Essay Project 2021: Keeping Portland Safe

By Stella Durrant

Do you ever think about the people that continue to protect us and keep our community safe? I have it is our police department, EMTs, firefighters, and many more that help these departments out. We have a very strong, proud, determined group of people in the police department that continue to choose to protect us and keep the city of Portland safe.

The Portland Police Department was founded in 1869 with only one chief. In 2021 we now have 6 officers working to protect our city. Star Thomas is the chief of police. Jason Smith, Jeremy Kauffman, Brent Listerman, and Tom Goggins are all full-time police officers. Christopher Quarello is a part-time police officer and Ashley Pasikowski is the administrative assistant for the Portland police department. I've learned about things like the motto that the police department follows ¨ready to protect, proud to serve.¨ That just shows that we have hard-working, good people protecting us every day.

The Chief of Portland police Star Thomas has been working in the field for 19 years and has been working at the Portland department for 15 of those years. Star was given the job to be the chief of police in 2017. Over the years of her working at the Portland station, people have had good experiences with her. Including myself with a misunderstanding back when I was in middle school. Star approached me and some of my friends explaining to us what was going on and was very friendly and understanding of the situation. I always remember this encounter and how Chief star reassured us that we were not in trouble there was just a misunderstanding.

There's a poem about police by Robert Longley part of it says ¨ where you protect and serve, always with integrity and never will you serve¨ this reminds me of our police officers because we know that they are always there to protect us and keep our community a safe place.

This essay is part of a writing project by students in Chandra Polasek’s ELA class at Portland High School. The project asked students to focus on elements of their own town while getting students engaged with the community. The essays were written with the intention of being published in The Portland Beacon.