St. Louis County Police officers recently took the field for a softball game with a Ferguson community youth baseball team, the Ferguson Regulators, in Forestwood Park in Ferguson.
“That was something that we’d been trying to work on for about a year,” said Jevon Kincaid, founder and coach of the Ferguson Regulators.
“It started one day at a baseball game last year, and I was telling a couple of my players growing up in North St. Louis that before we would go back to school, the police department would always have a softball game against the neighborhood. Everybody would go over to the park to play this game, and that was something that disappeared around here.”
Kincaid and community organizer Jeffrey Lyes started looking for police officers to partner with. Then Kincaid saw Captain Norman Mann of the St. Louis County Police Department talk on local television about the renovation of the baseball field in Dellwood with the help of the St. Louis County Police Athletic League. The league donated money and effort to bring the park up to playing condition. Kincaid contacted Mann, and they began organizing a softball game between Kincaid’s youth and Mann’s police officers.
“He shared my passion about bringing baseball back to the North County community,” Mann said.
The community softball game also was a step toward improving community relationships between youth and police officers.
“The police won, but they had fun,” Lyes said. “Everybody enjoyed their selves and enjoyed their company. The main highlight to me was at the end, we gathered them all together, and then we all had prayer because one of the coaches was a minister. I think that was a big highlight, doing something like that.”
The social interaction started a dialogue and created positive experiences between the youth and police officers.
“It really went well as far as the participation of the youth, which they were excited because they had never really intermingled with police officers before. The police were excited to do anything to improve community relations. They did the barbequing; they brought the pit and everything. All we did was provide the youth,” Lyes said.
“The main goal was to humanize each group. Also, we wanted to show the youth that police officers are fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins; they are not just men in uniform.”
For more information on the St. Louis County Police Athletic League, call 314-458-5186 or visit www.stlouiscopal.org.
