#CopsLoveLemonadeStands
Initiative Takes North America by Storm
By Lieutenant Zach Perron, Palo Alto Police Department
P
alo Alto, CA – Two officers from the Palo Alto Police
Department started a popular community policing
initiative this summer that quickly spread across
North America.
Sergeant Ben Becchetti and Officer Dave Pecoraro
of the patrol division came up with the “sweet” idea to
use the department’s social media channels to ask the
community to give the police advance notice when their
children were going to set up a lemonade stand. An
available officer or two would then swing by, buy some
lemonade, show the kids their police cars, pose for some
fun photos, and create some positive memories.
The department first used their Nextdoor account
on June 1 to advertise the campaign locally, and
received an overwhelmingly positive response from
residents. On June 6, the department created the hashtag
#CopsLoveLemonadeStands, posted an invitation on
Facebook and Twitter, and encouraged other police
agencies to join in. The initiative spread quickly, and
by the end of the summer, it had been used by 69 police
departments in 23 states and 2 Canadian provinces!
The diversity of participating agencies was remarkable,
ranging from small local departments to county sheriff’s
offices to state agencies. Even large city departments
jumped in, with the Pittsburgh Police Department, the
Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, St. Louis
Metropolitan Police Department, and even NYPD all
posting photos of their officers interacting with kids at
lemonade stands and using the hashtag. The International
Association of Chiefs of Police backed the initiative and
helped advertise it in early June, as did the California
Police Chiefs Association.
Over the course of the summer, the Palo Alto Police
Department received close to 125 individual requests to
visit lemonade stands – and their officers were able to make
it to about 80% of them. The department posted countless
photos of smiling cops with happy kids on their Facebook
page, Instagram page, and Twitter account and received
thousands of “likes,” retweets, and positive comments from
the community.
A number of television and radio stations picked up
on the campaign as well, and created many wonderful
feature stories on the initiative across the country. At a
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time when public perception of
law enforcement is trending down
in some regions of our country,
the #CopsLoveLemonadeStands
campaign stood out as a positive
story. Along with other recent social
media initiatives like the #WhyIWearTheBadge campaign,
the public is able to get some insight to the true character
of our nation’s police officers and see the good work they
are doing in our communities on a daily basis. As
it turns out, these sorts of social media campaigns
happen to fall exactly in-line with the social media
recommendations of President Obama’s Task
Force on 21st-Century Policing.
Cops visiting lemonade stands is certainly
nothing new: as long as kids have been having
lemonade stands, cops have been happily
patronizing them and making kids happy for
decades. The only unique thing about this
initiative was that the police were asking for the
community’s help in locating them, and on very
public social media channels too. Everyone
wound up being able to see the good work that
officers and deputies are doing.
Even chiefs got in on the action. In
Palo Alto, Chief Dennis Burns personally
visited a number of lemonade stands
throughout the summer. In Jefferson County,
Colorado, Sheriff Jeff Shrader did the same
thing. And in Indiana, Chief Rick Hite
of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police
Department was a strong advocate for the
campaign on Twitter.
In the end, no matter what agency, state, or country, the
results were all positive: the kids made money and learned
responsibility, business sense, and customer service skills;
the parents were pleased; the cops got to take a break; and
everybody got to meet officers on a personal level in a nonenforcement situation. But best of all, these contacts helped
to instill lifelong positive memories of police officers in
the minds of the children. And the entire initiative was
conceived by two cops on the beat in Palo Alto! ■