Hawthorne Press Tribune The Weekly Newspaper of Hawthorne Herald Publications - Inglewood, Hawthorne, Lawndale, El Segundo, Torrance & Manhattan Beach Community Newspapers Since 1911 - Circulation 30,000 - Readership 60,000 (310) 322-1830 - December 3, 2015 Taco With a Cop Beats Coffee Inside This Issue Certified & Licensed Professionals.......................6 Classifieds............................3 Film Review..........................3 Finance..................................2 Food.......................................8 Legals................................ 6-7 Pets........................................5 Police Reports.....................3 Sports....................................4 Seniors..................................4 Weekend Forecast Friday Sunny 68˚/50˚ Saturday Sunny 75˚/54˚ Sunday Mostly Sunny 73˚/54˚ Hawthorne Police Department Lt. Swain, USC student Chanele Zopp, Sgt. Chris Cognac, Chief of Police Robert Fager and Sam Asuga were just some of the day’s attendees who got to enjoy tacos and casual conversation. Everyone involved in its organization considered the turnout for this first-time event good, and there are high hopes that there is a second taco-based event between the community and police department. Community and Police Department Celebrate First-Ever Taco With A Cop By Cristian Vasquez It was a stronger smell of tacos that radiated from the corner of Imperial Highway and Condon Avenue that warm and sunny Saturday; there was a larger crowd than usual at the El Tarrasco parking lot, but there was also a jumper for kids, an old Hawthorne Police Department patrol car and the city’s first-ever Taco With A Cop. The new community event designed to connect the city’s residents with the police department in a relaxed and fun environment is a unique and creative twist on the worldrenowned Coffee With A Cop event. “We treated this a lot like coffee with a cop because it is a barrier free communication event except that tacos are the mechanism for conversation instead of coffee,” Hawthorne Police Department Sgt. Chris Cognac, who is responsible for the original Coffee With A Cop, said. “It has been a huge success and El Tarrasco has been here for quite some time; I actually eat here. It’s a nice day to come and eat lunch so it is good all around.” Hosted in the north side of Hawthorne, which has a strong Latino presence and is home to El Tarrasco, was an ideal combination for the family that owns the business to reach out to the community to organize the day’s event. “It was something new and a way to get the community together,” Monique Palomo, whose parents own El Tarrasco and who reached out to the community to organize the event, said. “There are things in the area that people don’t really speak on and this is hopefully a chance for people to be able to speak about it with a cop.” While the success of Taco With A Cop is far from that of the event that inspired it, the impact that barrier-free communication events have between community residents and their police departments have been felt by more than just the Hawthorne community. “Coffee With A Cop is now the largest community policing program in the world: it is in seven countries and thousands of police departments,” Sgt. Cognac said. “We still go out and teach it and hear about all of the offshoots. So we teach the philosophy of Coffee With A Cop and encourage people to put their own twist on it.” For several years many police departments have embraced the philosophy of community policing as a way of building trust between residents and their local police department. For the Hawthorne Police Department, the idea of Coffee With A Cop was kicked off in 2011 at a local McDonalds. Detective John Dixon and Sgt. Cognac brainstormed and decided that the best way to ease tensions between the residents and officers was to sit directly in front of people over a cup of coffee. “It is amazing to think that the world’s largest community policing program started at McDonald’s in Hawthorne,” Sgt. Cognac said. “We never thought it would have the impact that it did.” At its core the intent that Sgt. Cognac and the police department had for these events was to engage the community on a long-term basis, but it was never imagined that Coffee With A Cop would grow in popularity the way it has, nor that it would inspire other similar events. “When you think about the successful police programs around the world, you think they come from a big police department and not a small police department like Hawthorne,” Sgt. Cognac said. “You have to keep this simple because it is about people having access; no barriers or radio calls, no problems and this is what you get; the establishment of trust. It is the establishment of trust between the community and the police, and that is huge.” With the desire to continue having these barrier-free, communication events, both Palomo and the police department look forward to other local restaurants stepping up to host the next Taco With A Cop. “I do hope that we could do this more often and get the community together to be able to watch out to one another,” Palomo said. •
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