During my career in law enforcement I worked in patrol as an officer, later as a field
training officer, and finally as a patrol sergeant. Over the course of my career I also worked in
detectives, in the Gang Enforcement Section, and as a detective sergeant. One of the best things
about being a police officer is that once what you are doing becomes routine or boring, you can
change what you are doing. By the time I had been a patrol officer and field training officer for
five years and beginning to burn out on it I was able to go to detectives. This gave me a new
dimension of experience and I learned a lot during my years as a detective, particularly while I
was assigned to the Gang Enforcement Section. I did this for several years and eventually
became an acting detective sergeant in gangs.
After my time in detectives and the Gang Enforcement Section I decided to return to the
patrol division as a patrol sergeant. Of all of the assignments I had as a police officer being a
patrol sergeant was easily my favorite. In law enforcement sergeants are the middle men in
between the patrol officers (aka "The Troops") and the lieutenants and above (aka "The Brass").
Unlike many careers where being the middle man is a bad thing ("Being stuck in the middle"), in
law enforcement I found the opposite to be true. As a patrol sergeant you don't get stuck with
the routine paper calls that the patrol officers do, but you can still handle calls that are
interesting, require a supervisor, or are more complicated. While being a sergeant does bring
around a lot of paperwork, it is still less than the ranks above you often have to handle.
My retirement from law enforcement came sooner than I would have liked because of a
number of injuries sustained in the line of duty. The primary of these injuries required having
my spine fused at the L5-S1. This injury alone was enough to end my law enforcement career. I
miss my time in law enforcement nearly every day. But, I try to look at it as getting to do a
whole career of doing something that I loved. My father worked at the same place for 30 years
and hated every day of it. I got to spend a slightly shortened career doing something I loved.
Since my retirement I have run a private investigations company that I built from the
ground up. I'm now going to school for a bachelor's degree in psychology and will move on to a
master's degree afterwards. I am planning to go into counseling for police officers and military
veterans. Both police and military are fields that are likely to cause the need for counseling, but
each of those careers are often closed to outsiders. As a veteran of both the military and law
enforcement I believe that I have the insight to be helpful to both groups, and share a common
ground with them that may make it easier for them to open up to me.
I will close out this autobiography with the most important thing in my life, my family. I
am married to my best friend, Amanda. We knew each other and were just close friends for the
first five or six years but we became a couple nine years ago and have been married for eight
years. Neither of us can have children, but we have a large family of dogs and cats that are our
"kids." All of our animals are rescues, some of which we have bottle fed from birth when the
animal's mother died during birth. It makes us a happy, close knit pack of two people, three
dogs, and two cats.