Deputies To Get Home Cooking

Thu., April 13, 2000

By Trinity Hartman trinityh@spokesman.com

`Bad Cop. No Donut.” It’s a put-down you won’t hear at the SCOPE Edgecliff station.

On Friday, SCOPE members will show their appreciation for the good cops who work for the Sheriff’s office with home-cooked food.

“I think this community is starting to understand how difficult a deputy’s job is and how it can become very negative,” said SCOPE Edgecliff president Jackie Ash.

SCOPE members will serve up home-cooked meals and provide plenty of snacks from 11 a.m. to midnight. They expect 30 to 50 deputies from the three shifts to show up at the station, 522 S. Thierman Road, during the Friday event.

Deputy Mark Smoldt patrols the Edgecliff neighborhood.

Since SCOPE started in Edgecliff, Smoldt said, people have begun stopping him to talk about the neighborhood. He gets more friendly waves and less hostile looks.

“Every day you see something positive that’s resulted from this,” he said of the SCOPE station. “I’m not afraid of them (sheriff’s deputies) anymore,” said Debra Kirkpatrick, a SCOPE Edgecliff member who lives on East Woodlawn Drive.

Kirkpatrick has gotten to know the deputies who patrol her neighborhood and has made sure her three sons feel comfortable around the officers.

The key to reducing crime is to change the way children in the neighborhood view law enforcement, Ash said.

“The only input (about deputies) that a lot of kids get is negative. It perpetuates the cycle of them against us,” she said. “Those walls have to be brought down before we can build strong communities.”

SCOPE Edgecliff plans to tell students at Pratt Elementary that deputies will be at the SCOPE station Friday. Ash said she expects some kids who live in the neighborhood to stop by to get their pictures taken with the deputies.

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