thinking about our city.
The Seal Beach Police Department regularly engages with our community. Officers attend PTA meetings, participate in Read Across America and Red Ribbon Week, walk the school campus and hand out stickers. Our two-officer, full-time Community Oriented Policing (COP) Team is visible and approachable. But visibility is not the same as connection.
For many children, the first meaningful interaction with a police officer occurs only after something has gone wrong. Maybe they were involved in a disciplinary issue at school. Maybe they witnessed a family dispute. Maybe they were experiencing a crisis at home. By then, fear, anxiety and uncertainty often accompany the interaction, and those brief encounters rarely create the kind of familiarity that builds trust.
I began asking a simple question: What would happen if we intentionally built relationships with children before they ever needed us?
Seal Beach is uniquely positioned to do that. We have one elementary school serving approximately 700 students from transitional kindergarten through fifth grade. We do not have enough schools to justify a full-time school resource officer, but we do have a dedicated COP Team and a department deeply invested in community engagement.
The answer to that question became the Safety Seal Program.
We didn’t set out to create another school presentation. We set out to create enough positive interactions that if a child ever needed a police officer, they would already know one.
Designing a program kids would actually remember
A few weeks after completing the USC program, I asked for a meeting with McGaugh Elementary Principal Wendy Wood. I walked into her office with what I thought was a solid plan. She immediately made it better.
One of my proposed activities involved students sitting through an educational lesson. Principal Wood gently explained that children generally don’t enjoy sitting through another lecture during what is supposed to be their active time. That insight changed everything. Instead of bringing students into our world, we would bring policing into theirs.
The Safety Seal Program became a series of immersive experiences delivered entirely during physical education classes. Because the program did not interfere with instructional time, it could be approved at the school level without the extensive district coordination many agencies might expect.
“The Safety Seal Program brought learning to life for our students in a way that was engaging, memorable, and meaningful,” Principal Wood later reflected. “Through hands-on activities and repeated interactions throughout the year, our students learned important safety skills while building trust and familiarity with the people who serve and protect our community.”
Throughout the school year, officers effectively “took over” PE classes during three themed weeks:
- Street Smart focused on pedestrian, bicycle, and traffic safety.
- Help Happens Here taught students when and how to call 911, how to identify emergencies and how to ask for help.
- Fit for Life emphasized physical fitness, nutrition, wellness, and healthy habits.
Each PE class rotated through three stations led by officers, professional staff and police volunteers. Students rode tricycles through a traffic-safety relay course, practiced simulated 911 calls from police vehicles, completed fitness challenges and interacted with police personnel in ways that felt natural and fun.
The activities were simple by design. The objective was not to create an elaborate curriculum; it was to maximize interaction between students and department personnel.
Building an army of helpers
One of the first questions agencies ask is “How could we possibly staff something like this?” The answer is that we didn’t do it alone.
Seal Beach is a small agency with only 39 sworn officers. Success depended entirely on buy-in. After receiving approval from school administration, I presented the concept to every stakeholder group throughout the department. I met with command staff, detectives, patrol personnel, professional staff, the COP Team, traffic investigators, and our Volunteers in Police Service (VIPS) program. Their response exceeded every expectation.
Our Community Oriented Policing Team and traffic investigator served as foundational members of the program. Detectives participated when workload allowed. Patrol and community services officers signed up for overtime shifts. Professional staff members stepped away from administrative assignments for a few hours. Senior volunteers eagerly joined the effort.
Across the three Safety Seal sessions, participation included patrol officers, sergeants, detectives, corporals, our traffic investigator, senior community services officers, police aides, command staff and dozens of police volunteers.
For a department with only 39 sworn officers and fewer than 70 total personnel, nearly two-thirds of the organization became involved. Participation was largely voluntary. People weren’t ordered into the program. They wanted to be part of it.
By the final session, participation had become something people actively sought out. What began as an overtime opportunity evolved into one of the most anticipated community engagement events of the year.
More than a PE class
None of the activities were particularly complex, and that was intentional. The objective was interaction.
Students rode tricycles while practicing traffic safety. They secured seatbelts inside police vehicles. They learned to look both ways before crossing the street and move safely to the right when emergency lights and sirens approached.
They practiced calling 9-1-1 while sitting inside police cars and speaking into radio microphones. They learned how to provide their name, location, and the nature of an emergency, and were encouraged to memorize their address and phone number.
To reinforce those lessons beyond the field, every student received a 9-1-1 educational bookmark and cellphone-shaped reference card from 911 For Kids, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping children understand how and when to call emergency services.
Students learned about nutrition, exercise, sleep and healthy habits, and completed a fitness challenge inspired by SWAT physical agility testing. The West County SWAT BearCat was displayed on the field throughout the week and became a popular photo opportunity for students after completing the course.
Nearly all of the equipment came directly from the school’s PE storage rooms: cones, soccer balls, basketballs, hula hoops, pool noodles, and kinder tricycles.
One of the biggest surprises was how quickly those interactions evolved into relationships. The first session felt like a traditional police presentation. But by the start of the second session, it already felt different. Students began recognizing faces, remembering names, and approaching officers between activities.
By the third session, students knew many of us by first name. During recess, they wandered over to our parked police vehicles just to say hello. Some asked officers to walk them back to class. Others wanted to tell us about a soccer game, a lost tooth or what they were doing over the weekend. The interactions became effortless. What started as safety education became something much more meaningful.
The unexpected impact on officers
The program was designed for students. What surprised me most was its impact on our department personnel.
Police work is difficult. We spend much of our careers responding to conflict, trauma, violence and crisis. We are accustomed to interacting with people on some of the worst days of their lives. The Safety Seal Program offered something entirely different.
I watched officers laugh. I watched detectives race children through obstacle courses. I watched professional staff members become local celebrities.
Traffic Investigator James Dowdell later captured the sentiment perfectly: “While the program was designed for the students, I think many of the officers got just as much out of it. Spending time with the kids, seeing their excitement, and building those relationships was refreshing. It reminded us that policing is about more than responding to emergencies — it’s about being part of this special community.”
In a profession increasingly challenged by burnout, cynicism and fatigue, those moments mattered. Several participants later described Safety Seal as one of their favorite assignments of the year.
In an era when agencies across the country are struggling with recruitment, retention, and burnout, programs that reconnect personnel with the purpose behind the profession have value far beyond community engagement.
A blueprint for agencies
For agencies interested in launching something similar, several lessons emerged during our first year.
- Start with the principal: The most important partnership wasn’t with the city or the school district. It was with the principal. Without Principal Wood’s support, the program would never have moved beyond an idea.
- Don’t compete with classroom instruction: Integrating into PE eliminated scheduling conflicts and made participation easier for teachers. (In our district, there is no funding for separate PE teachers at the elementary school level, so this also gave their teachers a break from coming up with PE activities for three weeks of the year.)
- Focus on buy-in: Success required support from command staff, officers, professional staff, police volunteers, teachers and school administrators. Before building activities, build commitment.
- Keep costs low: The program’s educational materials cost approximately $478. Nearly every activity used equipment already available through the school’s PE program. The largest expense was commemorative Safety Seal T-shirts for all students. Those shirts were funded through community partnerships, including donations from the Seal Beach Police Officers Association, Police Management Association, Volunteers in Police Service, Police League, McGaugh PTA, and the local shirt vendor who absorbed additional production costs. Meaningful community engagement does not require a large budget.
- Use everyone: Some of our strongest contributors were not sworn officers. Professional staff members, senior volunteers, police aides and civilian personnel played critical roles throughout the year. Community policing belongs to the entire organization.
- Plan for simplicity: One of the greatest logistical challenges was designing activities that could engage both a 5-year-old kindergartener and an 11-year-old fifth grader while remaining accessible to students of varying abilities. Simple, adaptable activities ultimately proved to be the most effective.
- Focus on relationships, not curriculum: Students may forget individual lessons, but they remember the adults who invested time in them. Repeated positive interactions are what transform a program into a relationship.
- Consistency produces results: The first visit introduced us. The second built familiarity. The third built trust. No single event could have achieved what repeated interactions accomplished.
What we really built
One unexpected outcome came after students received their commemorative bright blue Safety Seal T-shirt. With fifth-grade promotion just days away, students arrived carrying Sharpies and spent the week collecting signatures from classmates, teachers and police personnel. What began as a participation shirt became a keepsake of both their final year at McGaugh and the relationships formed through the program.
The shirts were produced by Caprimura Customs, a local business that agreed to provide the shirts at cost and absorb expenses beyond the donated funding. Their partnership transformed what could have been a simple participation giveaway into a lasting symbol of the program.
The Safety Seal Program taught traffic safety, emergency preparedness and healthy habits. More importantly, it gave approximately 700 children repeated opportunities to interact with the people who serve and protect their community.
Law enforcement is often introduced to children as a consequence. We wanted to introduce ourselves as a resource. What we built over the course of a school year was not simply a safety
program. It was familiarity, trust and connection.
For a profession that often meets people on the worst day of their lives, there may be no greater investment than ensuring our youngest residents know us long before they need us.
Author’s note: The author would like to recognize Principal Wendy Wood and the staff of McGaugh Elementary School, the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy Public Safety Executive Leadership Program, 911 For Kids, Caprimura Customs, and the many members of the Seal Beach Police Department who helped bring the inaugural Safety Seal Program to life.
