ASAS Alum Ti’Andre Excels in Police Academy

By day, a student and by night, a police officer. Ti’Andre Bellinger serves one of Miami’s roughest neighborhoods, Model City, not coincidentally, the same community where he grew up.

ASAS

Miami’s CBS news station recently caught up with ASAS South Florida Alum Ti’Andre Bellinger. Bellinger is training to become a city of Miami police officer and at 19, he’s the leader of his section at the police academy. It was a welcome break from the rigors of the Academy to sit down with his mentor, ASAS South Florida Executive Director Sean Prospect.

“I think there was something about him and there was something about me that brought us together,” Bellinger said of when he and Prospect first met when he started attending his local ASAS program in 6th grade.

Prospect remembers meeting a teen that had a lot attitude but also had a good heart. “When Ti’Andre came to the program, he was very full of attitude and anger. Within ASAS, he found [that] poetry and spoken word was huge for him.

In high school Bellinger became a mentor to younger kids that were like him. Soon after that, he experienced an unforgettable moment: “I got to meet the First Lady [Michelle Obama] at a summer association meeting in D.C. She walked down [and] I shook her hand… it was surreal, all of this is.”

Today, Bellinger is on a mission to become a police officer, finish college, get into law school, and then he says the White House. “God willing, I’m going to run as the president of the United States of America,” Bellinger said. “And I won’t stop because it’s never over.”

Watch the full interview here.

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