Community: City of Tawas City - Tawas City Police Department
Population: Under 2,500
In April of 2021, The Tawa City Police Department, along with the Tawas Police Officers Association to conduct a campaign and fundraiser for Autism Awareness. The Police Officers wore custom Autism Awareness police patches on their uniforms and the patrol cars sported very colorful puzzle piece graphics to show their support of Autism Awareness. In addition, local area businesses helped the police department sell their Autism Awareness Police Patches to help support our community Autism center. Approximately $1,500 was raised for our local center!
Replicability:
Our group project utilized our current Tawas City Police uniform patch, but had it re-created to embrace the Autism Awareness puzzle piece insignias. I made the puzzle piece graphics for the patrol cars on my Cricut machine and applied them to the patrol cars myself.
Creativity and Originality:
We found that there are police agencies out there that support autism awareness and order their specialty patches; however we did not find many that embrace them in the field. Our officers wore the uniforms with the Autism Awareness patches for the month of April, as well as wore an Autism Awareness pin. We made vinyl graphics to additionally show our support while out on patrol. To see the kids reactions that are on the Autism Spectrum, when they saw our cars was absolutely amazing. Truly a life changing project. Funds from the sale of the project benefited the Acorn Health Autism Center.
Community Impact:
We have received an overwhelming amount of support from not only our community, but vacationers traveling through our city! We received daily voicemails, knocks on our police station door and emails telling us how happy they were to see our support. We have a lot of Autistic children in our jurisdiction and the positive impact we've had interacting with them on calls because of our unique uniforms has been tremendous.
