Eustis Police Department

On Monday June 20, 2016, the Eustis Police Department began implementing a community relations program titled AC4P which stands for “Actively Caring for People Policing”. The founder of this behavioral science, Dr. E. Scott Geller from Virginia came up with the term, “actively caring” in 1990 while working with a team of safety leaders at Exxon Chemical in Baytown, Texas. Following the 2007 Virginia Tech tragedy when an armed gunman took the lives of 32 students and faculty and injured 17 others, the AC4P concept took a new focus.

Dr. Geller and his team of students witnessed students helping others instead of thinking about themselves.Dr. Geller and his students envisioned applying this principle of positive reinforcement and spread the AC4P movement beyond Virginia Tech’s Blacksburg campus.

Dr. Geller and his students took green silicon wristbands, embossed with “Actively Caring for People,” which Dr. Geller had been distributing at safety conferences for two decades, and added a numbering system to enable computer tracking of the AC4P process: See, Act, Pass, and Share (SAPS). The SAPS process asks individuals and groups to look for AC4P behavior (i.e., See) and reward such AC4P behavior with a green wristband (i.e., Act). Wristband recipients are then requested to look for AC4P behavior from others and pass on the wristband (i.e., Pass). People will then be asked to document and share their exchange of AC4P behavior with the Eustis Police Department through our city website or through our social media page. 

In March of 2016, members of the Eustis Police Department attended training for AC4P in Winter Park, FL. The wristbands, ordered in blue will represent our municipality police agency. This program will allow our officers to deliver positive consequences in ways that help cultivate interpersonal trust and actively-caring behavior among police officers and the citizens we serve. You can see more on how the program works by going onto the https://ncpcv.org website.