MERIDIAN TOWNSHIP - Do you have what it takes to be a police officer? Lansing Community College along with the Meridian Township Police Department offers a chance for you to find out at their Youth Police Academy, a seven week program for high school students which provides hands-on experience, physical activity and real life observation and participation in the criminal justice system.

Anymore more hands-on and it would be the real deal. Instructor Steve Relyea gives students the basics on how to react in crisis situations and then puts them to the test using a computer simulated video. They are assigned random virtual scenarios from a prerecorded list that they could potentially experience in real life as a police officer and expected to react and even shoot at the screen if necessary. “It’s really informative and actually gives you more of an insight what the cops do and the police officers business is not really like known to teenagers so this gives teens an opportunity to actually be able to get on the inside and see how they would handle the certain situations that you never would think of,” says Hunter Dawson, a Senior at Haslett High School and son of Meridian Township Police Sergeant Scott Dawson.

Each workshop is different, week six is the “Use of Force/MILO” workshop where students are provided with a hands-on firearms training simulator. “There’s an hour of teaching, the first week for instance they tell you about the organization, the police department and why they’re set up this way, their shifts and all the basic knowledge of the police department and then the second hour is hands on. So the first week you can see the cars and find out why do they have them but then other weeks it’s CSI and like the hands-on stuff so like you get to do the fingerprinting and you get to take fingerprints or like the shooting going at today's workshop, it’s all virtual reality but you get to go in there and actually be able to be the officer you’ve been talking about for the past nine weeks,” says Dawson.

The firearms training simulator is just one of seven different workshops included in the Youth Police Academy. Students also train in pairs in order to learn how to work as a team and react to situations together using communication. Through this workshop students are able to gain connections in the industry and learn if becoming a police officer is the right career path for them.

The connections are what keep Dawson coming back every year, being a three-year workshop veteran. “My favorite part about coming here honestly has to be the people, every time I come here there’s always someone interesting that’s always like full-on for the police department always so into it and it’s always kind of cool to see how much they want to do it and it gives me faith for the police department because it’s one of those careers that’s not necessarily living up to what it needs to and so we have to try and draw more people in so when you see somebody like that it’s nice.”

The youth police academy is held every year creating future police officers. Applications can be found in the counseling office of your local high school or by visiting the Meridian Township Police Department. If you are interested in attending the seven-week workshop next Spring, contact Sergeant Scott Dawson at Dawson@meridian.mi.us or go to the meridian township website and fill out an application. The workshop is projected to begin on Wednesday, February 15th and is held every Wednesday for seven weeks after that.