FLORENCE, Ala. (WHNT) — The Florence Police Department has partnered with SPAN, or Special Programming Achievement Network, a program for troubled youth.
“It’s a program that helps with troubled youth in the community they can be referred to them by the local schools the school system court refer them to the program. It’s just a program for them to gain some counseling and some techniques on leadership,” Florence Police Department Spokesperson Joshua Meza said.
Every summer, the Florence Police Department partners with SPAN to help juveniles understand and see the behind-the-scenes of police officers.
“Today, we’re doing the dive portion of it, and we are showing them some things behind the scenes with our dive team. They get to see the SWAT team, they saw the canine unit, and then they get to take a tour of the police department and just kind of get a good feeling of what the police department does and what we do as police officers,” Meza said.
Meza tells me, the police department partners with SPAN for a number of reasons.
“I think it helps humanize the badge. They can kind of see what we do, there’s there’s misconceptions about what police officers do, how they are, and it just kind of shows the other side of us and then how we operate and who we are behind the badge,” Meza said.
The program started on Monday and will finish up with the police department on Friday.
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