WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) is pleased to feature the St. Charles County (MO) Police Department (SCCPD) as its “Community Policing in Action” Photo Contest winner for July 2021.

The SCCPD’s community engagement is the “foundation of [the] department’s culture,” says SCCPD Chief Kurt Frisz.

On June 11, 2020, a crowd in St. Charles County marched to protest the death of George Floyd and racial inequality. The slogan on a marcher’s shirt, “Let’s talk and listen,” caught the attention of Frisz as he was in the middle of the crowd, marching to show his support.

“I responded to the slogan on his t-shirt, and started talking to him. He was a very pleasant young man, and we had a good, earnest discussion about police and racial relations.”

The march was planned to proceed from Dardenne Prairie, a county town that the SCCPD patrols, to Lake St. Louis and back. Realizing that the organizers were new to managing protest events, Chief Frisz and Chris DiGiuseppi, Chief of the Lake St. Louis Police Department (LSLPD), helped them with planning, even lending the organizers a bullhorn to exhort the marchers to stay on course.

“Police from both departments, ours and LSLPD, joined the marchers,” Frisz added. “We and the organizers both saw this as a collaborative event, protestors with police. And, from what we heard, people on the sidelines were clapping and honking horns in support of this collaboration as well as the Black Lives Matter movement.”

View the winning photo on the COPS Office website, as well as on the COPS Office’s official Twitter profile and Facebook page. SCCPD’s commitment to community policing and its collaboration with members of the St. Charles County community are also chronicled in the July 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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