If you aren’t following Officer Jacob Lukas on Twitter, you are definitely missing out. Lukas’ popularity has soared among the students at Utica since starting his position as resource officer on April 17.

“It’s grown so quickly,” Lukas said. “120 followers to like a thousand in a matter of four days.”

His Twitter account is one that students cannot stop talking about. For students at Utica that are active on Twitter, it’s more than likely they’ve heard about Lukas’ account.

“I think that Officer Lukas’ Twitter is actually really funny,” sophomore Maya Narusch said. “Even my mom has seen his tweets.”

Lukas’ funny and relatable tweets have allowed students to see him in a different light than the police officer that works in the school during the day.

“I think it’s cool,” junior Sama Alomar said, “that he has a Twitter that people can follow to see what he’s doing in his everyday life outside of school.”

Lukas has used his sudden fame to promote the Shelby Township Police Department Twitter page on his own account. He instructed his followers to follow the police departments page, with the incentive of a car pool karaoke video. Lukas told his followers that if they could get the account to 5,000 followers, he and Officer Leslie Heisler would post the car pool video on YouTube.

“I’m pretty surprised it took off the way it did,” Lukas said. “We just wanted to get followers up on the Shelby page.”

The karaoke video was uploaded to YouTube on May 14, and collected almost 5,000 views in three days.

Along with promoting the Shelby Police Department Twitter page, Officer Lukas has also been promoting #HumanizingTheBadge. The goal of the hashtag is to strengthen the relationship between the police force and the people that they protect.

“I think the point is to make people feel more comfortable approaching police,” Officer Jim Malczewski said. “It’s to let people know that police are people too.”