LEWISTON — Let’s face it. If you’re a college student, you probably don’t want to see the police very often. If you’re a cop, you’re probably not crazy about heading onto the campus to break up yet another party or to make an arrest.

The relationship between colleges and police departments has always been an uneasy one and Lewiston is no exception.

Only here, things appear to be changing, and changing fast.

Groups of Bates College students have been sitting down over cups of coffee with local police officers. They’ve been playing hockey together and once the weather is improved, they’ll be playing softball, too.

Say what?

On Wednesday, Lewiston police Chief Michael Bussiere sat down with a pair of students to hash out plans for internships. Someday soon, Bates students will begin working with police, analyzing their daily operations and perhaps writing about it for law enforcement journals.

For the first time anyone can remember, there is peace and friendship between college and cops and just about everyone agrees that the benefits are considerable.

“It really is a win-win scenario,” Bussiere said. “It’s great for us and it’s great for them.”

Nods of agreement all around. The cops from the chief down to patrol are on board. So is the Bates college president and various deans.

And it all came about so easily. Audrey Zafirson, a Bates sophomore, and Andrew Segal, a first-year student, put their heads together while looking for answers to what could have been a complex problem.

“Audrey was inspired to reach out to the police after some incidents on the Bates campus last May left her upset,” Segal said. “Students were very unhappy with their relationship with the police officers. Instead of simply criticizing the relationship that Bates has with the police, she set out to make it better. Audrey and Chief Bussiere began working together to increase the communication between Bates students and the LPD.”

That was the first step, the figurative shot heard ’round the city. Encouraged, Audrey teamed up with Segal and the pair went to the Lewiston Police Community Resource Office to talk with Sgt. Rob Ullrich and his team.

There’s irony here. In 2010, Ullrich suffered a broken leg when he and more than a dozen other officers broke up a party gone wild on the Bates campus. The melee made national headlines and did little to improve the relationship.

Today, however, Ullrich is a key figure in this new spirit of friendship. He was among the first groups of officers to sit down with Bates students through the Coffee with a Cop program. The result, Ullrich said, was a smashing success. The students had many questions and hypothetical scenarios to present, and the police did their best to answer every one of them.

“You walk them through it all and at the end, they have a better understanding,” the sergeant said. “And hopefully, what they got out of it was that we’re just regular people, too.”

“The event was a huge success,” Segal said. “Many students came through and talked with the cops over a cup of joe. The Police Department, the Presidents Advisory Committee and Student Activities Office were all thrilled about how the event went. It was a very laid-back event.”

Of course, the matter could have been dropped right there, like so many initiatives that mean well but don’t have staying power. Not this one. By the time the cops were sipping coffee with the students, they already had a hockey game under their belts.

“The LPD has a great hockey team,” Segal and Zafirson wrote in an overview of their efforts. “Audrey came up with the idea to have the Bates Men’s Club Ice Hockey Team and the LPD team play an exhibition game at Underhill Arena.

“The police loved the idea, and on Jan. 11, (Bates College) President Clayton Spencer came and dropped the puck on our first annual Bates versus Badges hockey game. The game was a huge success. We had well over a hundred students fill the stands and although the Bobcats scored the first goal and led the entire game, the police team made a late comeback that fell one goal short. The final score was 6-5 Bates, but the final result was a win for everybody,” the students wrote.

The two teams enjoyed the experience so much, they wrote, that the LPD asked Sean Thomas, assistant captain of the Bates Men’s Club Ice Hockey Team, to play for them in a local tournament the following weekend.

“The police team was one man short because of shift schedules,” the students wrote. “They asked Sean if he would fill in as an honorary member. Audrey and I couldn’t have wished for a better outcome than seeing the two teams bond so closely.”

A strained relationship was on the mend. According to police Officer Joseph Philippon, who works on Ullrich’s team, the more the two groups got to know each other, the more questions the students had for the police. The results tend to trickle down. The more the students come to understand the day-to-day lives of police, the more information there is to be passed along to the community at large.

“People in general are curious about us,” Philippon said. “They don’t understand the complexities of what we do.”

Previously, the only time police and college students mingled was when there was a campus party out of control or city crime managed to creep onto the campus. A student’s interaction with a police officer was almost by necessity an unpleasant one.

“Unfortunately, at Bates, most often when students and police interact it’s a negative experience,” Segal wrote in his overview. “The cops always have to play the role of the bad guy, but in reality they’re all really good guys, who don’t enjoy getting kids in trouble; it’s just part of their jobs.”

If coffee and hockey were baby steps, the relationship is about to take one giant leap forward. The internship — actually, there are two — would place Bates students in with the ranks of police, to observe their daily operations and to pore over data.

The students, who will be selected from what Segal expects to be a pretty hefty pool of applicants, will work with the Police Department’s crime analyst. He or she will sit in on daily briefings and observe a side of police work most civilians never see. For the students, that will mean a rare insight into the nuances of police work, a solid entry on a resume and possibly, publication. For police, it creates a position that would otherwise not exist.

“Bates has many bright and talented students who can be a great resource for the Police Department and the community,” Bussiere said. “And they, in turn, can get real-world experience and a sense of accomplishment by working on projects that we otherwise would not have the time and resources to complete.”

Segal and Zafirson are working with the Harward Center for Community Partnerships and the Bates Career Development Center to get the internships off the ground.

“We share a community with each other,” Zafirson said, “so it’s important that we learn to act like one.”

With that in mind, more Coffee with a Cop events are planned, and with new twists being added all the time. Bussiere suggested that a prosecutor from the District Attorney’s Office might want to come along for the next one. Several beat officers have expressed an interest as well, the chief said.

Segal and Zafirson are elected members of the Bates President’s Advisory Committee. Nobody has stopped to question how a pair of underclass students have transformed a relationship that has been at best nonexistent for decades. Why question a good thing? Bussiere called the pair “extremely smart and focused.”

The meeting Wednesday lasted about an hour. The wording of the internship contract was discussed, but mostly they batted around ideas and talked. It was a light meeting, but a lively one. You know, like any meeting between good friends.

“It’s all been really, really positive,” Segal said. “We all have a ton of ideas.”

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