On a Friday afternoon in early October, the lawns of Look Memorial Park in Northampton will fill with something the park rarely sees: 75 first responder agencies at once, helicopters touching down on the grass, K9 units working a crowd, food trucks, live music, and a costume contest for children. The Fall Public Safety Festival runs from 4 to 8 p.m. and costs nothing to attend. There is no ticket, no gate, no capacity limit. You can simply walk in.
The event is hosted by the Northampton Police Department and the Franklin County Police Cadets, and the pairing is the interesting part. The Cadets are not a police department. They are a nonprofit, run by an executive board made up almost entirely of working officers from departments across Franklin County, and the festival is, by the organizers' own account, as much a recruitment and fundraising vehicle for that nonprofit as it is a community outreach event.
The cadet program itself is young. It launched in April 2024 through the Franklin County Sheriff's Office with 24 cadets, meeting weekly at Greenfield Community College, with field trips to places like ropes courses to supplement the classroom work. It was modeled after similar programs in Connecticut and supported by the Northeast Regional Law Enforcement Educational Association. Starting in 2025, it expanded to run the full calendar year. It is open to Franklin County residents aged 14 to 20, and it is deliberately cheap to join, with costs covered by donations and fundraising so that money is not the thing that keeps a kid out.
The program's director is Greenfield police Lt. Jason Haskins, who helped spearhead its formation. Its vice president is Sunderland police officer Benjamin Peters. The two founded the nonprofit, according to a fellow board member. The rest of the executive board reads like a roster of the region's departments: Sgt. Jennifer Bartak-Clark of Deerfield, Capt. Jason Collins of the Franklin County Sheriff's Office, Greenfield Community College police Chief Jack Vanasse, and Whatley police Chief James Sevigne.
Haskins has described the program as resting on three premises. The first is a straightforward introduction to criminal justice for kids who think they might want it. The second is youth development and leadership, which he frames as wanting kids to become the best version of themselves. The third is community service. The curriculum has covered motor vehicle law, communication techniques, and the use of K9 units, along with resume building, networking, and one-on-one career guidance.
Sheriff Christopher Donelan has been an enthusiastic backer, and he speaks about the model from personal experience. A cadet program like this, he has said, is exactly how he got started. He was a junior in high school when a similar program opened his eyes to policing, and he has pointed to that history as evidence of the model's longevity and legitimacy.
The results are already visible in small ways. Some former cadets have gone on to begin careers in local law enforcement, crediting the program with showing them the range of jobs that exist in public safety. The program's own figures note that about a third of its cadets are female, and its stated aims are character, community, and leadership through supervised service.
This is not the first Fall Public Safety Festival. A previous edition was held at the Franklin County Fairgrounds in Greenfield, where residents were briefly startled by drones and helicopters passing overhead before learning the cause. Inside the gates that day were displays of police, fire, and medical response equipment and demonstrations of police dogs working their handlers. The festival drew a crowd and, according to reporting by The Shoestring, served a dual purpose: it was a fundraising and youth recruiting opportunity for the nonprofit, and it was a chance for the public to meet public service providers on a good day rather than on the worst day of someone's life.
Peters put the philosophy plainly. It is not just one profession, he said. It is all of it coming together. Not just police, not just fire, not even just EMS. Dispatchers. Mental health workers. Tow truck drivers. The festival is built around the idea that the people who show up when something goes wrong are a much larger and more varied group than most residents ever stop to consider.
That framing matters in a region where the relationship between police and the public is not a hypothetical. The Shoestring, which covers western Massachusetts with an eye toward police accountability, noted the recruiting and fundraising dimensions of the event alongside its community-building purpose, and the organizers did not dispute either. The festival is, in their telling, both things at once: a good afternoon out for families and a pipeline into a profession.
For the Northampton edition, the setting is a park with its own long history of being given to the public. Look Memorial Park, more than 150 acres, was a gift from Fannie Burr Look in honor of her late husband, Frank Newhall Look. In 1928, Mrs. Look gave the city a farm valued at $60,000 along with $450,000 for its development and a trust fund for its upkeep. The park opened to the public in 1930. It is owned by the city but operated as a nonprofit by a self-perpetuating board of trustees, with the mayor serving ex officio, and it receives no tax money; upkeep comes from visitor fees, grants, and gifts. It is open year-round, and it holds a steamer train, pedal boats, a wildlife center, playgrounds, miniature golf, a spray park, and the Pines Theater.
The choice of venue is not incidental. A park that exists because a private citizen decided the public deserved somewhere to gather is a fitting place to stage an event whose stated purpose is getting strangers to talk to the people who respond when they call 911.
What visitors will actually see is a scale of equipment that is unusual to assemble in one place. Seventy-five agencies is a lot of apparatus, and the live helicopter landings are the kind of thing that draws a crowd on their own. The K9 demonstrations, which in Greenfield involved dogs working their trainers in front of an audience, tend to be the other big draw. Add live music, food trucks, and a costume contest for kids, and the shape of the afternoon becomes clear: a fairground with a message attached.
It is worth being precise about what is and is not confirmed. The event is listed as free and open, running 4 to 8 p.m. on Friday, October 2, 2026, at Look Memorial Park, hosted by the Northampton Police Department and the Franklin County Police Cadets, with 75 first responder agencies, helicopter landings, K9 demonstrations, live music, food trucks, and a children's costume contest. No official event page or ticketing link has been published, which is consistent with an event that does not require tickets. Anyone planning to attend should treat the listed hours as the reliable detail and expect the rest to be visible from the parking lot.
What the festival represents is a bet that a good afternoon in a park can do work that a press release cannot. The cadet program behind it was built by officers who mostly do their jobs in Franklin County, and it is being staged this year in Hampshire County, in a park that belongs to everyone and is funded by no one's taxes. The helicopters will land, the dogs will work, and somewhere in the crowd there will be a fourteen-year-old who came for the costume contest and leaves thinking about a career.