5,300 Thank-You Cards: a 9-Year-Old's Statewide Mission Reaches Houston Police Headquarters, Her 49th Department in Texas

Every sworn officer at the Houston Police Department has a thank-you card with his or her name on the effort behind it. On Saturday, 9-year-old McKenzie Harrington and her family delivered 5,300 cards to HPD headquarters through their statewide mission, Kenzie's Kindness Journey - enough, FOX 26 Houston reported, for every sworn officer on the force to receive a personal note of gratitude.

Houston was the 49th agency the family has visited, and Saturday's delivery pushed their statewide distribution past 8,300 cards. The goal is the whole state: all 699 police departments in Texas, by the end of next year. The logistics are a family operation - McKenzie's mother contacted the Texas Department of Public Safety to assemble a master directory of every law enforcement agency in Texas, and each week the family contacts departments to get exact headcounts before assembling the matching number of cards.

The mission began, her father Tracy Harrington told FOX 26, when McKenzie was 3 and had a habit of running up to every police officer she spotted to hug them: 'She was about three years old, and she just goes up to somebody and just hugs them. We had to pull them away a little bit so that way she's not doing it all the time. But ever since then, she's just infatuated with police officers and what they do for us and how kind they are to her when they approach her.' The cards are the manageable version of the hug.

HPD was the biggest single stop so far - 5,300 cards is more than half the family's statewide total in one delivery - and the arithmetic ahead is plain: 650 departments to go in a little over a year. McKenzie, for her part, does not plan to stop at the delivery list. FOX 26 reported she intends to join the profession herself when she grows up and earn a badge of her own.