After recent retirements and resignations on top of an already thinning force, New Orleans currently has room in their budget to hire 150 new police officers. It’s imperative they fill those positions, too, so they’ll be hard at work looking for new recruits this weekend… at church:

“We call it Super Sunday,” said Landrieu. “We’ll be in churches across the city. Either I’ll be there or somebody else from the department or a community leader will be there to talk about what you need to do to become a police officer. We eased the residency requirement and now we have a department on the upswing. We’re going to go out and really talk to people, hand to hand, and ask them to join our effort to make the city of New Orleans a safe place.” “It’s an opportunity for our officers to go into our churches and synagogues and mosques,” said NOPD Interim Superintendent Michael Harrison. “We can touch people and they can touch us. They can actually sit by us and we worship with them and then asked them to join us in this fight.”

If you watch the news report and see the religious references, it easy to think they’re recruiting a specifically Christian police force. But there’s no reason to jump to that conclusion. They’re just going to where the people gather — including a few non-Christian worship houses. If lots of atheists got together in one location on a Sunday, there’s every reason to believe they’d go there, too. There’s no religious requirement to apply for the force. Anyone can do it.

It’s no different from politicians who visit churches during campaign season; it’s an easy way to spread your message to a large segment of the community. It’d be a missed opportunity if you didn’t do it.

Just wanted to get that out there before anyone begins spreading the article online as if there’s something illegal happening.

(Thanks to Dan for the link)



