Cooking with a Cop Connects Kids to Friendly Faces in Law Enforcement

One day before the pizza-themed Cooking with a Cop competition at Kalispell Middle School (KMS), said cop was waylaid by a “police officer thing” and late for an appointment with a group of aspiring tween chefs patiently awaiting his culinary wisdom.

When he finally made it to the family consumer science kitchen classroom, the students burst into applause. 

It’s not the reception all cops get in every room they walk into, but Justin Turner is not a run-of-the-mill officer, and his current assignment is hardly an ordinary beat. The almost six-year veteran of the Kalispell Police Department is in his third year as the KMS school resource officer (SRO), a job he says he’s been after from the day he decided to join the force as a way to break down barriers between law enforcement’s imposing veneer and young members of the community.

On May 20, Turner was back in the KMS kitchen classroom for another round of his Cooking with a Cop series, which he’s been doing since his first year and something he says fits perfectly with the objectives of the program. It fits Turner, a self-described foodie, too.

This year’s Cooking with a Cop took the form of a competition for the first time, and Turner, wearing his custom black Cooking with a Cop apron, was joined by Flathead High School SRO Eric Brinton, and teams of pizza artisans from his school. The entrants concocted everything from the traditional to a table full of fruit pizzas, all judged by a team of panelists including Kalispell Public Schools Superintendent Micah Hill. 

But more than anything, the competition was a fitting example of what attracted Turner to the job of school resource officer in the first place. It was a room full of smiling faces, high-fives and positive memories, all instigated by a member of law enforcement. Turner has to spend part of his day serving in a more traditional law enforcement capacity to deal with criminal issues in the school, but this is the part of the job he finds most rewarding and important.

“It’s relationship building. It’s having an opportunity to build relationships with kids that isn’t with a law enforcement officer, like, ‘hey, you did something bad, now I’m here to deal with you,’” Turner said. “If that’s all kids ever got to see of law enforcement, I could see why they would have a negative connotation of a police officer.”

Kalispell Chief of Police Doug Overman spent five years as a school resource officer more than a decade ago and called his time as an SRO “the best experience of (his) career.” Overman estimated that just 5% of an SRO’s job involves doing traditional police work and that the rest of the time is dedicated to dual roles that can best be described as counselor and teacher.

And both Overman and Turner said they’ve been able to see their impact firsthand. Turner shared the story of a sixth-grader whose father was in police custody when she told Turner, on the first day of school, that she was afraid of him.

“I wanted to have this moment of getting to know her and I did. It took a couple months but eventually she was coming up to me, telling me about her weekend, asking me about my weekend, asking about my kids, my dogs … she’s always excited to see me,” Turner said. “That’s been very memorable for me just because I feel like I actually made an impact on her and made something change.”

By the nature of the job, SROs end up spending a disproportionate time with students who are struggling, but they have an unusual amount of time to build relationships with the subjects they’re investigating. It’s something that simply isn’t possible for a regular patrol cop, who arrives on a scene, quickly assesses the problem and always has a next call to handle. And it also takes a certain kind of temperament to thrive as an SRO, something Overman said is more common in his ranks than not but that Turner has in spades.

“You have to be a great communicator, but also you have to see the world in a million colors of gray,” Overman said. “There’s no black and white in kids’ lives. Sometimes you have to go where they’re at and help them make decisions.”

“It is very different how you have to talk with kids; you can’t be heavy-handed with them,” Turner said. “You ho have to be cognizant of how you talk to them because they will just shut down and you won’t get anywhere. So you have to have this very soft approach, very caring, very compassionate to truly be good at being a school resource officer.”