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Cats grow up quickly, and at approximately seven months old, Donut has outgrown the stinkin’-cute phase of kittenhood. Her legs and body are lengthening, her tail no longer the exclamation point that melts even dog lovers into puddles of baby-talking glee. She’s still a kitten, but unmistakably on her way to being a cat.
Was it just this spring that Donut was the toast of Troy, the subject of international press attention, a wellspring of feline wordplay and a “Daily Show” segment? Why, yes: Donut was named “Pawfficer Donut,” “sworn in” by two circuit court judges (“Raise your right paw”) and designated the Troy Police Department’s first police cat, the founding member of its feline unit.
“Stop in the name of the paw because this is too cute to miss!” enthused Us magazine. She’s “making a pawsitive difference,” echoed the Oakland Press. Pictures of her wearing a kerchief embroidered with a police badge went around the world. Donut was a story from NPR to New Zealand.
If police PR were crime fighting, Sgt. Meghan Lehman, the officer who dreamed up this whole explosion of cuteness – some of it on the fly – used Donut to crack a big, big case.
Donut in a recent photo. She’s growing up.
(Troy Police Department photos)
Lehman is the Troy force’s public information officer and in charge of its social-media accounts. Her overarching mission is to disseminate information to the public and news media, but also “to show people we are approachable, that we’re authentic,” said Lehman. “We are people too.” And everyone loves kittens.
Dance! Entertain! Prove you’re human!
If you’re wondering why you’re seeing more of this sort of thing – police dandling kittens, doing squad-car karaoke, dancing, issuing lip sync challenges – look no further than the rash of other police-centric viral videos in recent years, that gave rise to urban unrest and hashtags like #ICantBreathe and #BlackLivesMatter.
Just as those damning videos were made possible by low-cost digital cameras, so too are the ones that show cops acting like your little brother when his favorite jam comes on the radio.
“Overall there’s been a real effort” made by police departments to soften and humanize their image, said Lauri Stevens, a social-media strategist in Maryland who consults with law enforcement nationwide. Police realize that the attention given to such incidents as the death of Eric Garner (who gasped “I can’t breathe” before expiring under a police pile-on in New York), or the arrest of Sandra Bland (in which a routine traffic stop escalated into a physical confrontation, followed by Bland’s suicide in jail) has to be answered with something other than back-the-blue boilerplate.
Police “can’t get away with that anymore. It’s to their own benefit to improve. They’re hiring people who know how to do [social media],” says Stevens. “Good communicators.”
Stevens points out the success of Operation Orange Fingers, the Seattle police response to the legalization of marijuana in Washington. Uniformed officers attended that city’s Hempfest, passing out single-serving bags of Doritos with labels reading “We thought you might be hungry,” and the URL for the department’s “Marijwhatnow” FAQ website, telling smokers to drive sober, but feel free to “enjoy ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ at a reasonable volume.”
“Some people in the department thought it went too far, but it was a huge success,” Stevens said.
When in doubt, add a kitten
Back in Troy, Lehman wanted to raise the department’s social-media profile, and turned to the most sure-fire clickbait on the internet. Kittehs – the infantile spelling of which doesn’t even trip up Google’s spellcheck – turned into earned-media gold for Troy police.
Donut’s path from a Michigan Humane Society shelter to Us magazine started when Lehman challenged the internet to boost the department’s Twitter followers to 10,000 from the 4,500. If they made it by April 1, she tweeted, the department would get a cat.
Of course it worked. Lehman admits she really didn’t have a plan for how, exactly, the department would acquire this animal, but once the MHS saw the tweet, they offered to partner on the project. It would promote their cause of adopting shelter animals, while demonstrating to the public that police love kittens as much as anyone. That seems like the easiest sell in the world, but the response took everyone by surprise.
The MHS brought some kittens around to audition. They crawled out of their crate to face the cameras like starlets on Oscar night. One was selected, Pawfficer Badges. The day before Badges’ official swearing-in, though, she was found to have feline leukemia, a serious, incurable, contagious cat illness. This complication not only didn’t stop the cat-cop juggernaut, it barely slowed it down. Donut was a last-minute sub and Badges now lives in a special shelter in Ann Arbor for cats with feline leukemia. (“She will always be our first ‘pawfficer’ and have a special place in our hearts,” Lehman wrote on Twitter.)
The publicity died down after a few more days, although Donut has undeniably had an impact. School children ask for classroom visits. Residents donate supplies; a Ziploc bag in Lehman’s office looks like marijuana, but is really catnip, donated from a garden on Washington Street. Her vet care and food is covered by donations, relieving taxpayers of even that burden. And cat lovers everywhere have pushed for their own police to get a cat, too.
“We’re starting to hear from other departments,” Lehman said. “They want to know how to set up a cat program.” Police in Toledo, Ohio followed Troy’s script almost to the letter and added Pawfficer Cuffs in July. And departments elsewhere are taking the advice of consultants, who are telling the brass to “get your animals out there,” Lehman said. (Troy has three police dogs. If they mind the attention paid to their feline colleague, they’re not saying.)
A cat’s life
So what, exactly, does Donut do, now that she’s leaving her cuteness behind? For starters, she stays home many days; she lives with a dispatcher and doesn’t come to the office regularly. When she does, she stays in the Community Services Section, where the cat-allergic Lehman works with three other officers. Like any adolescent, she’s “kinda sassy,” Lehman said. “Not laid back. Playful.” When she leaves the area, she’s put on a leash, which like most cats, she doesn’t like.
The mobility issue will make outdoor appearances problematic, so the department is looking for meet-and-greet opportunities that make more sense for a full-grown cat. She goes out to schools a couple times a week, and she’s visited the Michigan Children’s Hospital, next door to the Troy municipal complex on Big Beaver Road. Lehman knows how much the community supported this project, and she wants to make sure Donut pays back the attention. But a cat is still a cat; they do what they want, not what you want.
Truth be told, police work in Troy would make for a pretty boring episode of “COPS” – it’s an upscale, well-educated community with little violent crime. With two malls, lots of business and major traffic arteries running through it, the department’s 106 sworn officers spend most of their time investigating property crimes, shoplifting and traffic tickets. But it also has a claim to more diversity than most suburbs, with almost 20 percent of the population identifying as Asian American, and about 4 percent African American.
Which is to say, in the course of serving the community, it’s more important for Lehman to be familiar with the various religions and ethnicities in Troy than its cat lovers. Donut has unquestionably increased the number of eyes scrolling the department’s Twitter, where Lehman posts updates on police activity, or the recent #TweetsFromTheBeat exercise, where officers from four Oakland County departments tweeted through a shift.
But when there’s nothing substantive to tweet about, Donut is always there in a pinch.
“The cat is so popular, there’s nothing we can do with officers that comes close,” she said. “The cat will get a thousand Likes, but the officer might get 100.”
