Image 01 Image 03

California Cop Plays Hopscotch With 11-year-old Homeless Girl

California Cop Plays Hopscotch With 11-year-old Homeless Girl

“This is the kind of thing a lot of cops in communities across the country do every day.”

Here’s your feel-good story for today. An officer in Huntington Beach, California was caught on tape playing hopscotch with an 11-year-old homeless girl.

According to the Huntington Beach Police Department:

Screen Shot 2016-04-01 at 5.42.45 PM

ABC News reported:

This police officer literally jumped to help cheer up an 11-year-old homeless girl who he discovered had been living out of a car with her mother in Huntington Beach, California.

While his partner talked with the mother to help get them housing arrangements, Officer Zach Pricer decided to distract the girl from the “adult people problem” with a game of hopscotch, or as he likes to call it, “copscotch.”

Pricer’s partner was able to shoot a video of the encounter on Wednesday. It was later posted to the Huntington Beach Police Department’s Facebook where it’s been viewed nearly 1 million times and has gotten thousands of positive comments.

“I had to check the welfare of the little girl, so I have to earn her trust and get her comfortable with me first,” Pricer told ABC News. He explained that he’s used other games and toys like Nerf guns as “ice breakers” to gain children’s trust.

Pricer said that once he got the 11-year-old to open up, he was “blown away by her intelligence and happy-go-lucky attitude.”

“She was very gracious,” the officer said. “Despite having nearly nothing, she was offering to me everything she had to play with. She showed me her bubbles and her little pink shoes that were falling apart but that she still loved. It was amazing to see how thankful she was for what she did have.”

The police department’s Housing Task Force is currently working on finalizing plans to help get the girl and her mother into a housing arrangement, Pricer said.

“And I just want to say that this is the kind of thing a lot of cops in communities across the country do every day,” he added. “It just so happened my buddy was messing around and happened to capture it on film.”

A little kindness goes a long way.

This morning an officer checked on a suspicious occupied vehicle in the area of Graham and Edinger. During his investigation he learned the people in the vehicle were a mother and her 11 year old daughter and they had been living out of their car. The officer contacted our Homeless Task Force to help arrange housing. As the officer worked on housing arrangements with the mother, another officer on scene, Officer Pricer, began displaying his expertise in hopscotch to the daughter. #Copslovehopscotch

Publicado por Huntington Beach Police Department em Quarta, 30 de março de 2016

Follow Kemberlee on Twitter @kemberleekaye

DONATE

Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.

Tags:

Comments

Taking time off from no-knock raids on the wrong house to shoot the kids in bed.

    ugottabekiddinme in reply to Same Same. | April 2, 2016 at 6:05 pm

    What a pathetic comment.

    The vast majority of law enforcement officers do their best every shift, every day, to do their sworn duty to serve and protect us all, even you, Same Same, from the predatory criminals among us.

    Give the officer some credit for acting like a regular guy with the little homeless kid, instead of just an officer.

    Whiskey Bravo in reply to Same Same. | April 2, 2016 at 6:56 pm

    If you ever need a police officer to respond, remember your lame and inappropriate comment before you pick up to phone for help.

    Really pathetic.

Need a new monitor, this ones a little blurry. So’s the keyboard.

That is good police work. Anyone who says different doesn’t know the job.

    Henry Hawkins in reply to forksdad. | April 2, 2016 at 8:35 pm

    There are good and bad aspects of ‘community based policing’, but this is one of the very good ones.

Sweet, but with a multi-trillion dollar welfare budget, and mass immigration, why is this American girl still homeless?

    Henry Hawkins in reply to n.n. | April 2, 2016 at 8:36 pm

    Go to an American county or city Dept Of Social Services and see how long it takes. Bureaucracy.

    They’re white; that puts them next-to-last on the list of people eligible for assistance (last place is single white males).

    Not hyperbole; I have been there and been told to my face that, as a single white male, I shouldn’t even bother applying. I _worked_ my way out of the hole.

Henry Hawkins | April 2, 2016 at 8:39 pm

My father was a career police officer, much of it working Motor Patrol in Detroit (motorcycle cop). They let offices take their bikes home and he gave neighbor kids rides on it all the time. This was in the ’50s and ’60s, mind you, and amost certainly is no longer allowed. Liability, you know.