Monroe PD Share Methods at Safety Seminar

MONROE - On Tuesday night at the Saul Adler Community Center in Monroe was one in a series of community safety seminars conducted by Monroe Police, in which Police Chief Quentin Holmes and other officers demonstrated tasers, showed off specialty impact munitions and took questions from the community to keep both police and every day people on the same page when it comes to fighting crime.

To demonstrate some less lethal ways police take down criminals, one police recruit had even volunteered to get tased.

Police Recruit Tara Smith volunteered to be tased to show the community what happens to a criminal.

She was completely incapacitated for a few moments but got back up, smiling, and said she wasn't in any pain.

"Talk about what exactly the officers do with the carry, when they utilize force and things like that," Monroe PD Public Information Officer, Mark Johnson, said. "There's a lot of misconceptions, a lot of rumors out there about what police equipment does, how it works. We're going to do some of these seminars and talk about what these things do and how they work."

Other issues police were trying to demonstrate with the tasing is showing how it has no adverse effects on a person's heart.

Monroe Police said more seminars are coming up in the future leading up to their  Citizen's Police Academy.

"If we're going to effectively fight crime in our community, we got to make sure that we go to the very people we serve and get their input," Johnson said. "We have to work together as a team at the same time. We have the expertise, the training, we want to make sure that our public, people we serve, know what to do and how to do it and that's the purpose of what we're trying to do with these meetings here tonight."