Consisting of a single question, it was, undoubtedly, the shortest job interview San Francisco Police Officer Jason Johnson had ever been a party to.
At the end of his probationary period as a new police officer, Johnson’s commander at SFPD’s
Bayview station asked him one question.
“What do you like to do?”
“I like kids,” Officer Johnson said.
It was just the answer the captain was looking for, because there was a community policing position available in the district at the Willie Mays Boys and Girls Club.
Johnson told his captain he’d try it for a month. He returned the very next day and reported that he wanted to stay.
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“You were there one day!” Johnson remembers his captain saying. “I know, but this is where want to be.”
Ever since that day, Johnson has been a fixture in the lives of Bayview children and teenagers, not only spending time with them at the club, but checking up on them at their schools, and arranging after school activities to help keep them out of trouble.
“A lot of kids I work with, they’re on the fence. They can turn bad, they can turn good. And they just need the direction.”
Johnson, though, has given them much, much more.
For the past two years, as part of a program he started called Operation Genesis, Johnson has taken groups of youths on a week-long trip to the country of Ghana, in Africa, for intensive lessons in their heritage and history.
“They get very emotional and very angry. Any emotion that you can think of, they’ve experienced it while we’re there in Africa.”
But the results of the trip, which Johnson illustrates by describing specific lasting effects that it has had on individual students, are profound. Johnson says that one student, who had dropped out of school just prior to leaving for the trip re-enrolled upon her return, began excelling in school and became a better mother to her son.
Johnson doesn’t take all the credit for the success of his students. Rather, he believes in the old saying, “It takes a village.” Both parents and community members, he says, are key players in getting kids to get to where they want to be in life.
“I know I’m just getting started now, but when they become successful, you know, it’s very fulfilling.”
