Officer comforts child who ran away from home

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KKTV/Gray News) – An officer in Colorado is being praised for going above and beyond when a child most needed his help.

Several weeks ago, the Colorado Springs Police Department got a call it never wanted to receive. The caller told them a 9-year-old had run away from home and was in extreme distress.

Officer Craig Johnson said the child had been having thoughts of self-harm and there was some sort of disturbance at his home that led to their decision to run away.

Finding the child quickly and letting them know they were not alone was critical.

Johnson was one of the officers who responded to that call.

To his relief, he soon spotted the 9-year-old sitting by themselves at a nearby school.

As a father of five, Johnson’s thoughts immediately turned to his own children.

“I was just trying to think how I would want a police officer or anybody, any person whose job potentially is to protect my kids, how I would want them to behave with my kids and interact with my kids,” he said.

So he approached the child, to be the person he said he would want in his shoes, if this were his child.

“At first, that person didn’t want to talk to me, and I thought they might run away. I was able to talk to them and get them to stay and talk with me,” Johnson said. “It was obvious that they weren’t at first wanting that help from a police officer.”

Over the next 45 minutes, Johnson and the child connected.

“I just let them know they weren’t in trouble. And I was just there to help. And that was genuine, that was my only purpose in that moment,” Johnson said. “I didn’t want it to escalate, which it can easily escalate. I just started talking with them, and we just ended up sitting on the ground and having a nice conversation. They told me about what’s bothering them and showed me the stuff they had packed to run away with.”

As the child started to warm up to Johnson, they asked if they could go play on the playground.

“They said, ‘Hey, can we go play,’ and I said, ‘You promise me you wouldn’t run and you pinkie-promise you won’t run if we go to the playground?’ And she kept her promise,” Johnson said. “They just showed me their favorite activities to do on the playground, on the swing set, the slides.”

While Johnson was the one at the forefront of his call, he said his fellow officers were just as busy behind the scenes, working to ensure a positive ending.

I asked him why it was important that only one officer approach the 9-year-old.

“Just imagine you’re a young child in crisis, and you have multiple armed officers standing around you, you’re worried about being in trouble, you’re overwhelmed,” Johnson said. “Once I developed a rapport with that child, my officers did a good job of recognizing that and not coming over and disrupting that rapport. But on the back end, they were doing a lot of work, speaking to the parents, arranging for medical services and arranging to take this person to an area facility where they could receive the appropriate mental health services.”

In the end, the child agreed to go with Johnson.

Ira Cronin, the public relations manager for the Colorado Springs Police Department, said Johnson’s approach to helping the child was inspired.

“I think back to when I was that age, and I was mad enough my parents that I thought, ‘I’m going to run away.’ That’s such an emotionally charged situation,” she said.

Cronin said Johnson’s skills were a major help in getting the child to trust him and get the help they needed.

“He was in the right place at the right time,” she said.

Johnson said this situation is one example of why he decided to pursue his profession.

“These are the calls you walk away from with a smile,” Johnson said.

Many would say Johnson went above and beyond that day.

“Officer Johnson’s chain of command passed this up, ‘You know, we really saw some exemplary work today,’” Cronin said.

However, Johnson said he was simply being a Colorado Springs police officer.

“I got into this profession, as did all of us, to help people, and we feel like so many days there’s negative endings to what we do in police work, and when you can walk away really feeling like you helped someone, that’s the best feeling,” he said.

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