Reporter Tim Hahn’s feature on the opening of the Erie Police Athletic League’s summer camp captures the promise of that outreach effort and of the elementary school students it serves.

About 120 children were on hand Monday for the camp’s opening, gathering at Pfeiffer-Burleigh Elementary School for breakfast and a T-shirt before boarding a bus for Gannon University. As many as 140 are expected to participate during the week, about double the number who attended the first camp last summer.

That growth is a very good sign because it means the Police Athletic League, resurrected in 2016, is reaching more kids through the after-school mentoring program law enforcement officers conduct during the school year. In fact, the camp is a reward for participating and a means to keep those lessons fresh during summer vacation.

“The reason that you are all here is you are the best kids at your school. You deserve it. You earned it,” said Sgt. Tom Lenox, a black officer who leads the Police Athletic League and works to increase minority recruitment on the Erie Bureau of Police.

The camp is staffed by officers from the Bureau of Police, the Erie County Sheriff’s Office, the Erie County District Attorney’s Office and the Gannon Police Department. It offers sports and other activities that provide fun and more enduring benefits to the children.

The camp, and the Police Athletic League itself, create positive interactions between officers and young children, some of whom come from neighborhoods and backgrounds in which relations with the police have been strained. Efforts to heal those rifts can never begin too young.

Through the camp’s partnership with Gannon, it exposes the kids also to college educators, athletes and coaches who help to broaden the sense of what’s possible in their lives. One possibility is that participants might in due course gravitate toward careers in law enforcement on the way to creating a police force that better reflects the diversity of the city it serves and protects.

At the core of the Police Athletic League, both at the camp and after-school activities during the school year, is a focus on mentoring and building character. And on children setting their sights high.

“They get to see that college is a possibility, a realistic possibility. They actually get to see that maybe being a police officer, being in the law enforcement profession, is a reality, it’s a possibility,” Lenox said Thursday during Mayor Joe Schember’s weekly news conference.

Though the Police Athletic League was revived under his predecessor, Schember has placed a strong emphasis on strengthening police-community relations. The Police Athletic League is a vital, and growing, part of that effort.