On Tuesday evening, the Owensboro Police Department will trade its patrol cars for fishing poles. From 5 to 7 p.m. on Oct. 6, the department hosts its first-ever "Cops & Bobbers" at Jack C. Fisher Park, 3900 West Fifth Street Road — a free, drop-in evening of fishing, food, and door prizes designed to put officers and residents on the same bank of the same pond.
The event is a partnership between OPD and the city's Parks and Recreation Department, and it comes with some serious logistical backing. The Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources will supply loaner fishing poles for anyone who shows up empty-handed, and Frank Miller & Son Sporting Goods has donated worms for bait. Academy Sports + Outdoors is providing door prizes, and OPD officers will be grilling hot dogs.
The idea, according to OPD Public Information Officer Mark Hammonds, came from watching how other departments run similar community-policing events.
"This is supposed to be fun and educational," Hammonds told the Owensboro Times. "Maybe some people may not have had a positive interaction with law enforcement. This is outside the typical scope of how someone would interact with law enforcement, so it's a laid-back environment."
The play on words may be new to Owensboro, but "Cops & Bobbers" is a well-worn format elsewhere. A version of the event has been run for years by police departments around the country, including the Garfield Police Department in northern New Jersey, which organized a "Cops and Bobbers" youth fishing derby at Dahnerts Lake Park with the aim of building positive relationships with local families and steering kids away from trouble. The format has since spread to departments as far-flung as Gurnee, Illinois, and as far west as Nevada, where the nonprofit Wildlife Habitat Improvement of Nevada has donated poles and volunteers to a "Cops and Bobbers" day at the lake.
The setting for Owensboro's version is a 36-acre community park on the city's western edge, best known for its four synthetic ball fields, eight hitting tunnels, and athletic field house. But the park also holds a lake — the quieter half of the property, and the reason Fish and Wildlife studied the pond this summer and plans to stock it ahead of Tuesday's event. The stocking is expected to include catfish, bluegill, and sunfish, giving first-timers a decent shot at a bite.
Hammonds framed the event as an introduction to the outdoors as much as an introduction to policing. "You ask about any police officer why they wanted to get into this and (they'll say) it was to be a positive role model," he told the Messenger-Inquirer. Meeting officers outside of official police business, he said, makes them seem less intimidating and shows that officers are just regular people. The event is geared largely toward children and families, but anyone is welcome — including adults curious about a career in law enforcement, who can use the evening to ask officers questions directly.
The timing is not accidental. The following morning, Oct. 7, OPD continues its community outreach as part of National Coffee with a Cop Day, with officers stationed at the McDonald's on South Frederica Street from 7 to 9 a.m. Coffee with a Cop is itself a national initiative supported by the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, built on the same premise as the fishing night: that a few minutes of unstructured conversation can do more for trust than a hundred formal encounters.
Taken together, the two events amount to a deliberate, two-day push by OPD to be seen in a different light. The fishing night is the more novel of the pair — and the more ambitious, requiring a stocked pond, borrowed poles, donated bait, and a state license waiver to pull off. But its logic is simple enough. Put an officer and a kid on a pond bank with a bobber in the water, and for two hours the usual script of a police interaction disappears.
There is no ticket and no registration. Participants can come and go as they please between 5 and 7 p.m. Poles are available on loan; bait is free; the hot dogs are on the department.
For a city where the most common encounters between residents and officers tend to happen on the worst days, that's the point.