News Times – Kendra Baker – Danbury CT – March 11, 2021
When he took over what was then called the Danbury Police Explorers program three decades ago, Lt. Matt McNally said he did not foresee how life-changing it would be — not only for local youth, but himself as well.
The program — now known as the Cadets Program — provides 13- to 21-year-olds with an eight- to 10-week leadership development experience through which they can explore law enforcement and other related interests, as well as engage in community service-based activities.
“You don’t have to be interested in law enforcement,” said McNally, adviser of the program. “We get kids interested in homeland security, first aid and emergency medicine, fire service, forensic science and government. They want to do public work and give back to the community.”
Danbury’s longtime probate judge, Dianne Yamin, can attest to that. As a teenager in the late-1970s, Yamin joined Danbury’s Explorer Post 33 with the aspiration of becoming an attorney.
“I joined because I really wanted to learn about the background of the law and how it’s enforced,” she said. “I think most of the people in our group wanted to be police officers, but I was interested in becoming a lawyer.”
The cadets have been key in assisting the city with COVID-19 testing and vaccine clinics, as well as helping police catch businesses that sell tobacco products to minors.
McNally said when he took over the program in January 1990, he had no idea it would be a role he’d still hold 31 years later.
“I was only going to cover for two weeks for my predecessor, but he didn’t come back and I just stayed with the program this whole time,” he said. “I’ve been on a lot of different job assignments with the police department over the years, and the program always went with me.”
McNally said there were only about eight to 10 members when he took over, and the police chief at the time was considering canceling the program due to lack of participation.
With a lot of young people in Danbury trying to affiliate with what he described as “wannabe gangs” at the time, McNally took a creative program recruitment approach.
“We decided to sell it as a gang,” he said. “We told them, ‘You want to wear colors? We have colors. You want to belong to something? We’ve got it. We’ll make you the biggest gang in town.’”
The approach worked, McNally said, and the program has been around for about 50 years and since grown to more than 100 members.
COVID Impact
Although the number of cadets in Danbury’s program remains higher than those of other towns, the city has seen a decline in participation due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, McNally said.
“We’ve lost a lot over the past year with COVID and schools being the way they are and all,” he said. “This time last year, we were at 178.”
When COVID hit last year, the cadets started holding their weekly Thursday meetings outside the police station’s parking deck and stayed involved in the community.
“They spent a lot of time helping out at the pop-up COVID testing sites, doing traffic control and stuff,” McNally said.
When cadet meetings moved to Zoom, that’s when attendance rates started to drop.
“We were only averaging about 75 to 80 on Zoom,” McNally said. “This has been a tough year for us — not having that weekly contact other than through Zoom. For some of these kids, this is their family.”
Those still in the program have remained active in the community during the pandemic.
“Raring to do something” other than sitting at home, a number of them volunteered to help out at the health department’s mass vaccination of teachers at Rogers Park last weekend, McNally said.
“We taught them how to do the entry into the VAMS [Vaccine Administration Management System], work on the computers and gave them different duties,” McNally said. “They worked all weekend, and these kids were happy to be doing something.”
Last month, some of Danbury’s older cadets helped with police compliance checks of local vape shops, which led to the citation of a store owner for selling tobacco products to underage customers.
McNally said this kind of work is nothing new for the cadets.
“Some of our older ones have volunteered to help with compliance checks like alcohol, tobacco and fireworks,” he said. “Vape was a new one for us, but it falls under the same realm of compliance checks.”
Makeup and Structure
McNally said Danbury’s cadets program has changed over the years, but it’s “always been a microcosm” of the city’s diversity.
“We get kids from all different walks of life, economic backgrounds, ethnicities — it’s just very inclusive,” he said. “They all come for different reasons and end up being this huge family.”
The program is run like its own police department and the cadets — who are required to maintain at least a C average, stay out of trouble and follow the program’s code of conduct — are pretty much in charge.
“They have a rank structure, administrators and they have elections — they elect their president, vice-president, secretaries and treasurers,” McNally said.
Yamin said she served as secretary of her group and took minutes during all their meetings.
Yamin, who went on to achieve her dream of a career in law and has served as Danbury’s probate judge for 30 years, said her experience in the program was “transformational.”
“It really changed my life, because it reinforced my interests and my love for the law,” she said.
In addition to learning about the application, interpretation and enforcement of law, Yamin said she and her fellow police explorers did a lot of interesting activities — including working with police dogs, fingerprinting, target practice at the Wooster Mountain Shooting Range and pretending to be accident victims a part of an out-of-town police training.
Like her, a number of former explorers and cadets have gone on to hold public service roles.
Danbury’s Democratic mayoral candidate Roberto Alves was involved in the program “for many years,” according to McNally, and Yamin said Danbury Police Officer John Krupinsky was in her class.
McNally said his biggest hope for the program is that it never dies.
“I hope that when I’m long gone, this program continues,” he said. “It’s made a tremendous difference in young people’s lives, and even though it was something I was only going to do for a couple weeks, it’s instead changed my life.”