“I think a lot of the people in law enforcement, they want to be able to fix things. Luckily, I get to train new guys. So one thing I tell them is, ‘I’m not gonna start preaching to you, but think about doing some volunteer work. Think about doing something in the community, because when you go on a call, and you see child abuse, and you can’t fix that; you can’t help that kid have a good life… you know that no matter what you do, he’s gonna go back in that horrible home, and deal with this horrible family life. It’s good for you mentally and it’s good for your soul to be able to realize you can’t change that, but you can change this. When you get off work, you can go volunteer here or work with these people, and that’s something that you can see tangible results in as opposed to just letting the failures that you see or the things that you can’t change just beat you down.’

“We’re really community service-driven here. We’re extremely proactive in engaging with the community. We do our community roll calls, where we go out and we’ll pick different neighborhoods all over town and we’ll host our briefings there. All the neighbors can come out, and they can talk to us, and tell us, ‘Hey, this stuff is going on in my neighborhood,’ or just offer support, or complain. There were a few neighborhoods where we went to where they were extremely dissatisfied with the service of the police department. And it’s good for us, I think, to be there and hear that, you know, from an entire community every once in a while. Okay, well, you know what? I’m not going to discredit what they’re telling me. I’m going to take it to heart, and we’re start focusing on some of this stuff and see if we can impact some of the problems that they’re having in their community.

“Working in this department and having an administration that really encourages the community outreach that we have is beneficial for the entire department and the city.”