The Juneau Police Department wants to boost residents’ quality of life with kindness.
JPD Police Chief Bryce Johnson and Lt. Kris Sell presented their idea to the Juneau School Board Tuesday night.
The department wants the community to spend a year trying to make Juneau a more peaceful place by encouraging people to perform random acts of kindness for others.
“What we want to do is encourage people to do at least one kind act per day for another person. And to once a week make that kind act directed at someone who’s not in their normal circle of associates,” said Sell. “Maybe someone of a different culture, different background, different religion, different socioeconomic status.”
Sell said the department asked the nonprofit Random Acts to track what impact kindness will have on the Juneau community through 2017.
She said Random Acts will send a researcher to Juneau in January to gather data on the town. Then the organization will return a year later to see if Juneau’s quality of life has changed.
“And that’s numbers about our crime rates, about our disturbances, about discipline issues in the school, and we’ve talked to the hospital even about tracking our level of disease in Juneau,” Sell said. “We know from studies that being kind actually improves your immune system.”
A column in the Washington Post recently cited a study that found patients who gave their doctors a perfect score for empathy tended to recover from colds faster than patients who gave their doctors lower scores.
But the columnist, who is also a doctor, said evidence of a direct link between empathy and better health outcomes was limited. He also said kindness can’t hurt.
Sell said Random Acts had never heard of an entire town leading a kindness initiative and they said Juneau would be the first.
Sell said she and Chief Johnson came to the Juneau School Board meeting, hoping to recruit young people to take part in the initiative.
She hopes Juneau’s youth will continue making deliberate acts of kindness after the year is up.
She said kindness is “the drug that can replace all other drugs.”
