SAVANNAH, GA (July 17, 2012) Fourteen recruits will join the ranks of the Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan Police Department Thursday, July 26, during a ceremony to celebrate their transition from19 weeks of training to sworn police officers.
The recruits will be sworn in during a pinning ceremony at 3 p.m. at the Savannah Civic Center.
Earlier in the day, the same recruits will honor one of 51 law enforcement officers who have died in the line of duty in Chatham County with the traditional Run To Remember, 1.5-mile run in Downtown Savannah.
The recruits have completed two weeks of orientation, 11 weeks of training at the Georgia Regional Police Academy in Garden City and six weeks of intensive additional training with the SCMPD training unit. After next week’s ceremony they will be assigned to ride with individual police training officers for 10 weeks before they may patrol on their own.
Bill Shira, vice president, sales information for Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation and Chairman of the Savannah Area Chamber of Commerce, will be the guest speaker at the pinning ceremony.
The Run to Remember will take place at 10 a.m. in specific memory of Sgt. J.J. Brown who was fatally shot about 3 a.m. April 14, 1981, as he struggled with a gunman who had fired on another officer.
The recruits will be accompanied in the run by current and past officers of SCMPD and other departments in the area.
The run convenes at 9 a.m. at the south end of the SCMPD headquarters parking lot on Habersham Street (near the SCMPD property room) and begins at 10 a.m.
It will proceed North on Habersham, west on Oglethorpe Avenue, south on West Boundary Street and east on Louisville Road to the Coastal Heritage Society Revolutionary Battlefield Memorial Park at MLK Jr. Boulevard.
A brief memorial ceremony will be held there and a wreath placed at the intersection. Elder Willie Ferrell of the SCMPD Chaplains Corps will present the invocations at both events.
SCMPD recruits have been honoring a different law enforcement officer killed in the line of duty in Chatham County with the runs to remember since the beginning of 2011. They have been joined by members of neighboring police departments within and outside the county.
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