WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) is pleased to feature the Mission (TX) Police Department (MPD) as its “Community Policing in Action” Photo Contest winner for April 2021.

The MPD is committed to maintaining good will through community outreach and, to further this effort, the department holds various events through its Community Oriented Policing (COP) Unit. The winning photo shows MPD Officers Julio Perez and John Oliva partaking in the COP Unit’s 2019 Valentine’s Day visit to a Mission nursing home. During the visit, the officers chatted with residents of the nursing home and gave them flowers, with one resident asking MPD Corporal Robert Rodriguez if he would be her valentine.

Through its COP Unit, the MPD also hosts Thanksgiving dinners in November and, during the Christmas season, hosts a party for local families, each of whom receive a bag of toys carefully selected for the ages and genders of their children. When many Mission residents suffered from food shortages, the MPD held a barbecue and provided approximately 750 meals as a thank-you gesture for the community’s support of the department. The MPD also participates in Crime Stoppers, a public safety program that operates at the local level and provides a way for community members to anonymously tip off MPD officers to criminal activity. At the core of all of the MPD’s community activities is the philosophy of community policing, which emphasizes the importance of building relationships of mutual trust and cooperation.

View the winning photo on the COPS Office website, as well as on the COPS Office’s official Twitter profile and Facebook page. MPD’s commitment to community policing and the importance of embracing the multicultural members of its community is also chronicled in the April 2021 edition of the COPS Office e-newsletter, the Community Policing Dispatch.

The COPS Office is the federal component of the Department of Justice responsible for advancing community policing nationwide. The only Department of Justice agency with policing in its name, the COPS Office was established in 1994 and has been the cornerstone of the nation’s crime fighting strategy with grants, a variety of knowledge resource products, and training and technical assistance. Through the years, the COPS Office has become the go-to organization for law enforcement agencies across the country and continues to listen to the field and provide the resources that are needed to reduce crime and build trust between law enforcement and the communities served. The COPS Office has invested more than $14 billion to advance community policing, including grants awarded to more than 13,000 state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies to fund the hiring and redeployment of more than 134,000 officers.

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