Jasleeen

__**Collingwood Community Policing**__  **The collingwood community policing center is a non profit organization. It first opened in April of 1994 to serve the collingwood-renfrew area.** ** Community policing is a results-oriented, community based system relying on police officers, volunteers, and community members. They believe that they can provide you with the tools to make a difference in your community and reduce crime in your neighbourhood. ** **This organization is for the community (mostly people that live around the neighborhood) people come here report problems they've had in the community.** **The problems can be from graffiti, robbery, theft to murder. If people do not want to directly go to the policing center they can ask questions online on the Collingwood Policing website. People also come to collingwood policing center if they have a question that they were to afraid to ask a police officer, and too get advice on situations they may have in their neighborhood. Also people who want to Adopt - A - Block may also come here and gets tools they need to make their block safe and clean. The CCP does many presentations for outreach in the community to get people aware of whats going on and what they can do as citizens to help the community. The CCP makes presentations to schools. One of the really big things the CCP are organizing right now is a parade which will be occuring on June 6th. The parade is going o be for everyone in the community and one of my jobs was too call many companies to sponser the parade and to contact people if they could make floats and participate in the parade. The CPP's main objective is for people too know what is going on in the community and aware them of what they can do to protect themselves and others. For example we have gone on kingsway and have put autotheft prevention notices on all the cars too see if their cars where safe, on the notice their is a checklist that says things like are their objects like bags wallets in plain view, is their some sort of security system, is the vehicle locked. These notices make people aware of things they should do so their cars wont get broken into. At collingwood community policing there are many job oppurtunities available such as the boss here Chris Taulu and she is the outreach coordinater,theres a president, a vice president, a treasurer, theres a director, a representative, Many of the positions available here are for volunteers aswell. For volunteers you just have to be eighteen years old, if your not coming from your highschool but too actaully work here you need a college diploma. Since we are usually just patrolling the streets and noting things down in books i do not get too experaince very much interacting with "customer" the one experiance i did have was when Chris left me alone at the office because she had to go run out for about an half an hour and a man came in (usually when people come in chris deals with them) and the man claimed that he lost his wallet at Superstore and he has all of his cards in their like his citizenship card, and credit cards and i had to file an report for him. Also an experiance i had with a customer was when the man didnt know how to speak english so i had to translate for him. One positive experiance i had was going court watching because ever since i was a little kid i always wanted to be a lawyer and in grade nine i wasnt entirely sure what i wanted to go into, and after going court watching and observing the lawyers and their startegies i noticed that, that may be something i would really like to do and im glad i go to go more then once because every different time i went i saw something new and my perspective changed a little. Something that to me that was totally unexpected was how much outreach the collingwood community policing center actually does and how much they help their community. Each person that works their is so devoted and happy and they love their job, helping others and making a difference in the community. Everyone always has a task or project to do and its interesting because never before did i even notice that there are places like this that arent a police station but just their too help the community. Since i have only 2 days more left into my work experiance i noticed that this type of work has interested my in a way, i never thought of something like this as a career option but i do kind of like how everything is so fast paced and how there is also so much to do and projects to be done. Especially going to the courts i learnt that working hard in school will pay off in the future when your a proffesional at what you do, and all you got to do is work hard. Some differences about going to work are there are always different houts you dont always start at 8:45 and end at 2:49, at work their are many more meeting and you alway want to get finished what your doing fast and at school you just socialize and do your work for homework. The similiarites are you develop an relationship between your co-workers aswell as you do for your friends, theirs always something to be done, something to look foward too and also you have a boss at school is would be your teachers and at work it would be your manager. Something that i will always remember from this workexperiance is when we went to 29th station and took a walk, and when we went to Main street near the courts, because i have never been in those kinds of areas and when i actually saw like right infront of me what type of lives people had it was heartbreaking. It was like a whole different world especially on hastings street and it made me appreciate things way more.**

__**Day 1**__  **On my first day at Collingwood Policing center i was shown around the neighborhood and we only went outside for a little while because of the bad weather. When we did go outside we went around and checked peoples cars, if the cars were crime safe and we had a autotheft prevention checklist to put on their windshields. I noticed that many cars are not very safe, in many cars there were purses, gym bags & store bags in plain view. I also noticed that only 2/10 cars had a steering wheel lock. Surprisingly I even saw 3 cars that werent even locked. We also went around kingsway and took a palm pilot with us to find cars that may be stolen, i was hoping to find a stolen car but none were found. The palm pilot was very interesting because its shows you all the stolen cars in British Columbia and sometimes when youd type a license plate number I'd only be a letter off. When we would go outside we would have to wear these jackets that say volunteer police on them, I noticed that people look at you very differently when wearing the jackets and smile and greet us. While we were walking a woman noticed us and came running to tell us that her that someone has been consistently hitting her car for the past year, she was telling us how she had called the police many times but the police doesnt respond andymore and they just take her to the hospital where mental people go, we talked to her and tried to calm her down and told her things she could do from preventing her car hit and after that we learned how to write an report.** __** Day 2 **__ **On my second day at Collingwood Policing Center we started making coloring books for a literacy program about safety, that we will hand out to kids. The coloring books consist of many tips about how to be safe when your outside and about the environment At around 11 oclock we went downtown to go court watching and we stayed and watched many different cases. For some of the cases we only saw ten minutes of them because they were boring, but other cases were very interesting and we watched the case until it would end. The case that was very interesting had an defence lawyer that was really good, it was interesting watching him and listening to the questions he was asking because I could tell he had his own technique. When he asked the victim questions I could see that the victim was kind of getting confused because he would contradict her in a way. After watching that case we took a tour of the court house and learned that when you enter a court room or leave the courtroom you have to nod to the judge for respect, also we learned the different positions there were in the court room and where each person has to stand.**  **On my fifth day at Collingwood Policing Center we had to run many errands. When we first arrived we went went onto the skytrain and got off at 29th Avenue station, we went with one of the volunteers that have been volunteering for four years. He showed us many places where people lived in really bad conditions, he showed us many popular places where people go to do drugs or sleep. After coming walking around the neighborhood for about an hour and a half we went had to go to the Longsdale Quay to drop off a package. We went onto the seabus and went to go drop it off. After dropping the package off we went to the courts on Main Street, we didnt get too watch many interesting cases because the time we had arrived at was the time everyone was going for lunch**.
 * __Day 5__ **

On my seventh day at collingwood policing center, the weather outside was very bad and one of the volunteers couldnt make it to work so we decided to have a low key day and just stay in the office and do stuff. Collingwood policing center was throwing an annual parade for the community and it was my job to call businesses and ask them to sponser the event. I called about 12 businesses and each person did sponser the event, so that was an sucess. After calling the businesses Chris gave me a an example thankyou letter and i had too type 12 letters and change them depending on the business. Writing the letters taught me a lot about how a business lettter should look like, i learned how to make a formal letter and how to start it, how many spaces to leave between paragraphs and all that type of stuff. That took about an hour and after that i had to write on all of the envelopes and mail the letters. That day i also had to call differeny businesses that would make a float for the parade and i got about 7 businesses and i had to make letters for them aswell. That same day i went with one of the volunteers to pick up this banner. I thought today would go by slow but it actaully went by fast because there was a lot to do and im glad i got to help them with the parade.**
 * __Day 7__