The Starke County Sheriff’s Office held its first class of the inaugural 2026 Citizen’s Police Academy Wednesday evening this week.

The six-week course aims to provide its attendees with a hands-on opportunity to see how Starke County Sheriff’s Office works, and to act as a bridge between the Sheriff’s Office and the community.

Chief Deputy Wayne James shared some of the topics that will be covered during the course:

“So the program is pretty much 6 weeks, some of the things we’re gonna be covering is our dispatch operations, jail operations, patrol, some of our special response teams such as drone operators, our SWAT guys … certain narcotic search warrants and things like that, but also our jail and our wonderful dispatchers that serve this community every day for police, fire, and EMS.”

James shared that the Citizen’s Police Academy is something that has been in the works for a long time, stating that Sheriff Jack Rosa and the rest of the department wanted to reach out to the community.

During the first night of class, students shared their motivations for attending; some of which included being part of a neighborhood watch and wanting to deepen their knowledge to better serve their neighborhoods, an interest in getting into the police force but wanting more knowledge first, and interest in some specific subjects such as K9 training and narcotics teams. Some attendees have been to similar academies in other counties and wanted to compare those experiences to this one.

James emphasized the importance of using the Citizen’s Academy to foster relationships with community members: “We wanted to try to like, really reach out and build better relationsihps and partnerships with the community who we may not come in contact with every day.”

Graduation from the program is scheduled to take place March 25th.