The best job I've ever had, the easiest one to get wrong

At the start of my shift, I decided to begin my day with a walking patrol. A walking patrol on concrete sidewalks, in full uniform while it was 103 degrees. A local woman stopped her car in the middle of the road and rolled down her window.

She frantically cleared off her passenger seat with a concerned look on her face. She asked me if I needed a ride and fully expected me to join her. After all, why would I be walking around on duty? Cops don't do that sort of thing anymore.

She must have thought my patrol car had broken down and needed help getting back to the station. I laughed and explained to her I was on a walking patrol. She looked at me as if I was delusional. I further explained why and how the Glasgow Police Department was taking initiative to get involved with the community in a more positive and proactive light. She pulled over to the side of the road and we continued to talk for another five to ten minutes.

Towards the end of the conversation, she told me, "I appreciate you." Her compliment hit me pretty hard.

She drove off and I continued on with my walking patrol, but with a different emotion. An emotion of determination mixed with self-awareness.

After walking a block and a half, I had a positive "out of car" experience. An experience I was told I would have by my mentors, training and leadership. I now witnessed firsthand the positive experience an officer can have by using this archaic principle, and wished I would have started this from the beginning of my policing career.

As with any job or profession, you have many perspectives and opinions on how to do that job. Law enforcement has a large grey area on how that job can be done. While still within the law, your work product can be viewed as being done poorly by some citizens.

Before I tell you a few of my hard learned policing lessons, let me share with you a little bit about what brought me to serving as a patrolman.

My father was a 0311 "Infantry Rifleman" Marine assigned to the U.S.S Long Beach and later went to 1st Battalion 3rd Marines in Hawaii. Although this was only a four-year (84-88) stint of my father's life, it was packed with a lifetime of experience, knowledge and lessons. As a child, I would go through my father's photo albums and travel back in time. The photos were of excitement, exhaustion, smiles, frowns, guns and pure adventure from around the world.

After I graduated high-school in Idaho, I took a similar path as my father and stood on the same yellow footprints he did, at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot (MCRD) in San Diego, California. After basic training, I went to Ft. Knox, Kentucky and became an M1A1 Abrams crewman in the USMC Reserves. In the USMC Reserves, I learned the importance of teamwork. The driver, loader, gunner and tank commander are all equally important as the tank will simply not function if just one crew member is not maintaining their role.

While in the USMC Reserves, I worked as a civilian Corrections Officer for the next five years. I worked for state and federal contracts that all had two things in common; keeping people inside and making sure rules are followed.

My time as a Corrections Officer felt like a dead-end option in life.

I looked forward to my weekends and despised going back inside the dreary atmosphere of people serving time. Although an important job, I knew this was not the career for me. I wanted to be a police officer in a rural setting.

While attending the Montana Law Enforcement Academy, I spoke to Assistant Chief Brien Gault over the phone.

Gault told me Glasgow was a great place that had a lot to offer. Gault told me that the area was so flat, you could see the back of your head if you looked far enough. He added the area also had excellent hunting opportunities. While not the mountainous Montana that I had envisioned, I made the jump and decided I would give Glasgow a try.

After completing the field training process, I was now on my own. I was confident and had a decent understanding of my new job as a patrolman. Being a Corrections Officer helped give me the confidence to this similar profession.

I wanted to be proactive and found work in between calls for service. An easy way to be proactive as a patrolman is conducting alcohol compliance checks. When conducting these checks, it is common to find people who are not allowed to be in bars. These are sometimes people on state/misdemeanor probation or on court conditions of release/sentencing.

An officer can also be on the lookout for underage drinking, over-serving and people being disorderly.

When walking inside the bars, it was common to get heckled a bit by some of the bar patrons. This behavior was not new to me having worked in maximum security prisons. People are going to get mad and throw verbal abuse your way for a variety of reasons. This was an early warning sign I ignored.

Lesson #1: These people are not inmates; they are regular citizens. It actually does matter if they like you are not. While not everyone is going to like you as a police officer, you do have to try and show that you are in this job for the right reasons. Only appearing to arrest and chase people out of bars is an ugly look to take on from the bar patron perspective. A well-known local bar patron compared another officer and I to the old Looney Toons characters of "Spike and Chester." These characters were known for being bullies. The bar patron had a point. Just because we could and were well within the law, did not necessarily mean we were going about it the right way.

A little over a year ago, I responded to a roll over motor vehicle accident in a residential neighborhood. While Dispatch was relaying information, I remember thinking, 'what? how could that be? Once on scene, I noticed there were a few juveniles hurt, crying and bleeding. The ambulance and fire department were also on the way. I started bandaging up one of the injured juvenile's hands.

During the chaotic scene, the mother of one of the injured told me she was not going to pay for an ambulance as she would just drive her child to the hospital herself.

Without thinking, I immediately told the mother I was not worried about her finances and told her that her daughter was staying put. Everyone got quiet and the mother gave me a look I'll never forget. I knew right after I said that statement, it was wrong. After the scene was cleared, I drove by the hospital to see the mother and daughter walking to their car. I apologized to the mother for what I had said. There were many ways I could have told the mother she needed to wait for the ambulance.

Lesson #2: These are regular citizens, not Marines that you can bark passive aggressive orders to.

My first four years of policing have flown by. I look back on past decisions and think of better strategies that could have been used or better things that could have been said. While now actively conducting more walking patrols, getting to know more people, I can feel a weight has been lifted off of my shoulders.

The "us vs. them" mentality an officer can build by only patrolling in their vehicle is a real problem.

The Glasgow Police Department has taken a genuine interest on having more "out of car" experiences like the one I shared in the beginning of this column.

Thank you for taking the time to listen to my experience and I look forward to meeting all 3,322 of you during my daily foot patrols.