Cub Scout Criminals

Let's be honest here for a minute.  I haven't exactly been thrilled about my calling lately.  Bear Den Leader is my title.  Fighting for the control of nine, nine-year-old boys right after school to teach them responsibility while they're holding knives or swinging loaded paintbrushes or galloping through the grocery store aisles like frightened, wild geese is my job.

But this den meeting was pretty awesome.

I'd never actually seen what the inside of a police station looked like and I was just as excited as the boys (though, I don't mean to brag, but I controlled my excitement p.r.e.t.t.y. well and refrained from joining the boys in jumping, punching, squawking, running, and overall acting like a chimpanzee).  Officer Daly was perfect with them and gave them just the right amount of candy, spent a heavy amount of time in the super tiny gun room answering loads of questions like,

"Can I please take a bullet home!?" No
"Can I try holding a gun?!" No
"Will you shoot me with one of your fake bullets?!" No
"Do you have any supercoolspecificgun?!" Yes.

He locked them up in the holding cells and then let me take pictures of them pretending to be criminals.  Because apparently acting like a criminal when you're actually not one is a pretty fun thing to do.

They all had their own interpretation of what a criminal might look like.

In the dispatch room, the dispatchers were happy to look up the boys' houses on their fancy computers.  And occasionally a really great question would come from a cub. "Do you like your job here?"  "What is a normal day like?"  "When you call 911, where does it go?"

At the end of our hour, Officer Daly took them to the parking lot, opened the door to his police car, turned it on, and stepped back out. "Okay..." he said sweeping his hand in front of the car, "have at it.  You can go inside and push any buttons you'd like.  Just be courteous to each other and take turns."  The boys looked at each other with wide, wild eyes and it was in that moment that I appreciated my calling and the chance it gives me to see Carson in his setting.  There he was, right in the middle of it all, surrounded by friends who shared in his very same excitement.  There's a magic in that.

They were not shy and had no problem discovering the sirens and the lights and the incredibly loud megaphone from which they shouted poop jokes.  Teenagers came running from five blocks away to see what all the commotion was and ended up buckling in laughter when they found that what they thought was going to be a massive police showdown turned out to be a whole fleet of cub scouts instead.

And at the end of the afternoon I humbly admitted that cub scouts can be fun.