Mini Police

As our Mini Police program rolls into 2020, our Neighbourhood Policing Teams continue to meet and engage with thousands of primary school aged children across Lincolnshire on a regular basis. Since September, our PCSOs (Police Community Support Officers) in South Holland have delivered key messages across 22 schools, helping to educate children and keep them safe.

We have delivered messages around topics including Road Safety, Online Safety, Challenging Stereotypes, Antisocial behaviour and Scams. We have also covered Crime Scene Investigation, School Parking, Bike Marking and our Random Acts of Kindness task. Each of these carries a different message and involves a different learning style to keep the children engaged.

One example of how we keep the Mini Police program engaging is our Crime Scene Investigation task – our Mini Police (and in some schools whole classes) get to play detective. We stage a crime scene within the school, leaving clues that Police officers find in crime scenes such as fingerprints, DNA (from blood, hair, skin cells etc) and footprints. Before our Mini Police can even examine the crime scene, we kit them out with protective equipment – forensic suits and gloves – and they are then tasked to identify anything that could be evidence. If they can identify anything, we challenge them to work out how they can practically recover that evidence from the crime scene and then we explain how the police use that evidence to identify suspects. Once we’ve gathered all the evidence, we look for suspects – we get the children to work out how we can use what is in our surroundings to identify suspects. If we are able to identify any (we usually do!) then we have to think about what we would want to ask those suspects – our Mini Police write their own interview questions and then interview the suspects. It is up to them to work out ‘whodunit’. Pictured are the children from Holbeach Primary Academy in action during their investigation.

This session is great fun to be part of, but also helps to deliver learning about how the Police solve crimes, how forensics and science help to find evidence, and how using open questions (who, what, where, when, why and how) help to increase our knowledge base and put the pieces of the investigative puzzle together.

Another topic we cover is Scams – we know that your average 9-11 year old isn’t likely to be a scam victim – mainly because they don’t have what the scammers want – money – but we know that primary school age children come into contact with lots of adults – from parents and grandparents to family friends and others in their communities. We set out to teach the children what scams are, what types of scams there are, how to identify a scam and what to do if they think something is a scam or someone might be a victim of a scam. We do this with our Powerpoint presentation (written by ourselves in association with Friends Against Scams and adopted nationally by Trading Standards), and by using interactive games and

challenges to encourage the children to apply their newfound knowledge. Pictured are the children from Year 5 and 6 at Spalding Primary School who recently became Young Friends Against Scams.