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Police Week honors and recognizes the sacrifice and turbulence of police officers nationally. This week, Michigan celebrated their law enforcement state-wide.
Chief Donnelly of Houghton Police Department spoke on what it is to be a police officer in Houghton.
“I think our job is very difficult in the fact that we always end up dealing with people on their worst day. If there’s any sort of crisis in their life, that’s when they end up needing police. Our officers will deal with people with a range of emotions any given day. [When you walk into work] you don’t know what’s going to happen, and when something tragic happens to somebody, and if it’s terrible enough, we get involved in it. That’s when we have most of our [first meetings] with people.” – John Donnelly, Chief of Police in Houghton, Michigan.
Between the long overnight 36 hour shifts and the emotional strain of some calls, being an officer to serve the public is difficult. Police week recognizes the year-long efforts of our law enforcement officers.
“Our job, it gets very demanding. We’ll have police officers that are 22 or 23 years old and they’ll have encountered 15 or 20 deceased people, and that can range from elderly people dying of natural causes, but we’ll have infant deaths, kids getting hurt. We’ll have all sorts of tragedies- animals getting abused, and all those things.” – John Donnelly, Chief of Police in Houghton, Michigan.
Chief Donnelly is a firm believer of getting out and interacting with the community, and highly encourages his officers to do so as well. This lets the community get to know their officers as people instead of entities, so they may feel more comfortable around them if they are in a crisis situation.
Donnelly said that daily, they tend to act as a directory for other people. For traffic incidents, they can handle it themselves, but for a mental health crisis situation, they contact local organizations such as Dial Help for a specialized individual.
Each officer must be trained to act for many different situations for rural areas such as Houghton, which is a common trend for law enforcement officers in Michigan.
