Mixing fun with learning, the Junior Policeman’s Camp teaches children everything from underwater evidence recovery to paperwork.
By Lindsay Tice
Staff Writer
AUBURN
With a camera and log sheet, wearing blue rubber gloves so they wouldn’t contaminate evidence, the four young detectives roamed the murder scene.

Empty soda cans and two cigarette butts littered a table. A blue vinyl chair lay on its side. The white outline of a murder victim took up floor space in the middle of the room.

One detective placed small yellow number cards next to the pieces of evidence while a partner snapped pictures for the case file. Another young detective recorded the evidence on her log sheet.

And a fourth tripped over the murder weapon.

“Hey, look what I found!” 11-year-old Emmanuel Boucher shouted as he held up a shiny BB handgun, an exact replica of a .45-caliber, nickle-plated Smith & Wesson.

“Beep, beep, beep. Violation,” Auburn Det. James Lawlor declared from the back of the room. “You have to photograph things. You can’t just pick evidence up.”

Junior Policeman’s Camp is in session.

Started last year as a collaboration between Central Maine Community College and the Auburn Police Department, Junior Policeman’s Camp caters to kids 7 to 15 years old.

Last year, organizers tried running a one-week session with all campers. This year, they broke camp into two sessions- one last week for young kids and one this week for pre-teens and teenagers- to ensure that both age groups were getting the attention they needed.

For the younger kids, the four half-day sessions cost $125. For the older kids, four full-day sessions cost $250.

In both, campers learn about everything ranging from underwater evidence recovery to paperwork.

In other words, whatever it takes to be a cop.

“Everything they see on TV and the big screen, that’s what they think we do. At camp, we do the stuff that we really do,” said Tom Poulin, school resource officer in Auburn’s elementary schools who hoped the camp would show kids that being a police officer is about more than shooting bad guys.

That “real world” work didn’t deter the four kids who trooped into the Auburn police station this week to become junior officers.

“It sounded fun. Just the word ‘police’ sounded fun,” said 12-year-old Alex Maier of Lewiston.

Earlier this week, the campers attended police dive team and K-9 unit demonstrations. They talked about chain of evidence, fingerprint analysis and DNA. And in an attempt at some tongue in cheek humor, officers took them on a morning field trip to a doughnut shop.

On Thursday, the last day of camp, they rode along with Auburn police officers as they made their rounds.

And they got to investigate a “murder.”

The scene was set in a spare conference room in the back of the Auburn police station. A chair was tipped over. A table was covered with soda cans, an iced tea bottle, an empty Burger King paper bag and a couple of cigarette butts. A trash can sat nearby. The outline of a body lay in the middle of the floor.

The campers carefully lifted the soda cans so they wouldn’t smudge any fingerprints and cataloged the evidence on their clipboards. They dug through the trash can looking for clues.

“He likes Pop Tarts,” Boucher said when he found a wrapper in the trash. “He’s not eating healthy.”

From the back, Lawlor and Poulin prompted the young detectives, warning about “cross-contamination” when they started gathering evidence and encouraging them to think about the meaning of everything they were seeing.

“Ah, three chairs. Hmm,” said Lawlor, feigning puzzlement as he scratched his chin and looked around the room.”

“Three people!” Boucher exclaimed.

They dusted the cans and iced tea bottle for fingerprints. They threw out their own theories about the crime.

It was cool, the kids said.

While only two said they wanted to enter law enforcement before the camp, all four were eager to become police officers after.

“I always wanted to be like James Bond,” said Boucher. “This is almost like it.”

ltice@sunjournal.com

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