VIDEO: Columbus Police Department Career Day

COLUMBUS, Miss.(WCBI)—The decision to devote your life to public safety can be a hard one to make but the Columbus Police Department is working to make the choice a little easier.

Saturday morning officers opened the doors of the police station to welcome residents to learn more about an officer’s day-to-day.

“It looks easy just to drive with blue lights and go fast but it’s much more than that,”said Assistant Police Chief Fred Shelton.

Protect and Serve was the message Saturday as citizens poured into the Columbus Police Department.

“What we are trying to do is encourage people to become police officers. Our slogan is join CPD and we are trying to get people to join CPD and become a part of this community. We’re reaching out to this community. We want to see people from this community come and protect and serve. It’s just not a slogan, it’s something that we really want to do,”said Shelton.

Shelton says he hopes the career day sparks the interest of a future potential officer.

“People say, well, I want to be a police officer but I don’t know how. What we are doing is showing them the how for example, they have to take a physical fitness test. We are showing them what the physical fitness test consists of. Some people may not have fired a weapon; we are taking them down to the range showing them what the range looks like and how to shoot a weapon. We’ve got a crime lab some might say, I don’t want to be a police officer, I want to go into the forensic science. We have a crime lab here we also can give them a demonstration with our K-9 so there are many opportunities here at the police department,”said Shelton.

Yasmine Simmons is a career day participant and she says for her wanting to join law enforcement started at an early age.

“A couple years ago, I’d say seven years ago, I use to always watch CSI Miami and all that and so now I’m in college and that’s my major criminal justice and ever since then I just wanted to learn. When I seen the advertisement last week, I thing on Facebook, I wanted to come and see what it was all about .

Shelton says the department hopes the career days will help them improve in more ways than one.

” We’re down in numbers and we’re trying to build numbers and we’re trying to get qualified applicants. So we are going to continue this. This is an on going process. There’ll be a third one, there will be a fourth one, there will be a fifth one, and not only are we going to try to get up to staff but we’re going to continue to have a pool of qualified applicants always on file. If we are able to increase our force we will have qualified applicants waiting in the wings,”said Shelton.

” The crime it makes you want to get involved and try and stop it, it gives me an understanding of how this would go and that would go and if I wanted to further my career in it,”said Simmons.

CPD was able to give out 24 applications during the career day.