Cop Shop celebrates 10 years of smiles

All too often — just due to the nature of the job — when we encounter police officers, it’s not always for pleasant reasons. We’re reporting a crime to them, or receiving bad news from them, or maybe even being arrested by them.

But that’s not what the police of HRM are all about – they’re there to serve, protect, and be helpful members of the community. Every holiday season, they like to help remind people of that, and take some deserving kids Christmas shopping while they’re at it.

This year, the Halifax Regional Police, in partnership with the Halifax Shopping Centre, celebrated their 10th annual Cop Shop event, where police officers throughout HRM are paired with a child in need, and take them shopping with $200 each, compliments of the Halifax Shopping Centre.

“We started it as an opportunity to pair children with police officers, with the intention of having children understand that police officers are someone there to help, but they’re also really just individuals that you can talk to, and approach, [and] just to increase their comfort level with them,” says Stephanie Schnare, marketing director for the Halifax Shopping Centre. “We do this with about 50 children every year, and the children are selected based on need, involvement in their community, and academics.”

“Policing, at its most basic level, is dealing with those challenges and problems that people themselves should not deal with, or cannot deal with, or would not deal with under any normal circumstances. So, we really don’t come across people at the best of times,” says Jean-Michel Blain, the Chief of Police for Halifax Regional Police. “But here’s a great opportunity for our people to be able to go out, to be able to contribute to the lives of almost over 50 children, and to be able to do something that they normally don’t do, and that’s to make somebody very happy.”

Each year, the Halifax Shopping Centre provides their 50 Cop Shop shoppers with $10,000 — do the math, and that comes out to a $100,000 donation since the program began in 2005.

And that’s just the straight-up monetary donation from the HSC. Cop Shoppers get even more than that, thanks to the generosity of the mall’s many retailers, as well as community partners. This year alone, numerous stores in the mall offered special discounts for the Cop Shoppers, some provided free vouchers and goodies for their stockings, and SportChek promised a free winter coat of each child’s choosing, free of charge.

“Metro Transit provided us a bus, as it was raining outside, so they offered up a bus so we could have the kids scoot over to Walmart,” says Schnare. “It’s just great to see all of the Shopping Centre retailers, and also the community, give back.”

So, what do the Cop Shoppers shop for? The sky’s the limit.

“Clothes, wrestlers, Pokémon, high socks for basketball, and maybe a hockey stick,” says eight-year-old Chance Johnson, who is excited to become famous from appearing in this article (enjoy your newfound fame, Chance!).

Ten-year-old Naomi Shields, on the other hand, went hunting for clothes, jewelry, and art supplies. “Drawing, painting – pretty much any kind of art,” says Shields.

But the Cop Shoppers aren’t just interested in themselves – they understand that this is the season for giving, and they have friends and family in mind during their christmas shopping excursion.

“I’m going to get my mom a Christmas present,” says Johnson, but he declined to say exactly what he was getting her, just in case she reads this article before she opens it.

“Like, my brother, my sister I already did, my mom – people like that,” says Shields. “It makes me feel better, to get stuff for other people, not only yourself. You’re getting it for other people, and helping them.”

“Very often what they see is the kids themselves will go out and get gifts for family members — their parents, their siblings — and they kind of forget about themselves,” says Blain, who says his officers are often known to treat some of the kids to presents and treats out of their own pocket. “That’s why our people go out of their way to do it.”

The HSC made thinking about others even easier for the kids this year — on top of everything, the kids were given an additional $10 ‘Pay-It-Forward’ gift card, to buy a gift for a kid their own age and gender, which would be donated to the Salvation Army.

But at the end of the day, what everyone associates with Cop Shop more than anything else is just how fun it is – that includes the shoppers AND the coppers.

“We get to have, in my opinion, the funnest day of the year,” says Constable Jamie Cooke, a K-9 officer with the Halifax Regional Police. “We get to take some well-deserving children out, and we get to go Christmas shopping. It’s really the most fun I get to have all year.”

“What I saw there is I saw 50-plus young children, and then I saw 50-plus older children,” says Blain, who hopes that the Cop Shop program helps kids see there’s a fun alternative to getting into trouble, and maybe even inspire them to become a police officer themselves one day. “You could see the smiles, and it really made me feel really satisfied inside.”

It’s a pretty magical day, Cop Shop day, and the kids who get to take part appreciate what the police, HSC, and the community-at-large have done for them in order to make their holidays just as magical.

“Thanks for doing this,” says Shields. “It’s going to help the families, it’s going to help us, it’s going to make a lot of other families have a better Christmas than they’ve had before.”