What is your most important lesson about police work in your law enforcement career?
It always comes down to relationships—with my co-workers and with the people in the communities we work with. I think nowadays in law enforcement we are seeing how important that is. If you want to have a healthy relationship with the community then you have to get out there and talk to people.
Community policing is the model. For me, the most important thing has been those relationships, because that has served me well my whole career – knowing people in the community, so that they can share information with me, and me being able to share information with them. That’s how we keep the community safe. What I’m really talking about is rapport and trust.
Police officers have tremendous power: a badge and gun, and they can arrest people. So it’s so important that you have that rapport.
At work, too, you have to build relationships, especially as a supervisor. You can’t just come in and dictate orders. You have to get to know people and really take an interest in their behavior, in their lives
How is police work different from when you started?
I can think of two things that stand out. The first is technology. When I started, we had pencils and notebooks and paper reports and now it’s all done on computers. Now we don’t have a stamped clock when we come to work. The recording systems are all digital, and everything has modernized and changed over the years. Computers in the cars, we didn’t have those when we started. When I started we didn’t have smart phones, we had pagers. That’s how they got hold of us on our days off. The rapid growth of technology has changed how we do police work, even the evidence collection. It’s certainly helped us do our job more quickly
The second thing is the department has changed. When I started most of us lived and worked in Scotts Valley or in the county. Now probably more than half of our people don’t even live in the county. They are required to live within one hour of the police department.
It’s a beautiful place to live and work – Scotts Valley – it’s just very expensive. It’s expensive for teachers, it’s expensive for nurses and cops. So on our days off we all used to live here and it was easy to go to events and all that. Now, our people may live in Hollister and San Jose, and that’s changed the dynamics of the police department.
What should residents of Scotts Valley expect from your department?
What residents can enjoy and look forward to, because we’re a small-town police department, we are very responsive to the community’s needs. Now I’m sure a lot of police departments say that, but we have certain demographic benefits. We are only about five square miles as a city. For years now our response time for emergencies has consistently been under three minutes. That’s just rare for most other places. If you live in Scotts Valley, and you call 911, we will be there in less than three minutes.
We really pride ourselves on taking community policing seriously, so we do things like the D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program. We’re the only police agency in the county that still offers it.
We think it’s so important that officers get into classrooms and interact with young people. We also provide a Junior Police Academy for middle-school-aged kids in the summer, where young people get to interact with officers. We also have a school resource officer at the high school. We have an officer on campus that teaches criminal justice. We still celebrate Red Ribbon Week, for healthy, drug-free lifestyles, and we get out of our cars and interact with young people in the community. Our officers try and get out and get involved in the community. I’ve been in the Rotary Club for years. That’s one of the joys of a small town, that you can have that relationship with your community and they can get to know you.
What advice do you give young people who are interested in a career in law enforcement?
When we recruit people here we try to look for personalities who can get out of their cars and talk to people. They still have to do a very difficult job. If you are arresting a non-compliant Hells Angel, but then maybe you turn around and you are in a restaurant and a little boy or girl wants to talk to you and you have to get on their level.
We talk about that a lot, about how we want guardians not warriors, and I think that gets back to relationships.
We tell young people that despite the challenges in law enforcement, it’s a great profession, a noble profession. It’s exciting. We tell young people this is a very rewarding profession. There are not a lot of professions where you can get out there and see how you can affect people’s lives in a positive way.
