On the weekend before Thanksgiving each year, the Old Saybrook Police Department asks the community to Give the Cops the Bird. With this slogan, the department hopes to attract attention to its annual push to collect donations of frozen turkeys to help town families in need.

Thanks to generous donors, in 2015 the annual event yielded 600 turkeys and 3,000 pounds of food.

“Two hundred Town families have a true need and we try to provide for them at Thanksgiving and Christmas,” said Police Chief Michael Spera. “We need to provide food for 400 meals. Anything extra goes to the Connecticut Food Bank and is distributed around the state.”

Spera and other Police Department volunteers stood underneath canopies at Stop & Shop on Nov. 19 and 20 throughout the day ready to collect the generous donations of non-perishable food and frozen turkeys offered by town residents.

“We are always blessed with an extremely generous community,” said Spera.

Spera hopes that the 2016 campaign will bring forth even more donations than in 2015. By the end of the weekend campaign, the Police Department reported that it had collected donations of 648 turkeys, boxes and boxes of non-perishable foods, and many cash donations from the generous Old Saybrook community.

Starting last weekend, the Police Department had also begun its annual campaign of collecting donated toys at Walmart to give to local families in need at the Christmas holidays.