New tactics take flight at this year’s Shop With A Cop
- Mark Sabbatini
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 15 hours ago
Santa arrives at a military installation in a police helicopter before motorcade parades down Egan Drive to help 55 kids pick out gifts for families
By Mark Sabbatini
Juneau Independent
Santa Claus was met by U.S. Department of Homeland Security and a few dozen other law enforcement officers when his flight landed in Juneau on Saturday morning. He was also carrying ID in the name of "Bruce Boland," yet had little trouble getting past them to exchange jolly greetings and embraces with his welcoming party.
Santa’s arrival in an Alaska State Troopers helicopter at the Alaska National Guard hangar was a new element of the annual Shop With A Cop in Juneau, which paired 49 officers with 55 young shoppers from 29 families. That was due to the elite tactical planning skills of the mission assessment team.
"We wanted to fly Santa in on a helicopter," said Kirt Stage-Harvey, a Juneau Police Department detective who helps organize the program locally. "The wildlife troopers have a helicopter and it's kind of a fun thing."
Plus it’s a lot easier for 100 officers and youths to exchange jolly greetings in the vast National Guard hangar rather than the relatively cramped lobby of the JPD station, Stage-Harvey said.
Santa (or "Bruce," if you prefer) said he’s logged plenty of time in airborne transport and offered praise for the AST helo — a perhaps not shocking endorsement compared to the rough and chilly ride of a non-aerodynamic, open-air sleigh.
"That thing is smooth," he said. "It’s like being a Cadillac."
Shop With A Cop is a nationwide community policing event where officers from various agencies take underprivileged or at-risk children on shopping trips funded by donations. Among the agencies in this year’s local shopping were the troopers, Alaska Department of Corrections, U.S. Transportation Security Administration, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and U.S. Forest Service Law Enforcement and Investigations.
As in past years, most of the local participants getting from the meeting point to the shopping site did so in a long parade of law enforcement vehicles, many with lights flashing and sirens blaring. The new gathering spot meant a procession that started near the airport and went a short distance down Egan Drive, thus holding up traffic for a few minutes while they turned left off the main thoroughfare into the entrance of Fred Meyer.
Once inside the store, the shopping process played out in somewhat different ways based on the whims and experience of the officers. The young shoppers each had $200 to spend — half for family and friends, half for themselves — with some picking out their own things and others handing the officer they were with a wish list, depending on the pairings.
"The hard part is just keeping everything organized, making sure you're not over your limit, and making sure everything gets tagged," said Jaimie Rountree, a U.S. Customs agriculture specialist officer, helping a fellow officer shop with four children during her second year at the event.
Lists for each kid of items and people to shop for, lots of gift tags, and plastic trash bags to group items handed to them (and allowing the purchases to be concealed from peers who might be getting some of them as gifts) were in the shopping cart Roundtree pushed through the toy aisles.
Alex Walters, 11, who said she made a list before coming to the store, handed Roundtree several items in short order. Walters said picking out gifts for her younger siblings was easy since "there are a lot of toys that they like," but some of the shopping ahead wasn’t going to be as simple.
"My mom and my grandma, because I don’t know what they want," she said when asked who would be the hardest to shop for.
In addition to purchases, which were taken back to the JPD station for gift wrapping before they end up at the recipients’ homes, families were also given the fixings for holiday meals at the checkout lanes.
Normally a bunch of officers cruising the toy aisles with shopping carts and kids in tow during the holiday season wouldn’t be cause for concern to anyone. But David Lyons, an assistant federal security director for TSA, said he expected to get some reaction from people seeing him in a black uniform vest with "Department of Homeland Security" in large letters on the back due to mass immigration operations that have occurred this year.
"We were downtown a couple times this year on the docks and stuff, and we had ‘ICE’ protests, but we were very quick to say we’re not ICE," he said, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that operates under the Homeland Security department.
Lyons said eight officers with his department were shopping for a total of nine kids in three families. He said this is his fourth year participating in the program, which he’s done in Juneau and Seattle.
"What I do in advance is I obviously find out how many officers that we can give to the event, and then I go to Kirt and I basically say we can take on probably three families of three of us in this case because it's like one kid per officer," he said.
Stage-Harvey said the number of participants was down from an all-time high last year, which involved 61 kids, which is due to the officers and funds available. This year’s total is more typical of the 40 to 50 kids usually selected each year, with factors such as those who’ve been in at-risk experiences taken into account when more families sign up than available resources allow.
This year’s shopping trip was a familiar and yet entirely new experience for Morgan Dale, a Forest Service officer based in Montana who is on temporary assignment in Juneau. He said he’s participated in Shop With A Cop for about 10 years and many of the basics such as the shopping are similar back home, but not some of the extra touches.
"It’s not as cool as Santa jumping out of a helicopter," he said. "That’s pretty unique."
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at editor@juneauindependent.com or (907) 957-2306.
