Chief Carlson's Story
How long have you been at Hollins?
September of this year I’ll have been here a full two years. I started the beginning of the semester in 2000. I started as an officer, as a patrolman. Basically I guess I worked, probably the first two months I was on the midnight shift which at that point was 11 p to 7 am, and then what the director decided at that point was, with my past police experience and training and everything, that she could better use me on the evening shift when most of our incidents happen, so she moved me over to the 3 to 11 shift. And I stayed on the 3 to 11 shift until March of 2001 which would have put me at the 6 month mark. I was promoted to patrol sergeant, so from that point I was in charge of all the patrol officers. So there was 6 officers plus myself that was in the patrol division. Actually I still stayed on the 3 to 11 shift for a while until I had some investigations to do and then she kind of moved me over to the day shift. Come about October of that same year, our past director, Mary Ann, just resigned one day. And my boss, vice president Doug Waters, called me at the house on my day off and left a message on the machine. It’s kind of funny. I think I was out doing something, I come back in and I didn’t even look at my machine. Next thing, I’m cooking dinner for the family and the phone rings. When I pick it up, it’s Mr. Waters on the phone, so it kind of took me aback ‘cause I’m wondering what’s the vice president calling me at my house for. (Laughs.) And he went through some pleasantries and he told me that the director had quit and no notice and we’re flying without a captain right now, so he asked me if I’d step up and take over as the acting director of the department. And I advised him I would do that, you know, I would do what I could until they could find a new director through their search. So I took that position over and probably within the first month of doing it I decided that this just may be the job for me. I mean I had started doing some minor changes and we changed some scheduling and changed some of the atmosphere of the office and the officers were getting real comfortable. At one point we used to not like to come to work because things were just so hectic, but things started to change around and even the people in my department asked me to go ahead and apply for it. So I did. And probably after another couple or three months of finishing up their search and doing interviews and stuff, I was appointed the director in the middle of January 2002. So I haven’t even been here two years yet, and I’m already running the show.
That’s exciting. What was your past experience in law enforcement?
I started off in the Air Force back in ’75 – lets you know how old I am – and I worked as a base policeman in the Air Force on active duty for 4 years. When I left the Air Force I returned to my home in Pennsylvania and I started working for a county police department in Pennsylvania. I worked there for 3 years. After my first year there I was promoted to corporal, and I had a small division of about 5 officers that were under me at that point. After a year of being corporal, I had applied for a sergeant’s position, they had a road sergeant’s position come up and I put in for it and I remained on that list for about a year. Just about the time I was there for 3 years, I’d applied to… in Philadelphia they had started a new transit authority police department and a lot of my buddies from inside the county were going into the city – better pay, benefits, whatnot – so I had applied. And about the time I came up for my sergeant in the county P.D., I’d gotten called in for interview processes in Philadelphia. So, long story short, I decided to take the position in Philadelphia. So I went into Philadelphia and I had to go through another whole police academy again, another 18 weeks this time. But it was a pretty interesting deal. We worked basically in the subways, in the elevated trains, and down in what they call the tunnels down there. And after about 2 years of that I’d had about enough and me and my wife at that time, we decided that we needed to just change things all together. So my brother-in-law and my sister were gonna move to Texas, so I thought about it and I called around to P.D.’s down there and saw how I could transfer my training from Pennsylvania to Texas and it wasn’t that hard of a thing to do. So we moved and I started working for a college. It was the Alamo Community College District which is two-year colleges, but they have about 5 different campuses in the city of San Antonio. So I started working for them as a patrolman. And I spent 2 years with them. We were a regular campus police department down there. As a matter of fact, all of our campuses were right inside the city, so we had open roads throughout our campuses, not like we enjoy here where there’s only one way in and one way out. We had bars and stuff that were within the campus boundaries and we had shootings and stabbings and car thefts and car break-ins, so we stayed really busy. When I first started working, we had about 60 police officers and then through the 2 years that I – actually 3 years – that I was there, we ended up cutting it down to about 45 officers which made it really hard on the officers. Where we used to have 5 officers per shift per campus, now we were down to 2 and 1. So it was getting really dangerous and it was getting really hard to keep up with all the crime. So I took a position with a county sheriff’s department that was just south of San Antonio called Atascosa County as a road deputy and I spent 5 years with them as a road deputy. Which probably brings me close to the 20 year mark at that point. I never retired, but got divorced like all cops do. (Laughs.) Married somebody else and, at the time, I’d gotten involved with a San Antonio gang that had been doing some things in our county. And it was getting to the point where we were hunting each other, kind of. Basically what it was, they’d done some drive-by shootings and actually they’d killed 2 people in our county. And my wife at that time was frantic. You know, we had a ranch on 60 acres and every time she’d see lights out on the dirt road she’d freak out. She thought this gang was coming to blow up the house or do whatever they had to do. So after about 3 or 4 months of going through that we decided it was time for a change and we moved and we ended up here in Virginia. She took a job and I worked for some security companies, you know, keep my time going. And I eventually ended up in Craig County, but I was only working part-time up there with the sheriff’s office and then, as things would have it, we went back to Texas and we got divorced. (Laughs.) Then I just came back here on my own. I’ve always been a police officer so I have the interest in it and I just decided this is where I want to be, back in Virginia, and I just returned here on my own. While I was working here in Virginia, I was working for a company called Wackenhut that handled some of the lower-rent income apartment houses here, so they had armed security out there and I did that for a while. And I ended up meeting a girl over in Virginia Beach while I was vacationing and I moved from here to Virginia Beach, I just transferred within the office of Wackenhut. And we spent about a year and half over there and I finally talked her into coming back over here. So we transferred back over here and probably within about 3 or 4 months of coming back, I applied for one of the officer positions here at Hollins and that’s basically that story. (Laughs.) That’s how I got here.
It’s fascinating! How did y’all choose Virginia in the first place?
Because she got a job here?
She had a friend… we’d gone from Texas to New Hampshire, she’d got a job in New Hampshire as a clothing store manager. She had a friend there whose sister lived here in Roanoke so when her clothing store – it was an outlet store – closed down, she was out of a job so her friend said, you know, come on down to Roanoke, there’s lots of stuff going on right now. They found us a rental house and whatnot, and we just made the move and that’s how we ended up right here.
Tell me about your family when you were growing up.
Ok. Basically we grew up… I have a sister younger than me, about 7 years, and a brother that’s 2 years younger than me... we grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia outside in Delaware County, same county where I went to work for that P.D. at. And that was kind of, I don’t know, my dad was kind of an abusive father I would say. Ok? There’s times that, this is maybe where I first got the interest in law enforcement, I don’t know. But I remember a few times the police having to come to our house and take my dad away. But I think ever since the show, probably the one in Los Angeles, Adam 12, came out… I think I used to religiously watch that every week and I think that’s where a lot of my interest in going into police work comes from. But, yeah, basically we grew up in that setting. My dad actually was a numbers cruncher for the Philadelphia Stock Clearing Corporation, but he used to like to bet the horses and stuff like that, which brings on all those problems. Which is why I’m exactly like my mother and nothing like my dad. I’m not into sports and I’m not into going out to the bars and I’m not a bettor, so I kind of turned opposite, I guess, and I have a feeling it’s because of that, just growing up and seeing that. Actually when I was in basic training in ’75, my mom decided to go ahead and file for divorce, so I found out that they were filing for divorce while I was still in boot camp. And by the time I got out of boot camp, they’d already gone their separate ways. But my dad died. He was only 55 years old. It was a result of emphysema, problems he had from smoking and stuff like that. But other than that, my childhood was… it was pretty good. I mean, we got to do some things, you know. Of course it comes back on my daughter and my step-daughter now. I’m the same as my mom, you know, I’m very tight with stuff and I’m very regimented and that all comes from my mom. That’s another thing, I think it helps me in this career field.
How old are your daughters?
My step-daughter is 15, she’s gonna turn 16 this summer. (Oh.) Yeah, we’re already going through that. (Laughs). And my daughter lives with my first wife in Vermont and she is 14 years old. I guess they’re both about that same, they’re one year behind so whatever we’re dealing with right now I’m gonna deal with long distance next year.
Do you have a lot of contact with your daughter?
I try to call her once a week. (Pause) We had brought her into Virginia Beach for a while. Her mom was just, her mom never remarried so her mom was having a rough time and even child support really wasn’t helping, but I guess her and Becky started getting real edgy and she came to live with us in Virginia Beach for a while. But coming from the school system in Vermont to the school system in Virginia… completely different. And she used to have A’s and B’s in Vermont, now she’s getting D’s and F’s in Virginia Beach. So we decided after about 3 months that she’s not gonna make it through the rest of the year and I had to send her back up. But probably once a year we try to… my mother lives in Cape May, New Jersey, so that’s a half-way point between Vermont and here, so I try to go up there at least once a year in the summer time when she comes down there to visit my mom and I get to see her that way.
How long does it take to get to New Jersey from here?
It’s probably about, it’s about 8 hours. Yeah, it’s about 8 hours for them to come down there, also.
I’ve been commuting between here and Birmingham, which is where I’m
from (Wow.) and that’s about a 9 hour trek. Just about the same. Depends on
how bad the construction is going through Tennessee.
You get used to it after while though, don’t you? Yeah, you do.
There was a while when I’d gone back, I’d stayed up with my mom for about 6 months to help her out after my second divorce, and I’m in the National Guard and so my National Guard unit is here in Roanoke, so I used to make that once a month, that trip. 8 hours. I’d come in on a Friday and then I’d bug out on a Sunday after we got out of drill and drive all the way back. (Laughs.)
You’d just be exhausted all the next week.
Yep, yep.
Are you close to your brother and sister?
My brother is more like my dad, so we’re not real tight. My sister I’m closer to because she’s more like my mom. Although, 2002 everybody’s got their own families and problems and everything and everybody pretty much keeps to themselves unless, you know, they get together in the summer, try to meet. Like I said, when I meet my daughter, my sister and brother will probably come down for a couple of days and stay at my mom’s house. But other than that, other than holidays or so, on the phone, probably every 3 or 4 months I get to talk to them.
What do you do for fun?
I’m an avid fire arms enthusiast, I guess you’d say. So while I was in the sheriff’s department in Texas I was designated sniper for the sheriff’s office, so I had built a custom rifle, about $1,500 worth, and I enjoy going out to the range. I still have the weapons that I used to have in the sheriff’s office because we basically had to buy our own equipment. And we were pretty well packed when we left the cars. So I’ll go out to the… there’s various shooting ranges out here. I do that just for relaxation. Other than that, since I’ve taken over the director’s position, this is pretty much a 24/7 job, so I’m pretty well tied up. I don’t have a whole lot of extra time. My wife is working as a manager of a clothing store and she does a minimum of 40 hours a week and she opens some days and closes some days, so there’s no regularity to our meeting times. Usually one of us is sleeping when the other one gets there. At least we’re together all night long. (Laughs.)
That can be really difficult. How long have y’all been married now?
Going on 3 years in the summer. Yep.
Tell me about her.
Well. Debra is, she’s very (pauses and hesitation), how should I put it? She’s, she’s got a very young mind, you know. We’re both 40 years old, but in her mind she’s still 20, you know. So, ah… (Chuckles.) She’s a very happy person, she’s always happy, which is a good thing. That way she can put up with me when I, you know, don’t pay a lot of attention ‘cause I’m home working on scheduling or something like that. But, we get, she enjoys doing, taking rides. She’s not much of a camper and a fisher and a hunter like I am, but we get… our time is quality time. (Chuckles.) (Interruption by a school friend.)
Ok. So she can…
Yeah. She’s a good mother. She’s got 2 children. My stepson is, just turned 19 and he’s off in the Air Force himself. As a matter of fact he’s in Texas finishing up his tech school. He went into intelligence. Once he finishes that, I think they’re sending him to Hawaii. He’s kind of up in the air about whether he wants to go to Hawaii or not, but he sounds like he wants to make a career out of the Air Force. And I think I probably helped him do that ‘cause being that I was in the Air Force and now I’m in the Army, I know the big difference between the two. And he had gone to talk to an Army recruiter first and they gave him the usual Army stuff, so when he came home and told me all this I told him what the Army stuff really entails and told him for his personality and what he wants to get into, the Air Force is probably a better suit-and-tie, nine-to-five job that he can do rather than spend time like I do out in the field all the time.
Does he want to fly?
He had thought about that. He got to basic, of course they go through different programs that you can do, and he called his mom up and he told her “Mom, I’m changing my job, I’m gonna become a pilot.” And, like I said, Debra is so childlike that she just, she told me, “Guess what! Blake’s gonna become a pilot!” (Laughs.) I said, “How’s that gonna happen?” She said, “Well, they’re gonna make him a pilot.” I said, “Ok. I tell you what though, first of all he’s gonna have to become an officer…” But, she didn’t understand. She gets caught up in the excitement of stuff and she don’t understand, you know, the process. After I explained it to her… And he could still do it. Once he gets his time in, he can take college courses while he’s there. May take him a long time to get a 4 year degree, but I think he wants to stay in for the 20 years or so. That may work out good for him.
Does that worry you at all with the national “stuff”?
No. I’ve been in the military for a long time. I’ve almost been 10 years. Actually when I got out of active duty, I was out for a year and I went into the National Guard for a Try One program, and at that time it didn’t work well with the police department I was working for, so I just got out after the one year. And divorces do funny things to you, and after my second divorce I decided that something’s not right, something’s missing in my life and I went back to the Guard recruiters at 40 years old and asked to get back in. And I was still in good shape and I can still do what I have to do for P.T. and stuff and I still have my MOS and an infantryman, they put me right back in. Of course, the possibility of getting deployed is… it could happen. As a matter of fact, when 9/11 happened, it was just 2 days after… well, Mary Ann left October the 3rd, so it was a month after and everyone was worried about getting deployed anyway when Doug asked me to take the position and I told him, I said, “Sir, I’ll do it, but you’ve gotta understand also that tomorrow I could be on an airplane going to wherever because we don’t know what’s gonna happen. And, luck as it is, we don’t have enough manpower in my unit to get sent anywhere, but it’s still a possibility. We’re going to… I leave on, as soon as graduation’s over, I leave on the 25th, on my birthday, to go to Fort Stewart, Georgia for 2 weeks for my annual training and we still do our normal deal like that. But unless our strength in the unit gets up to about 95 percent, they can’t send us anywhere, but the possibility still exists if things don’t cool off. My wife don’t like it, but… Actually, at my point in my life now, I would prefer not to go because being in the National Guard I figure our job is basically here in country. But of course I’ve been a soldier all my life so I’ll go where they send me. But I’d prefer not to at this point. (Laughs).
What is the strangest thing you’ve seen working as a, not just at
Hollins, but working as a campus security person?
At Hollins we’ve got a pretty good handle on crime. Really we don’t have a whole lot. That was another thing, we had gone from I guess the old security department they used to have here to, when Mary Ann had first come in, her and Janet Rasmussen had gotten together and decided that the word “security” is not a job, it’s a responsibility, so security became a responsibility of everybody in the community out here and they changed our name to the Department of Campus Safety. And we handle, of course, all safety issues. We do a different job than what the old security department did because we’ve got so many… with federal regulations going on, with different crimes on campus there’s a whole lot of federal regulations now that we are responsible for like the Cleary Act and the reporting and stuff and it takes a lot of time. So we have to be a lot more detailed in our reporting and programs that we offer at the university like rape awareness training and victim’s relief act training and stuff like that, so our department has gone towards more of a police department, which is in my line. Eventually, I know most of the campus, or all universities are going from their old security departments to police departments because it gives you immediate response people right there, you don’t have to wait for the deputy or the county, you know 20 or 30 minutes to get there. If something happens now, we can handle it now. Matter of fact, the officers I’ve got working for me now, I’ve got over 20 years. I’ve got a woman I just hired on, my newest hire, Officer Rubeiz, she’s retired from Roanoke City Police Department and her last 10 years there was as a rape and homicide investigator, so we’re lucky to get somebody of that caliber here to work for us. All my officers are either ex-police officers or have criminal justice degrees and some have both. I’ve only got 7 officers actually authorized and we all have some sort of a background in the criminal justice system, so we can, I believe we can detect, you know, problems that are going to arise. And we don’t have any problems with the students. Our biggest worry in the department is the protection of the community. I mean we do parking violations and rules and regulations that the university has set in place but our biggest priority is the protection and the safety of the community. That entails all, staff, faculty, and the students. Of course, the students are at a younger age where they’re inexperienced and, you know, have never been subjected to crime and whatnot, so we have to spend more time with training and watching over them than we do the rest of the community. But that’s our basic function, to you know, provide a safe campus area for everybody out here. It’s like our own little town, our own little police department in own little town out here. And our agency is a member of the Cardinal Criminal Justice Training Academy, so all of our officers go through the law enforcement 18 weeks of training academy. The guys that I’ve hired on and the gals that have already been through that, their training just comes over with them. Right now I have one officer who was a police officer in Massachusetts for 14 years and his wife was from here, so they moved back here and I put him on. And he’s in the academy right now because his training was from Massachusetts and he really wanted to go through the whole thing, so he’s away at Cardinal right now for… he’s probably, oh 8, 9 weeks into his 18 weeks. He comes back to us in June, then I’ve got 2 younger officers, one is a recent graduate of Penn State University he’s got his criminal justice degree. He will probably be the next one to go. Then I have a young female who came to us from the Coast Guard. And she’s got a lot of law enforcement training from the Coast Guard with drug related stuff and, you know, boarding boats and stuff like that. And so we’ve got a good balance of different types of officers and they’ve all got good common sense, which is hard to put together. (Laughs.) But they all understand that the university is…this is not your standard police department stuff. We handle all of our own misdemeanors here. Most misdemeanors here go through the judicial system through SGA. The only things that we would have to, at the time, call the County P.D. in for would be felonies because they have the resources to do those investigations right now. If we become our own police department in the future, then we’ll have those resources. And actually we’d have more time to spend on it because we’re here all the time. There’s a lot of cases that of course we’ve handed over to the County and they just don’t have the time to work on them. And that’s why I think in our professionalism and our changing and our training and stuff, that eventually we will need to have our own police department here also so that way we can concentrate more on what Hollins needs instead of having outside influences come in and deciding well, we’re gonna take you to jail because you did this or you did this or you did this. ‘Cause misdemeanors are all up to discretion anyway, it’s only when you get into the felonies that it starts getting sticky if you don’t do something. (Laughs.) But we’re pretty lucky here that the students here are a great bunch. We have our minor problems, you know. We have our minor misdemeanors, you know. And we handle those and they’re taken care of. We’re lucky so far not to have had a lot of outside influence come in, bad influence. I’m sure there are some things that are going on that, you know, may be happening that we’re not aware of and I’m hoping that eventually the students will get trust in us through our professionalism to come to us and tell us that “My boyfriend did this to me.” or “This guy did this to me.” or whatever and they’ll be assured that we’re gonna handle it in a professional manner. So that’s what we’re shooting towards. Our boss is very excited about the possibility of becoming state accredited and I’ve already started working on that and putting together a director’s manual that we can become state accredited. Which is another feather in Hollins’ cap, especially when it comes time to new students coming. To me, education is number one, but safety runs with that. If it’s not a safe environment, you’re not gonna learn anything. So I think the education part and the safety part of the university have gotta work hand in hand. You can’t have one without the other, that’s my idea anyway.
The problems that you encounter, are they…Do they predominantly seem
to be just experimentation and youth, not seeing a whole bunch of…
Yeah. Right. There’s very… and even the assaults that have happened are not really malicious, they’re more of a slap or a verbal assault or something like that between the students. Most of it would be alcohol related, things of that nature that the youth hasn’t figured out is really a bad thing yet. (Laughs.) So, that’s… and of course none of us learn that until something all of a sudden changes our lives, whether it’s…. hopefully it’s a lesson that’s you learn that’s small rather than you end up in jail somewhere or get a DUI or something like that where you learn the hard way. (Laughs.)
I was surprised to learn that the girls can have male visitors within the dorms. Now this is my first experience with a women’s college and perhaps I’m just naïve, but that surprised me, does (They have guidelines.) that complicate your job? It seems like it might.
No. If they follow the handbook it doesn’t. What would make it more complicated is the fact that there are a lot of males around now so we don’t know who are the good ones and who are gonna be the bad ones. If they follow their guidelines in their handbook, they’re supposed be, at least in the dorms, they have to be with their guest… a male can’t wander through dormitories unescorted. Males are allowed to come to Moody from the outside and socialize with the girls, they don’t have to have any specific guest, student that they’re visiting. And of course when they have their parties and stuff they pretty much have them here so that they can keep them in a certain area so if you do have some problems come in, at least it’s isolated. But we really have had no serious problems. Of course we do get some judicial violations. I mean an officer may catch a male with a key going in a front door. Of course my officers will stop him and I.D. him and find out who he’s visiting and who he got this key from. Because the males are not allowed to have keys to the dorms or to the rooms. And some of the students, the boyfriend runs out for a pack of cigarettes or something and they throw him the keys and the next thing you know he’s coming in there and we’re catching him and the student’s going to judicial court. (Laughs.) Other than stuff like that, we’re pretty lucky out here. We are.
I’ve also heard about ghost stories, does this affect your job at all?
Not at all. Last year I was interviewed by a student actually on video tape about the Presser ghost stories and I probably ruined her day because I knew I’ve never run across anything myself in Presser. The newer officers that have been hired within the last year, you know they’ll question some of the older officers about it, but as far as I know, none of us have ever seen a ghost. (Laughs.)
I found that to be very amusing. My first introduction to that is that I
had a class with Jan Fuller Carruthers last semester and she gets called out
every semester to go bless the different problem areas.
No kidding. Well, my stepdaughter, of course I would tell my family this, and the first thing she wanted to do is she wanted to come up and see Presser, so one night I said alright, I’m working 3 to 11, y’all can come up to visit me and I’ll take her over there and let her walk through there and… she’s into, of course you know 15 years old, she’s into Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all that kind of stuff, so it was interesting for her but I don’t think she saw anything either.
What has been your favorite part about your job? Is there anything that
stands out about the time that you’ve been at Hollins?
Yeah. Of course I’ve always been, and this probably goes back to my early childhood, I’ve always been a protector type person. I’ve always worked in that type of a field, whether it’s in the military or in law enforcement, so to me, I get a lot of job satisfaction out of knowing that I’m really doing something that’s making a difference. You know, providing protection out here. That probably is my greatest, I don’t know how to say it, (pause, searching for words), my greatest job satisfaction that keeps me doing it all the time, you know. And being the chief of the department now, I have latitude to decide how I can incorporate some of my past experience and training into Hollins and make it a better place, and that gives me the greatest pleasure in being able to be the chief of the department. I’ve got, all together, 11 people underneath me and they all look up to me. It’s a good feeling, you know, knowing that the people that I have working now actually like to come to work here. There was a time when everybody was kind of… wasn’t sure, you know, what was gonna happen from day to day. But everybody knows who I am, the type of person I am. They know my tolerance level and everybody enjoys each other. And I get, that’s my greatest job satisfaction now because I’m not out there beating the streets no more. I’ve always enjoyed street patrol. I mean, 3 to 11 was great for me out here, because I got to do most of the stuff that goes on. Of course it’s not like Texas and it’s not like Philadelphia and it’s not like Delaware County, but there comes a point in your life when you don’t want to do all that anymore. You lose friends and things like that happen and you just want to teach and instruct what you’ve learned and I’m at the point now where that’s what I enjoy most rather than hitting the streets and writing tickets and all that. I enjoy coming to work every morning and knowing that I’m gonna have an influence or an impact on my officers and my dispatchers. (Pause.) Good or bad. (Laughs.)
In the years that you’ve been working in protective fields, have you
seen a shift in the way that people behave toward each other? Does it seem like
it’s gotten better, does it seem like it’s gotten worse?
(Sigh.) I’m gonna say that I think, from what I’ve seen in the law enforcement field, it’s getting worse. (I was afraid that was gonna be your answer.) Especially in law enforcement. Of course, tempers are a lot shorter than they were 10, 15, 20 years ago, you know, with things like road rage and all. I mean, it all stems from something and I wish I knew what it was because then we could fix it. But we’re not sure where it’s all coming from, so we’re using all of our resources to try to push it back because we don’t know where it’s coming from. There are certain areas that we suspect, but generally on the streets now days – and it all depends on where you’re at, I mean here at Hollins everybody knows who I am and everybody supports me and everybody is nice to me and I’m nice back to everybody. In Philadelphia it wasn’t the same way, you were viewed more as a problem than you were a good thing… you weren’t their protector, you were the guy who put them in jail all the time. So it all depends on the area or the groups that you’re working with also. But crime is definitely on the rise. I would say more violence toward each other than what we used to have. Now here, we’re still good. (Laughs.) And I don’t foresee, unless all of a sudden something strange in the atmosphere happens where everybody turns on each other, I don’t foresee Hollins ever getting really bad. Of course, the City of Roanoke and the county are expanding so we’ve got more… we’re not as isolated as we used to be from crime and we’re opening our doors up to more events from the outside, so we just have to be real careful and watch. You know, the more watchful of what’s going on around… and the students need to watch also, because there might be some bad influences that are coming in that we don’t really know about and we really can’t control until we find out that they’re a bad influence and then we can try to get rid of them. But some of them are really good at hiding the fact until it’s too late.
Following up on the other interview, you were talking about alcohol use (Right.) and you said that that’s something most people don’t learn the easy
way, that it’s something most people have to learn in a hard way. (Right.)
How did you learn?
Well, I’ll tell you, probably my first experience with alcohol use was when I went into the military in ’75 and I was in from ’75 to ’79, and of course we did stupid stuff just like anybody else between the age of 18 and 22. (Chuckles.) Ours was kind of double-edged because I was an Air Force cop, but back then, alcohol use was not a bad thing. I mean it was, most of the guys in the military then were coming back from Vietnam. There was a lot of… I say drug use, but marijuana use that continued from Vietnam on into back into the States. And alcohol was used excessively during Vietnam, so that was part of the culture, the military culture was alcohol. Of course, once I got through boot camp and police school and I finally got assigned to a base, I learned from the other guys how to relax when you’re not working. Of course, our stress as base policemen, we were kind of like… it was kind of like on a college campus, we’re controlled. I mean only certain people are in and out anyway, military’s even more controlled than, say, a college campus would be. So we dealt with basically internal people anyway. Of course you had some, every once in a while the bad would come across the fence, but they couldn’t just get through the gate. Not on an Air Force base at least. But we learned through experiences with our sergeants and above that, you know, on your days off you’ve got to try to unwind, so it would involve going to the bars and drinking or we’d have… I think back then each barracks, we had three floors in the barracks, each one of them floors always had a bar so the guys could go in there and buy their beer, liquor, whatever they wanted. And they could party right there rather than be out driving. Although I’ve had some friends that have actually, even as base policemen, have been arrested for DUI, which wasn’t really a serious offense back then. It’s… actually even when I worked in Philadelphia, DUI was not a real serious offense and I’ve know police officers in Philadelphia who had been stopped or arrested themselves for DUI’s and at that point it wasn’t all that serious. I mean they’d get suspended or something, you know, without pay, or demoted or something like that. It didn’t really become a serious thing until probably more into the mid-80’s… almost close to the 90’s before DUI became really serious. That’s probably with the development of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers probably. Of course I mean nowadays, at my age, I don’t want to wake up with a hangover. I mean, to me drinking and getting drunk and waking up with a hangover is a waste of my next day and I hate that feeling. (Laughs.) I don’t like the feeling of not knowing what I’m doing. I like to be in control of myself all the time. So I just don’t indulge now. I did in the past, ain’t gonna do it no more.
When was the first time that you lost a friend?
I’ve been to many police funerals. Only 2 have been close friends. I, actually… for my first funeral was when I first started working in Delaware County PD, we were so close to Philadelphia… I think Philadelphia PD was losing 2 or 3 officers per year, so we made a lot of funerals. ‘Cause in that part of the country it’s really, it’s a big deal. You’d have thousands of police officers from all across the country would show up for these funerals. My first loss of my real friend was a guy by the name of Tom Sewell who I went to the academy with in Philadelphia and… after my second year when I left, he stayed on and he became sergeant. So he was a sergeant on the patrol division on I think it was the evening shift he worked. But he ended up getting a call to, I believe it was a train yard, by one of the transportation workers who said that there was a derelict on one of these trains and he wouldn’t get off. So Tom got sent over there plus a paddy wagon with two other officers was sent over there also to assist him, but Tom got there first and he did get the guy to get off the train and it took a little while for backup to get there, so he… he put the individual on his patrol car and started to pat him down for weapons and the guy came off with a butcher knife. And slashed at his face a few times and Tom drew his weapon and they just locked horns, the 2 of them. I think he emptied his weapon into the guy, but the guy got a couple of good knife hits and one of the hits went between… when we wear our vests, of course there’s slots in there (pointing to the side of his rib cage) so it went through the slot and it went through and it pierced his heart and he got internally bleeding through the heart. So when backup finally got there of course, the uh the perp was dead, he’d been shot 6 times. But Tom was airlifted to the hospital, but never made it to the hospital. But that was my first friend. Of course when I found that news out I was working in uh Atascosa County, Texas. And my mother called and she asked me, she said “A transit authority officer was just killed, do you know of anybody by the name of Tom Sewell?” And I said “Oh yeah.” You know. So she sent me down the articles and then a couple of my buddies on the force who were still there sent me some more articles and stuff so I still got all that the packets and everything like that. My second close friend was killed in Atascosa County and again that was probably a year after I left there and moved up this way. Actually I was in Virginia Beach when I came home from work and my wife told me, said, “I’ve got something bad to tell you.” She said, “I got a call from your ex-wife and Mark Stephenson was shot to death.” And she knew a little bit of it, so she gave me the number that she left to call the sheriff’s office and I called a couple of friends over there and found out that not only was Mark killed, but another young deputy was killed and a state highway was killed all in the same family violence episode. We had… there was a guy (hesitation, struggling for words) there that constantly beat his wife and our department constantly made calls to his house. And for whatever reason, we don’t know because the guy shot himself after he killed the 3 officers, he uh he got mad and he called the sheriff’s department and reported another family violence and the 2 deputies responded first and he waited outside in the bushes with a rifle. And when the 2 officers got out of their cars, he shot and killed both of them and when the trooper got there, the trooper come in as back up and he saw that there was 2 officers on the ground so he radioed in what he had and he tried to backup and he backed up right to where the guy was hiding and the trooper was shot in the head and killed also. Then there was two more officers who arrived on the scene that were both shot during… this was before the gunman killed himself. So actually we had 5 officers killed. But Mark was uh my uh like um I was his (hesitation, struggling for words) I was his field training officer, basically. He came out of the jail and he took over a really rough area of the county that… I was covering my area and that rough area because one of our other deputies who was shot and he was out on leave for about a year ‘cause he got shot in the throat. But I taught Mark that area and I taught him basically what he knew out there. So that that hurt me really bad when somebody like that, you know… family man, great family man, ex-Army cop himself. Boy was 6 foot 9, nobody ever messed with him you know. He was big. It, it bothers you for a long time. Matter of fact I wear this pin (points to a small lapel pin) it’s the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington, DC, so I’ve got 2 close friends that are on the wall down there. But that’s basically what that is (Chuckles.)
Yeah. Well, obviously there’s a lot of sadness and a lot of grief when
you lose somebody. (pause) Did it
affect the way you thought about your job?
It made me… in a way it made me want to go back to Texas because it made me feel that – I felt this same way when Tom died – that they’d died after I left and of course you start wondering, well, as stupid as it may sound, you wonder if I was there still and, you know, I hadn’t gone away, would I have been able to make a difference? Of course, probably never. Wouldn’t make no difference ‘cause the chance of being there at that time probab… Matter of fact, uh, if it wasn’t young Muncie that was killed that night it would have been me. ‘Cause me and Mark used to cover those areas together so I would have been the deputy that responded with Mark to the other one and I probably would have died myself right then and there. It doesn’t really… being in law enforcement as long as I have, sooner or later it’s gonna happen. I mean, it’s not guaranteed, but you’ve got to work your mind into thinking it can happen, it may happen. It happens to 500 officers a year. So the chances, being you know in law enforcement over 20 years and not (pause) being seriously injured or killed, you’re doing pretty good. Whether you’re doing something right or maybe you’re doing something wrong, I don’t know. I’ve always felt that I’ve been able to talk through a lot of situations and I’ve always managed to get control, not always physical force, but by mental… you know, by talking to people, and controlling some situations that may have saved me or some officer may have gotten killed because of….. But I don’t think it, it doesn’t make me not want to do the job anymore. (Almost makes you more determined about it?) Yeah, yeah it does in a way. Yep, yeah. Because I know that those officers they would want me to continue, they wouldn’t want me to wuss out on them, they’d want me to you know suck it up and go on. (Chuckles.)
Have you ever felt like your life was in immediate danger, I mean it’s
a dangerous line of work, but is there a time that you can look to and say, “I
almost didn’t walk away from that one.”?
Absolutely. Plenty. Um, you want an example? (Laughs.)
Almost more how that affects you, yeah.
Different ways. I’d say each time that somebody points a gun at you and the gun don’t go off or you realize after you handcuff somebody they had a gun stuck in their belt that they could have – in another minute or less – they could have shot you, or you find a knife on them or so many, I mean… there’s been an attempt on my life by a fleeing felon in a vehicle who at an 85-mile-an-hour chase on the interstate going toward San Antonio decided that he’d just had enough of this chase and he, he hit my car, which sent me flying across the highway at 85 miles an hour spinning. And the other officers that were in pursuit, we had him boxed in, it makes you want to put your hands on him. And basically we did. And we pulled him out of the car and we cuffed him. But it effects you in different was. I had one instance where I could have just slapped the kid silly because he almost, I almost killed him, and he almost… he caused that. Me and a partner had made a call to a house that had, about a month prior, had been vacated because of the drive-by shooting. A gang had come down from San Antonio and one day they were driving around this little town and they started taking a few shots at these other kids – they weren’t gang members because they were just, they were teenagers but they weren’t really gang members – they took a few shots and the kids went in and got all their guns so when I got there I had about 12 kids running around with guns in the back yard and of course the gang… they were only about 300 yards away where their house was… but I stepped into a hornets’ nest with that one. Luckily someone recognized or saw a flash of a badge or something and didn’t fire me up, but the people who were living in the house decided to move out of town, so they left town and the house was vacant. Well we got a call that there was some shots fired at that house again, so we go down there and we check the building and made sure that there was nobody broke into the house or whatnot. And me and one of the constables we came back around front, we were just talking about stuff and we saw this pickup truck coming down the dirt roads and it stopped at a stop sign just maybe a hundred yards from us, was just observing us, and then all of a sudden he just got on the accelerator and I could hear him coming around the corner and he came right at us and he jumped the curbs and he pulled into the lot and one kid jumped out of the driver’s side and ran towards Ricky Luna with a knife in his hand and Ricky didn’t have time to do anything, he didn’t have time to even draw his handgun. But as this kid was running I heard the racking of a round through a rifle and the other individual came out towards me with a rifle and I already had my rifle in my hands ‘cause I’d already used it when I was checking this house. So it came, I guess it was a 2 second stand still of hollering where we were both pointing rifles at each other and probably both of us were getting… I know my finger was almost ready and, for some reason, he threw the rifle down and he got on the ground and I remember I jumped on him like a drill sergeant. I was mad. Very mad because he almost made me kill him. And I cuffed him and he made me so mad that I didn’t even arrest him. After I found… he was drunk, he was 19 years old, he had a wife, he had a little baby. He made me so mad that I didn’t even want to arrest him. Finally I took the guns away from him, I called his wife to come and get him. After I read him the riot act again, I uncuffed him and I let him go. And a lot of the officers, you know, told me I would have just taken him to jail. And it’s a misdemeanor I just didn’t feel… it was my life that he was threatening and I just didn’t feel that it was right at that time. Maybe it was guilt because I almost killed this kid for no reason at all. But I chose that decision. I never had any problem with him since, you know, but it just worked out that way. But I think every time I would go to something and I would go into family fights where the husband was sitting in the living room and the wife was standing outside and she wanted him thrown out of the house because he’d hit her and she had the kids and whatnot and I went into the house and talked to him and by the time I finished talking with him… it was in the dark, I had my flashlight in his face, he went to move, I just dropped my flashlight down, in between his legs he had a handgun which he could have shot me with at any time. Um, diffused that. But every time was something, was a different feeling, you know. You don’t always get angry, you don’t always get scared. Sometimes… (Pause.) I’ve never shaken in my boots, I’ve always been the type that can you know, after it’s over with, I just wipe the sweat off my forehead and then I can say, “Wow. It’s a good thing. It’s a good thing it, he didn’t do that or she didn’t do that.” But I’d say it’s different feelings every time, there’s no set reaction that you’re gonna have, it all depends on what the circumstances are.
Is that level of anger that you felt against that 19-year-old kid, is
that unusual? Is that one of the reasons that you remember that one so vividly?
Probably, because cops are adrenaline junkies. And you may have heard that term before and it’s true. I noticed after I left and I was working in the private security field for the next 2 or 3 years, you have that and you miss it and you feel… it’s like a drug withdrawal. You’re so used to that adrenaline flow for, especially in Texas, ‘cause there was something every night, you know… somebody would shoot somebody, somebody would stab somebody, somebody would run somebody over, somebody would run from the police, somebody would do this, do that. You know, stolen cars, burglaries, it was always something. So every day you got your fix of adrenaline one way or the other. And after you stopped doing that, I mean even driving 100 miles an hour down the interstate going to a traffic fatality or a traffic accident, it’s still, you get that same adrenaline flow and after a while you begin to feed off of it. But getting back to the original point I guess, it’s (Long pause.) something that just becomes a part of you I guess. They say it’s in your blood, it’s in your blood and it never goes away. I mean I could have left law enforcement and not come to Hollins and gone into the private sector and… Every time I watch the show Cops I’m still sitting on the edge of my seat because I feel like I’m still, you know I’m still there, I’m still doing it, I know exactly what them officers are going through and I know what they’re gonna go through afterwards. So you know it never goes away, once a cop, always a cop.
What’s the worst thing you’ve seen?
Well, I’m gonna say, the most grotesque thing I’d say I’ve seen was a body that was dropped off in our county by, we believe by one of the drug runners in San Antonio. This may have been one of his mules or it may have been somebody that he… but they actually, to prove a point they actually… they cut his heart out of his chest. So when we found the body he had an open cavity in the chest where they had removed his heart. That was probably one of the grossest things I guess. One of the worst things I’ve ever seen was a traffic accident where – still bothers me ‘cause I can still see that little kid’s face – on a section of highway that I patrolled there was a family of 7 going back to south Texas and there was a pickup truck with 2 Mexican nationals that were drunk coming north and the troopers clocked, they figured… actually the roadway was… At that time Texas still had a 55 maximum, but the troopers basically figured that both parties were going about 70 and the, the 2 Mexican nationals crossed the line and hit this family head-on. When I got there, the truck with the 2 guys was still burning. The truck must have flipped in the air because it came down upside-down and just crushed them inside there and they burned inside the truck. But the rest… most of the family was thrown from the pickup truck except for the dad that was driving and his 7-year-old boy was in the front seat, still in their seat belts. No blood, but it was sad because they were both dead. That’s probably the saddest thing that I think I’ve ever seen. It sticks in my mind. I mean there’s been other many other things but that probably moved into the fore-front of my brain on, on things that bother me from what I’ve seen. I’d say, you know, being in the field as long as I’ve been, I could write a couple books probably on different things – good and bad – you know, good things, bad things, funny stuff. But that’s probably the 2 top things.
Ok, reverse it, what’s the best (Pause.) I don’t know the right way
to word it… the best of human nature that you’ve seen?
The best of human nature? Let me think. And this is something that is probably normal, but it takes you more time to think of the best than you do because the worst sticks in your mind all the time. Oh there was a lot of things, let me try to pin-point the best out of all of it. ‘Course we always, most of the guys always had good times together, camaraderie is always a good thing. I think. Um, let me think, the best… (Long pause.)
Like we’ve seen incredible acts of heroism around like (Right, exactly, exactly.) have you seen anything that just, and almost asking about people outside of the force because we kind of expect the officers to (to do stuff) to do extraordinary things and I’m kind of curious what the most extraordinary thing is that you’ve seen a civilian do.
I have, and it’s just taking me a couple of minutes to try to go back into the things. There’s a lot of stuff that I don’t, you know, remember the whole story to, just bits and pieces, (Pause.) And it’s weird but I cannot… it’s not, nothing you know towards my personality (Laughs.) We just dwell…
No, I think that’s a true thing though because the bad things haunt
you.
Exactly. And the good things you gain pleasure from them and (Let go.) they go away. While we’re finishing talking if something really good pops into my mind… I mean I’ve seen many… I’ll tell you, it’s actually kind of funny, too. An act of heroism with a little bit of humor, this I rememb… this sticks in my mind really good. There was an old rancher in Texas whose family was kind of the rough-neck type people and his daughters were hellions, I mean his daughters every Friday, Saturday night down in Texas South they’d be the ones dancing and fighting on the tables down there in the beer joints. But one night him and his wife were asleep and these 3 guys that were hopped up on some kind of dope broke into his house in the dark, at night time. And he woke up and he got his gun and he came out into the kitchen and there was these 3 guys standing in his kitchen and… this rancher slept butt-naked (Laughs.). So he approached the 3 of them butt-naked, and they ran out the door, they got in their car, and they left. And he had his wife call us, 911, and he jumped in his truck and he chased them butt-naked. (Both laugh.) When we finally got to the deal and we got the car stopped, there he was standing out there like he done it all the time. Standing out there with his gun in his hand and butt-naked. But he helped catch his own burglars. (Both laugh.)
I kind of have to wonder if those guys did drugs anymore or if that was
quite enough to turn them off of it.
I remember them ‘cause it took a long time to get them out of our jail into the pen – actually it’s called the Texas Department of Criminal Justice now, it used to be called the Texas Department of Corrections – it took a long time. By the time they were convicted of the burglary, I think all 3 of them got like 40 years on that deal. (Wow.) Texas is really, really tough on felons. But I remember having to take some of these guys ‘cause they used us road deputies to take them to the doctor appointments or dentist appointments and I remember at least I had one of them that I transported, and I’d talk with them and they’d talk with me, and they… they remember it to a point, ‘course they were pretty buzzed-out, but couldn’t, they’d never seen anything like it themselves, you know. (Laughs.) But he was a character in the county.
What has gotten you through the hard times, when your friends lost their
lives? What… is there anything that you turn to?
Probably. Well, of course, the second, most recent time, when Mark was killed… (How long ago was that?) It was in October of 1999. My wife helped me, you know, throu… although I’m not the type that… I hold a lot of stuff in. So I may take the news and it may bust me right then and there, but I don’t show a whole lot of emotion, so… most of my time, my bad times are, you know, when I’m by myself. Sometimes driving to work I’ll start thinking about it or if I’m sitting in the house by myself I’ll start thinking, or if I hear certain songs or if I see something about Texas on T.V., I’ll start thinking about it. Basically, I don’t think I’m ever gonna get over it. I’ve never, I’ve never gone into counseling, it’s never gotten to the point where it’s affected me in my personal life or my work like so I don’t feel that I need to have any kind of counseling to get through it. I think I’ve learned over the years that you can get yourself through those things if you can convince yourself that it happens and it’s ok… It’s not ok, but it’s ok. You know, it’s life. I mean you see so much and you relate… that’s why a lot of police officers are not religious, you know, I believe in God, but other than that… God and country….
(Gotta wonder what’s wrong with Him sometimes.)
Yeah. You just you start to really wonder… you see so much bad you really wonder how this can happen, you know, it’s… Then you start to understand that it happens because, we’re just people, we’re, you know, we’re really not that much different from the other animal world, you know. I mean animals kill animals, people kill people. It’s not that hard to really realize that we’re not all that advanced really, you know. (Laughs.)
I guess you see that more up close and personal than most of us do.
Right. And more people… I mean, some people are more advanced, but every day you get people that are advanced that all of a sudden they snap and they go and they kill somebody or, you know, they go off on these wild deals and just come back to their workplace with a gun and just go off and, you know, you just don’t… you never understa… I don’t think we’ll ever understand it. You can train and take all kinds of courses in psychology and sociology but I don’t think we’ll ever, we’ll never straighten it out. Unless we all become robots, some kind of control where they can control your emotions and your feelings and everything. I don’t foresee it happening soon. (Laughs.)
Um… Did you cry for your friends that you lost? It’s kind of a
strange question, but…
Maybe. (Maybe.) (Laughs.) Maybe, but not breakdown, you know, going into… but, I mean, like I said, just driving to work sometimes and something… I mean you’ll shed a tear, you know, ‘cause you start thinking about it and then you start missing them, you start missing what you used to be. Of course you still wonder you know whether you could have made a difference or not.
That’s probably the most frustrating thing.
Yeah. Yep.
And probably… I think I told you, before we set up the first interview when I came in to talk to you, that a close friend of mine was murdered recently, and um, didn’t have the little benefit of him being in a dangerous line of work where it was almost something that we’d prepared for (Right.) and I know a lot of times I fluctuate between being sad and being furious. (Right.) Is that something that you still do?
Sure. Absolutely. I mean, if, you know, I… luckily I’ve never had to actually shoot anybody in my career, but I could visualize myself shooting that individual if I was there and I had the opportunity to save those officers’ lives I wouldn’t have thought twice. Because I know not only he, he would have shot… he’s a menace to society. Anybody that would set somebody up and bushwhack them like that, whether it be a law officer or anybody else, he’s a menace to society and I don’t feel that I would have any reservations you know in taking that person’s life in the line of duty.
I assume that you’ve probably had a lot of experience answering calls
on domestic violence… How do you feel about the women who don’t press
charges, who stay in the situation.
I wish they would understand the ramifications of not doing that, not pursuing it… I don’t blame them because they’ve got their reasons. And I’m not the one to step in and say you know, “you need to do this” because tomorrow he may kill her and, and she knows him best. And… but I would really wish that they would… we give them the means. We take him away for a while and we give her the means to get help and that’s our job. And of course, if it aggriva… if it gets worse, we come back and we do our job again.
But how do you feel about those women?
I feel sorry for them in a way, because they’re, they’re not helping themselves when they don’t go through with it. Like I said, I do understand ‘cause I’ve worked cases… I got a letter from the Crisis Intervention Women’s Center in San Antonio for a girl that I helped in our county and it basically went that way. I got a hold of the intervention lady and we got her out of the house and they put her into a safehouse and we kept her secret for about 72 hours I think it was, and of course I was working closely with her on keeping her secreted and working on the charges and everything and she called me up at the office one day and she said, “David, I got to tell you, she’s gonna drop the charges, you know, they’re gonna move back in.” And I said, “Well, Jean, I hate to see it, but it’s her choice.” Nowadays it’s a little more aggressive because women don’t really have the choice anymore. If an officer comes – State of Virginia’s the same way – if you come into a domestic violence situation and either party has been harmed, the other party goes to jail and the state presses the charges. The woman or the male don’t have to press the charges, they’ll be made to be a witness to it… they’ll be a hostile one probably if they don’t want to press the charges, but they’re trying to make a point I guess that this is a criminal act and, you know, it’s got to be dealt with because it’s getting out of hand.
That seems to make more sense to me, does that… do you agree with
that?
I think so, too. I think because of the fact that if… and we’re working on a, I just got a grant proposal or a notification of a grant from the Department of Justice sent to my office and it’s for the reduction of violence against women on campus and there’s a lot of money to be had that Hollins can… hopefully will get that we can use for training, education, lighting, certain issues. Not that we have a lot of violence against women on this university but it’s always better to, my motto on the job is: train for the worst and hope for the best. And that’s basically it in a nutshell. You know you really need to train, you need to have all the resources for the worst case scenario and hope you never need to use it. But I do think that we do need to have better training here for the students in identifying stalking and rapes and assaults and whatnot and also to educate them to the fact that if they do not pursue these crimes – because they are crimes – that it only gets worse. Because the perpetrator has… if you get no punishment, you think there’s nothing wrong with your behavior. And we’re also, it also gives us, part of the program that we’re allowed to use the funds for is to educate the students to realize that we’re not the bad guys, just because you may have, you’re only 18-years-old and you’ve had a couple of beers and you did an illegal act, it doesn’t matter at that point… what matters is this illegal act that was done to you. So the Department of Justice feels that a lot of on-campus rapes and assaults are not reported because the student feels that they’re gonna be persecuted for violating some little law like drinking alcohol or something like that so they don’t want to report it at all. And there’s probably a lot of stuff that’s going by and it’s only gonna get worse until it’s you know, it’s brought to our attention and there’s actually charges brought against these individuals doing it. So hopefully we’ll get this packet together by the end of this month, ‘cause it’s… I never read a or wrote out a grant for anything for the federal government, but it looks very tedious (Laughs.) and it’s like 44 pages long, so we’re getting a lot of help, ‘cause it’s not only gonna be campus safety or police involved, it’s going to be student affairs, and athletics may get a part of this because athletics can teach some defensive courses and even, even academics, it may even benefit academics. It’ll, it’ll benefit probably physical plant because, we got the call boxes up, but there are some areas that more light should be put up. And it may help, it will help the community as a whole, ‘cause we have to go into it as a whole to apply for this anyway, so I think it’s a good thing that we found out about it and that we’re gonna try to pursue it the best we can, whether or not they pick us… I don’t know, because we don’t know what their guidelines are gonna be. Maybe they don’t think there’s enough crime out here, I don’t know. Hopefully we’ll get a little piece of the pie.
In the flip side of the question, how do you feel about men –and I’m
not trying to make this a sexist statement because I know that women do also
abuse men, but they are the minority and that’s largely a physical issue –
how do you feel about the men who do that, who harm women?
I think, in the beginning, I told you about my own situation growing up. That my dad was a drinker and a gambler and basically he was a wife beater.
Was that frequent in your childhood?
I would say probably, once a month it would come to a head like that. Not, I only remember I think 2 incidences when my local hometown police came and took him away. But I do remember many, many, many fights and arguments and windows busted out and furniture broken up. Just ridiculous stuff. You know out driving down the road and he gets mad at my mom for something ‘cause he’s been drinking, this is after we went to a restaurant or something, and he’ll get out of the car and kick the doors in and you know we’d just drive off and just leave him out there. You just don’t, at that point you just don’t care about him, I don’t care what happens to him. But it’s made me a lot more aware of other victims I guess. ‘Cause although I was struck, too, and nowadays that would be part of, still part of the family where back then it was mostly spousal violence or abuse and the kids, they kicked our ass all the time anyway. But nowadays… that abuse we got was beyond a spanking. My mom was the disci… my mom had the paddle. I accepted that kind of discipline ‘cause that was, we knew that was coming. But to get punched or kicked or get your dinner thrown at you or something like that, that’s abuse.
Did that usually come out of the blue, something where you couldn’t
have… I guess I’m kind of wondering because in some cases you know, with
some personalities you can see the buildup and you know it’s getting close and
other personalities it’s very quick.
Well, it only happened when he was drinking and basically that might be every night because back in those days, you know, my mom was a housewife she may have had a part-time job every now and then to make a little extra money for the summer vacations and my dad would be the breadwinner, he’d go out and work 9 to 5 and he’d come home and he may go right to… he never had driver’s licenses, he would get off the train and he could walk about 10 paces and he’d be at his favorite corner bar and that’s where he and his buddies would meet up and you know. However much he drank, I mean, you could basically tell, when the time come, when he come… we knew when he was coming home because the dog would start barking anyway in the yard, the dog loved him for some reason, I don’t know why. (Laughs.)
What did you do when you heard the dog start barking?
We’d run. Well, we’d look, because if he’s stumbling we know, and it’s later than normal, he gets off the train by 6 o'clock and it’s like 8, then we know he’s probably been at a bar. If it’s you know within a reasonable time he probably just came right on home. And there was times when he was great you know. I mean he used to take us places, we used to do stuff, it’s just the alcohol that would make him stupid, I guess.
That must have been really hard to grow up with. (Yeah.) Almost hard to know how to think about your dad.
Well, yeah, yeah. I mean, when he died, he died at 55, I didn’t think it was gonna upset me as much as it did, but closing that casket for the last time, watching them close it up, it busted me up. Although I don’t know why, because actually in a way I kind of hated him. You know you love them and you hate them. I guess you don’t really love them until they’re gone and then you realize what’s left, then you’re kind of relieved though that my mom won’t have to put up with this and the kids don’t have to put up with this no more either.
I think there’s also some sadness about what you think it should have
been, what it could have been. When you see the good times that you had with
your dad, I think that’s part of where the sadness comes from.
Sure. And I think that being the way that he was, it made me aware of who I am and I made sure that I was never like him. So I never had the… I mean he used to love sports I, I have no use for sports myself. I mean, I love anybody who likes to do it and stuff, I just… for me I just don’t see sitting around watching ballgames because to me I associate that with him and sitting in the bars and drinking and stuff like that. So I’ve never done that, and I’m still to this day I’m not that male-bonding type person, I’m still more of a lone wolf, I always have been when I was a kid, even in the military now, some of the guys in my unit are pretty rough and I don’t associate with them other than in the unit and I only go so far, you know, I’ve got my own discipline even in the military and… but I don’t associate a lot with other men even because of the fact some of the stuff that, you know, the old male stereotypes of what men do, I just don’t do. And being in my profession, I can’t condone some of the stuff that they do, I just don’t want nothing to do with it. But I’ve gone out of my way I guess to make sure that I sided with my mother. And it probably kept me from having a regular boy’s growing up because I never… me and my dad, we didn’t bond like some dads and boys would do, where you would grow up like your dad, where you’d be proud to be just like your dad. My dad for some reason he hated cops, he’d always… I think that was just one of his drunk things you know, and he always would down me for wanting to be a cop, you know, I always wanted to be a cop since I was a kid. And that’s probably because you know he himself was no angel. He tried to be a good father, you know, but gambling and alcohol will destroy you.
Did it take you a long time to understand that he was trying?
I could see it in certain, when he was sober, yeah, he would take us to… I’ve gone to ballgames with him, I’ve gone to the racetrack with him, he used to like racing. We would get together as a family and go on a day trip somewheres, but it seems like it always would turn out… and I, I can’t say it was alcohol because… I’ll bet you it was because probably whenever we’d stop to have like dinner he probably had a few beers and a couple shots or something with the beers that made him get ugly, so by the end of the day you couldn’t spend 8 or 10 hours without something happening at the end.
What kind of person is your mother? Tell me about her.
My mom is... matter of fact my name, Carlson, I, when I was in Texas I changed my name. From my dad, after my dad died, because me and his family just don’t – his brothers – just don’t get along too well because they just felt that I was not the perfect son when my father was sick with cancer and dying. I did what I felt I needed to do. But I changed my name to Carlson and that’s my mom’s maiden name and my mom is pure sweet. So right now she’s in her se… she just turned 70. But she’s typical….
***Oh no! I got so involved in his story that I failed to notice that the tape stopped. Quietly stopped. He talked about his mother’s sweetness and about a Swedish heritage festival that she helped start in New Jersey, and explained the built-in animosity between Swedish and Norwegian people (like Virginia vs. West Virginia).
Well, I guess we know what career I won’t be going into! (This is a
reference to the tape recorder mishap, to my ineptness as an interviewer.) Is
there any part of your life that you’d go back and redo if you could, either
because it was especially good or because you wish you’d done it another way.
Of course I would say no. (Laughs.) ‘Cause most people would say no, you know, what I did is what was supposed to be. Although (Pause.) if I had to, I would probably do some things differently, but then if the choice is given to me you can or you can’t, I would… although I wish I hadn’t had to do some things that I’ve done, I’m not gonna try to change history. Of course, if I was told you’re going to go back to a point in your life and you’re going to make things different, then I would probably have pursued, I may have pursued, sometimes I think I may have pursued a military career more heavily. My interest when I first went into the military was police work. The reason why I went into it is because at 1975 at 18 years old, you couldn’t go into police work, so I had the choice of college or the military. College wasn’t going to happen because I was maintaining a D-average in high school and my parents didn’t have the money to send me to college. Community colleges were kind of very, not that big of a thing back then, so I went into the military. So I figured they can send me to boot camp, make me the way they want, they can send me to police school to law enforcement school and then I would, from that point on I would decide what I wanted to do. And I always was kind of frustrated I guess in the military because although you are law enforcement officers, your duty ends after your 8 hours. You go back to the armory, you turn your weapons in and you’re pretty much done, you’re then you’re a civilian again and I liked the idea of being the protector 24/7, so I wanted to get everything I could you know all the experiences then go into the civilian world and be a police officer on the outside. But sometimes, if I had to back, I would like to have been a little bit more, I probably would have gone into the Army rather than the Air Force because that’s where you learn the most military enforcement schools. I would have liked to go into Army Special Forces and I’d like to have gone into the sniper school and stuff like that ‘cause I’m that type of person. To me, I would rather, instead of being in a whole company of woohas running around, I would rather be me and another team member out there either doing intelligence gathering or doing sniper missions or something like that where you, I’d come to count on minimal amount of people rather than a large amount of people. So, but, I, if I was given the choice, I wouldn’t change anything, only if I was told I had to. (Laughs.)
What do you consider to be the biggest personal loss you’ve suffered?
Biggest personal loss… (silence). Or one if you can’t narrow it down.
(Pause.) My daughter.
Do you talk to her… I know you don’t get to see her very often, but
do you get to talk to her often?
About once a week. Sometimes, it all depends also I guess… if I’ve got drill, like last weekend, or if she’s out or they went to some, to Grandma’s or something like that, I don’t get to talk to her. But I would say, that would, that would be my biggest loss of the living. (Chuckles.)
Is she… I’ll get in trouble for this because it’s a loaded
question, is she what you’re most proud of?
Yeah. Yeah.
How old was she when you got divorced?
Six. And I remember the last thing that I did with her was I taught her to ride a bicycle. I’ll never forget that little 6-year-old getting on that bicycle and I pushed her, it was on a dirt road going down a hill at this ranch I was living on, 60-acre ranch, and I just told her to keep pedaling and all of a sudden she just kept going and going and going and going and I remember her face turning and smiling as she was pedaling this bike and you know she was doing it. At that point actually I felt really bad because a couple of months after that I got remarried and we left the area and we left my ex-wife and my daughter down there in Texas. And I remember when, you know, my daughter came up that day, I was loading up the truck to leave and I just couldn’t take it and I broke down and I went in the house and I remember my wife at that time she just said “I can’t do this. I can’t take you away from your daughter.” You know, and she went out to talk to my daughter and she just said that “I just don’t want my daddy to cry, I want my daddy to be happy.” You know so I’ll always remember that. I know we’ll have a bond even though right now we’re not as close as I’d like us to be, so I could have complete contact with her, take her and do stuff like that, we’ll always still have that bond that’ll never go away.
I think that’s an important thing and there are a lot of people who don’t ever have that kind of bond with either parent. (Oh yeah.) But I think that’s a special thing. (Yep.)
Is there anything else that you would want people to know about you?
Well…
Anything interesting that most people don’t know about you that’s
also not a deep, dark secret that you won’t divulge?
Well, I don’t think there’s any deep dark secrets, I’ve pretty much come to grips with most of the… most of my past. Of course I’ve got, I’m on my 3rd marriage, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing ‘cause I’ve known cops that have been on their 5th and their 6th marriages. (Laughs.) So eventually you… and it’s still gonna happen to this day, officers’ll come in that they’re already married that go into the career field that find out that their wives just can’t handle that type of… and it’s stressful on them. I mean my first wife, we were married 14 years and I don’t know how she managed to, to suppress, you know, the feelings of not knowing whether I’m ever coming back, you know. But no, my second wife, she didn’t handle it very well at all, within 3 years… But my wife now, she was always fascinated with police and stuff, but she’s finding out that she’s… she’s probably not the perfect police wife worry-wise, ‘cause she does, she doesn’t think about it, but… and in a way she may be the perfect, because I guess if they don’t worry about it then they don’t care at all, I don’t know, that’s double-edged also… should they care or should they not care? It’s hard. I guess I would probably, if it was me and my wife was a police officer, I would probably be very concerned every day she went to work, but I would try not to show that so that she doesn’t do anything different, I’d want her to go out there and do her job the way she would normally do it and not to do anything that would make her appear to be a coward or anything where she wouldn’t get involved in anything and I guess… And Debra has been lucky that working here at Hollins I don’t have to every day worry about somebody shooting me or sticking a knife in me. It could happen, but you know it’s not something that I have to concern myself with everyday like I used to.
So you feel like this is, seems obvious, but a safer place for you. Do
you know – random out-there question – have any of the security people been
harmed at Hollins? Is this a place where the students would…
The only, since I’ve been here for almost two years now, none of my officers or any of the officers have been assaulted. We had some close calls, but they were never students. Probably ex-staff members who are terminated or so… most recent case was one of my female officers ran across two street people that were hanging out in the library and she confronted one of them to get him out of the building and he started going off about his nickname of being “Click” ‘cause, they call him that because of the sound of a gun when you pull the hammer back, and he had a great big old duffle bag and, you know, she… he led her to believe that he had guns in his bag, so, of course she was by herself, she called dispatch and dispatch sent a county officer out here to back her up and they ended up getting the guy out here, he was walking away, and just did a small interview – the county never searched his bag or anything to see if he did have weapons – but that could have been an assault. Or if she… by rights, she could have gone ahead by herself and checked him out, but for her own safety she decided not to do that. She told him to leave campus and she walked behind him at a distance to make sure he didn’t go anywheres else ‘til the county officer got there, but that’s a situation that could have turned bad for the officer, because she’s about 90-pounds soaking wet. Although I have every faith in her because she spent 4 years in the Coast Guard as a law enforcement officer, so I know she’s gonna do good.
It’s always kind of an amazing thing, because I know that, given the proper training someone of my size can be at threat (Oh yeah, absolutely.) but knowing my size it’s kind of amazing to me that that can be true. (Both laugh.) I know one of the things that affected me growing up as small as I am is I am hyper-aware, like, in crowds, (Right. Chuckles.) I am hyper-aware in crowds because I know that without any kind of intention whatsoever, I can get hurt. (Exactly.) And I can’t imagine putting myself in a position where I would be the one to protect someone else, it seems like it would be almost comical.
Probably some, I can’t say it would be either way, but in some instances it would be probably to your favor and some not to your favor, it all depends on who’s on the other end. Some guys just do not like female authority and I’ve seen this happen on the streets before where they will not… they’ll talk to me but they’re not talking to that woman, you know, that woman’s not telling them what to do.
Does that make you angry? (Oopsie! Another leading question, I kept
getting swept away in the narrative as a lover of stories, not staying in my
role of student of anthropology.)
Oh yeah. Absolutely. Because it doesn’t make a difference whether she’s a woman, whether she’s white, black, brown, green, I don’t care, she’s got a badge on her shirt and that’s giving her the authority to talk to him the way she’s gonna talk to him.
Has your job, have you noticed that you look at different people in different ways, has it… it’s not even… prejudice doesn’t seem like the right word, but almost experience. (Right.) Have you seen things that make you look at certain races or at certain types of people in different ways?
That depends on the area that you’re working, too. Of course when I worked in Philadelphia and they, they… it’s still called profiling, I mean the FBI still has profilers who try to profile serial killers and stuff like that. Profiling has gotten to be a negative word now, although it does have its uses. And as long as you don’t use it in a negative way, as long as you use it in a positive way, it can help law enforcement. Of course there has been, I mean, San Antonio, for example, I would say that out of… of course San Antonio is predominantly Hispanic, so you know that most of the gangs in San Antonio are Hispanic. There’s a few Anglos thrown in and then there’s some black gangs on the east side, but mostly all the gangs are on the west side and they’re all Hispanic. You know that when you see a Hispanic male dressed a certain way that there’s a good probability that he’s in the gang. And if he’s not, he’s probably trying to get into one so he’s dressing the part so you can pretty much figure out that he’s drawing that attention and he’s, he’s actually targeting himself for the police to watch him. Whether or not you actually abuse him is not the matter, it’s that you’re watching because you know from your past experience, this is what you’ve seen. And I don’t think we, I… unfortunately with the law, you’d have to go one way or the other. You’d either… if you didn’t profile to a point, you would either have to ignore everybody or suspect everybody and that’s not fair either way. So you’ve got to use what little bit of tools you can to try to make the job easier or more identifiable for the, you know, the problems that are gonna come up.
That’s what always seems to make sense, and I know that the profiling has gotten to be kind of a hot-button topic lately, but I know that’s what always seemed to make sense to me. Like I grew up in Alabama and you know there are women who clutch their purses when a black guy walks by, but I’m more apt to be distressed by a cluster of 4 or 5 teenagers regardless of race. (Right, because you know.) Yeah, because I know what young adolescent males do when they get in groups… almost regardless of anything else, that there’s gonna be a lack of respect and probably some foolishness as well, whether it’s maliciousness or not, the possibility for problem is there.
That’s right and that’s a form of profiling, you’re actually profiling. (Yeah.) But you’re not being prejudiced towards that group, I don’t believe. You’re, you’re probably suspicious, but you’re not actually acting prejudiced towards them. I don’t think safety and prejudice are the same thing. Of course, prejudice is more against certain large groups, but when you’ve got criminal groups that pretty much act and do things the same way all the time, that when you see someone else doing that same thing, you know… they say if it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it must be a duck, so you know. Sometimes you’re wrong and you can usually, as long as you’re not overly aggressive, you can stop at that point before you go overboard. But it doesn’t hurt sometimes to see a certain profile and just spend a little more attention watching it for a little while just to see what’s happening, and that’s what police work is all about basically, I mean you don’t want law enforcement to constantly be reactive, you want proactive law enfo… you gotta have proactive, ‘cause some of these cities now, like New York… I’m sure they don’t have much time for proactive law, it’s all reactive, you know, it’s after the fact. So, if you can get, if you’ve got a community that you can do proactive law enforcement, without harassment you know, you’re better off ‘cause you may cut the number of victims down. I mean we used to, in Texas we had the month of December… nobody had any days off, we had what we called Holiday Watch, the sheriff would send all the deputies up to the north side of the county and we’re profiling I guess, because we’re, all we’re doing is messing with the San Antonio people that are coming into our county and doing burglaries and breaking into these houses in the daytime, stealing everybody’s Christmas presents. So we set up road blocks, and we basically would, all day long we would stop every car that came into our county and check their driver’s license and see where they come from and if they weren’t from our county, we’d question them… what are you doing here, where’re you going, you know, that’s border-line harassment (Laughs.) border-line, but at that point it was felt, the sheriff felt that it needed to be done to protect the large group, you know, so… And we did catch some of the criminal element that were coming down. Now we were polite and friendly so that if they weren’t a bad guy you know, we didn’t want them to feel that they were being harassed or pressured, but if they were a bad guy we wanted them to know that, yeah, you’re being harassed and pressured and we don’t want you here. (Chuckles.)
Here’s a strange question: in
my social psychology class, I’m reading about the fact that there,
traditionally – and apparently this gap is lessening – there have been more
murders in the south than in the north of the United States, that southerners
are supposed to be more aggressive, generally. Is that, have you noticed the
difference in the way that people react from, between where you came from and
down in Texas and…
I tell you, it works the same way in law enforcement officers killed, there’s more killed in the south than there are in the north. And you would think with New York and all them places up north – Philadelphia – more officers would be killed up there, but there’s not. There’s probably twice as many officers killed in the south. Some say that that’s because people’s attitudes are different…there’s more aggressive behavior in the south, it’s hotter in the south, a lot of it happens in the summer, there’s… so it’s hotter, there’s more beer drinking. (Laughs.) We have equated with that in Texas because we have… you could go into any convenience store on the way and they would have big tubs with ice and beer in it and when you’d go in there you’d buy a beer and – of course the driver in Texas is not allowed to have an open container, but the passengers could, so as long as the driver didn’t have an open container, it was legal. And when you bought your beer, to keep it from being an open container in public, they would just stick it in a bag, so you bring it in your vehicle and you could drink it that way. And of course unless the officer can actually see through the bag, even a driver who’s drinking the drink, you can’t technically stop him because you don’t know that he’s committing a crime. Or you don’t… you can’t really suspect that… that’s not probable cause enough to make a stop.
I think that’s kind of amusing because I don’t know of anybody who
drinks water or milk out of a brown paper bag. (Chuckles.)
That’s true. I mean and I tell you I’ve seen it happen before though, people that just want to push the envelope will put a Coke or something in a bag and they’ll drink it in front of you and they’re just begging you to check it. (That’s just tacky.) Yeah, right, it’s just a disrespect to the people on the job. But I’ve seen that happen, too. They’re just wanting you to, you know, to start a confrontation. (Laughs.) (That’s a mess.) But I think it’s… I’m not gonna say it’s because we drink more beer and we’re hotter down here and we’re more Neanderthal in the south, I think it’s just that – plus there’s probably more, not gonna say anything bad about weapons because I believe in the right to own weapons, but there’s probably more weapons in the south than there are in the north. I know a lot of people, as a matter of fact, the officers I worked with in Philadelphia they didn’t know ‘til they got to the academy one end of a revolver from the other and the only time they shot it was in the academy and then once a year they’d go to the range other, than that the thing stayed in their holster for 9 months, 10 months, 11 months before they’ve even taken it out, so they’re not as experienced with weapons of destruction. So I’m sure that has something to do with it, having that readily available with the mixture of alcohol and heat and tension and stuff and well, you may… you’re gonna have more murders.
Did it surprise you when you came down here and found out how young kids
start messing with guns around here?
Well, when I… yeah. Back when I first went to Texas I was surprised that kids that are 6, 7, and 8 are out with their dads hunting deer with their own rifles. (Laughs.)
I’m kind of torn about it, because it’s disturbing, but at the same
time it seems that they would be almost better educated, less likely to
accidentally shoot their neighbor in the face, or you know…
Sure, exactly. I think they learn, oh actually they get a respect for the capabilities of something like a firearm and they’ll learn to respect it more when you’re introduced to it rather than somebody finding one somewhere… a group of kids that have never had any teaching or anything, just start playing with it to see, because they have no idea other than what they see on T.V., which, you know, it desensitizes kids anymore to violence, I think – video games – I think it’s all a part of their desensitizing that creates more juvenile crime like that where they don’t… to them it’s nothing, or they don’t think it is. Who knows what goes on in their mind after they kill somebody, hopefully the same thing would go on in their mind as anybody else, remorse and whatnot, but it don’t seem to… it seems like they’re desensitized to it, which is really bad. Because that was one of the things that kept human beings in line I think, you know. The, the feeling that you know you just hurt or destroyed somebody, another human being, that’s one of the things that I think that probably kept people in line up to a point, and if they don’t have that fear or that remorse, they’re just lions out there waiting to kill Bambi, basically.
Silence.
Anything additional you want to add? (Uh…) Don’t leave your car in the Moody parking lot over the weekend? (Both laugh.) (Well actually…)
(Laughs.) I hope that I can gain the support of the rest of the community to… an endeavor that I have is to professionalize my department and to become a campus police department, that’s something that I’m going to bring up to the Board of Trustees, the Board of Trustees does have the power to petition the circuit court to change this from a security/safety department to a regular police department, of which I would be the chief, and my officers are already well trained… they’re all experienced law enforcement officers. I’d just like people to know that going that way is not a bad thing, it’s really it’s a good thing. We’re not going to operate any differently, we’re not gonna start throwing students in jail, but I feel that as law enforcement officers, we can better protect this community immediately rather than having to wait for the county to come out… we can do some arrests as it is now for breeches of the peace as conservators, but I don’t feel comfortable with it because of the liability and the last thing Hollins would ever need is some kind of a law suit because we arrested somebody for something that we really shouldn’t have, you know, only police officers can arrest for that. And I don’t see taking a chance with somebody’s life by letting something go by, waiting for the county to come out here when we could have done something right then and there to save somebody’s life. I realize that in the past there has always been a lot of negativity towards going to a police department because of the fact of firearms, and I hope that that is beginning to dissipate because the ultimate professionalism of the department would be going to a police department anyway. My officers, like I say, are not going to act any differently, they’re not going to be threatening people or… I’ve always had the idea, I’ve always told officers that I’ve trained in the past that the gun don’t make the man or the woman, the woman or the man makes the gun, it’s yours to control. It’s to be used in the defense of life only, you know, it very restrictive when you’re allowed to use firearms. And we would definitely be able to… all the training that we go through now would actually be accredited by the state and we could work towards state accreditation for this department, which would be a good plus for the students and the parents of the students who are sending their daughters here knowing that there is a highly-trained and professional police force right there on campus to protect their girls. I think it’s, it would be a good thing. I think the timing’s right, I think we’ve finally got the department to a point where everybody feels comfortable with us… everybody feels comfortable with, with me running the department, with my past experience, and I basically hand-picked these officers that I have right now by, because of their expertise, and hoping to be able to professionalize to that point. And I (leaning over into the mic and grinning) I welcome your support.