A heavily-attended Cottage Grove Police Department Open House was held on Thursday, Oct 6 at the Cottage Grove City Hall Public Safety and HERO Center.

According to Community Engagement Officer Dan Schoen, “This is the first time post-Covid that we’ve been able to have large groups come through. We are so grateful for our community. We wanted to open up the doors and get the people back in the house.”

Visitors were able to tour the facilities, buy food from the Lion’s Club, and browse a Community Resource Fair. Attendees were also able to get a closer look at different equipment, including the Cottage Grove Command Center, a State Patrol Helicopter, and an armored SWAT vehicle. The open house also included a SWAT Team bank robbery demonstration.

Many partners in law enforcement were in attendance, including the Highway Patrol, Mounted Patrol, and the local fire department.

“This year we added a Community Resource Fair. There were 17 groups in attendance,” stated Officer Schoen. “We’ve been intentionally connecting directly to many organizations who offer different types of assistance to people in our community. In many cases we’re able to provide a connection to an organization who can help them with an issue before it grows into something critical.”

The open house itself is meant to provide a connection between the police department and the residents of Cottage Grove.

Schoen added, “Knowing your neighbors before they need your help is better for every community. Here, our community gets to see their officers before they have a crisis. They recognize they don’t have to assume something is wrong every time they see a squad car. They get to see how much our officers and staff truly care about the people they serve. Having our officers see how much their community supports them means more in 2022 than most people can imagine.

“Our community is growing in size and diversity, there are people who intentionally want to see a divide amongst us. These events help us show our communities we’re unified and have no desire to let small groups of people drive us apart.”

The open house event was originally created as a way to inspire modernization.

According to Schoen, “Our mayor and city council saw the need to modernize our facilities to ensure we were delivering the services our citizens expect and deserve. We felt it was important to show them the critical issues facing our officers in the old facility.

“The services we need to offer, and how we offer them, have grown and diversified so much it is important for people to see that not everything our police department does is from a squad car,” said Schoen. “Not every important function in our police department is done by a police officer.”

The next Public Safety Open House is scheduled 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 15 at the Cottage Grove Fire Department’s Central Fire Station.

Volunteer Washington County Sheriff’s Mounted Patrol Officer Charlotte Ferlic and her horse Leo. Photo by Nerissa Solovitz

A local youth tries out police equipment at the HERO Center. Photo by Nerissa Solovitz