Mission to Skopje supports confidence-building between schoolchildren and police
Not quite. Bringing police into the classroom is part of an initiative by the Ministry of Interior (MoI), implemented jointly with the Ministry of Education and supported by the OSCE Spillover Monitor Mission to Skopje. It is funded by the Dutch Embassy in Skopje.
The project has done a great deal to strengthen confidence by teaching children the fundamentals of safety and helping them learn more about the officers' work.
Nearly 15,000 pupils visited
Between December 2004 and the end of the school year in June 2005, police officers visited nearly 15,000 primary school pupils and explained - in Macedonian or Albanian - about police officers' duties, children's rights and the principles of community behaviour.
The officers outlined the basics of safe conduct, including how to talk to strangers and how to avoid street violence, as well as other important issues such as road safety and security in the home.
Twenty thousand reflector badges and 18,500 colouring books with basic information on safety have also been distributed in first grade classes throughout the country.
The MoI favours this pro-active approach. "We believe that the use of public information is a key element in community policing. It can also be a key way to bring the youngest citizens and police much closer to each other," says Goran Pavlovski from the Ministry.
Improving police-community relations
Getting the police involved in a child safety campaign also contributes to the Mission's overall aim of improving relations between the police and communities.
The programme is being implemented by school teachers and community relations co-ordinators from the MoI, with the assistance of the OSCE Mission's community policing trainers.
The co-ordinators are police officers appointed by the MoI who have been trained in community policing and studied best practices on an exchange programme in The Netherlands. Today, communities throughout the country are benefiting from their skills.
"The children are the future of this country. It's great that they now view local police officers as friends and have the unique opportunity to see the human face behind the uniform," says Mite Stojkov, the Deputy Chief of the MoI's Section for Public Peace and Order.
Complementing related projects
The project complements other community policing projects supported by the Mission. These include the TV series Odblisku (Take a Closer Look), which has produced a series of TV spots promoting the benefits of community policing; the citizens' advisory groups set up to improve co-operation among the police, local authorities and communities, and the 'Road Safety for Children' project, under which traffic police were trained to educate first grade children from elementary schools throughout the country about road safety.
'Road Safety for Children' is part of the ambitious 'Road Safety for All' project, which is aimed at helping improve safety on the roads through the training of traffic police and a nationwide public awareness campaign, and is supported by a contribution from the US Government.
Parents, teachers and representatives from the MoI believe that the initiative to bring police and children together in the classroom has already proved its effectiveness.
"In our town, the local police officers are genuine members of the community," says the mother of 7-year-old Marija Stefanovska from Radovis. "I feel that they are part of my family. Now I am more confident about my young daughter's safety."
The MoI and the Mission are so satisfied with the results of the project that they have decided to expand it to include older children (grades 3-4 and 7-8) and, in some areas, to broaden the scope of the project to outside the classroom.