Law Enforcement Week: Cape Girardeau Police Department’s Newton helps inform public and support police as PIO

Cape Girardeau Police Department’s Public Information Officer Bobby Newton serves Cape Girardeau by making the public aware of the police’s actions, delivering department communications and offering peer support for his fellow officers.

Newton said he went into police communications because he could be involved with the community in a more “positive light". He said people don’t call the police on a good day.

“Unfortunately, those guys see a lot of the worst days of the citizens to where I still see some of that, but at the same time, I get to see them in a positive light,” Newton said. “I feel like there's a lot of times there's a barrier between the police department and the public, and I wanted to break those barriers down.”

He said he wanted to show people that police are human beings like everyone else, with families and everything that goes with being members of a community.

Newton described one of the biggest misconceptions as the dissemination of information from the police about situations is it's not “fast enough". He said there can be many reasons information hasn’t come out quickly, citing possible interferences with investigations.

“We have to look at a year down the road — is this gonna go to a jury trial, or we're going to be hindering the jury pool to where there's going to be issues there,” Newton said. “If there's a public safety issue, we're gonna push that out, you know, because public safety is number one for us.”

He said that he also serves on the department’s peer support team. Newton said the peer support team had been developed after they had realized there had been an upward trend in law enforcement officers dying by suicide.

He said, as a part of the team, the system is completely anonymous. An officer can reach out to a peer if they are struggling with their mental health in some way.

“The peer team member is trained and they also know resources available,” Newton said. “Doesn't matter what it is — if it's financial troubles that the officer is going through. Maybe it's a divorce. Maybe it's loss of a child or something that happened at work they're in a critical incident they responded to. We want to be able to provide those resources to them.”

He said the department has gotten a lot of great feedback since developing the process. Newton said the department also offers a program called “Beyond the Badge". The organization reaches out to the spouses of the first responders if an officer were to go through a critical incident to help family members navigate the situation.