Police Community Challenge
UConn PCC Mission
The UConn Police Community Challenge is to positively enhance community and police relationships through hands-on shared adventure education programming as well as effective data collection and assessment aimed at discerning impact and best-practices.
What is the UConn PCC?
The UConn PCC is a community building challenge course program hosted by the UConn Police Department and UConn Department of Student Activities. Community members and police officers participate side-by-side in activities and initiatives at the UConn Four Arrows Challenge Course.
Based upon the Police Youth Challenge Program (PYC) from Baltimore Chesapeake Bay Outward Bound School and the Baltimore Police Department , the UConn PCC provides a chance to intentionally bring community members and police officers together in a neutral setting outside of the traditional police service roles. This gives two groups the opportunity to become one and learn more about each another as individual people. Hosted within a setting of adventure education, the group is offered opportunities to engage in fun and experiential activity as they build trust, develop communication channels, create social bonds, and more. These events are jointly facilitated by trained members of the Four Arrows program and the UConn Police Department who ensure a safe and open environment of personal and community exploration where every participant can feel welcome.
The UConn PCC also conducts participant perception surveys before and after each event. These surveys are designed to determine each individual’s perception of the “other” group and assess if the UConn PCC program is an effective means of changing those perceptions and increasing community satisfaction with the police and enhance police officer skills in community engagement.
Experiential adventure programs are designed to give all participants skills in problem solving through practical and concrete experience and the UConn PCC facilitation team works with the group in dedicated reflection periods to help translate the skills learned during the PCC experience into real world community problem solving. Community members and police officers leave with a new set of connections and skills to create a safer and more socially-close UConn community.
Who can participate in UConn PCC?
Any student organization, staff or faculty group, or community agency can participate alongside the members of the UConn Police Department. The UConn PCC is actively looking for partner groups and departments to engage with officers. A group will be asked to have 8-10 members willing to participate in a day-long challenge course at the Four Arrows facility in Storrs, CT. The UConn Police Department will assign the same number of officers to the event. Each and every participant will be asked to assist the UConn PCC mission by giving approximately 20 total minutes of their time to complete online perception questionnaires before and after the event.
How do I find out more?
If you would like to find out more about the UConn Police Community Challenge initiative or participate in a course with us, please email Lt. Jennifer Moskowitz at PDSTARTteam@uconn.edu.