Officer’s Stone and King gave interviews on October 26th. National First Responder Day took place on the 28th. Stone has been on the police force for three years, and King has been on the force for a year and a half. King talked about the daily routine.
“It varies from day to day in terms of the calls we get what type of calls we get. Some days are worst than others.”
King described their shifts.
“Right now we are on day shift, which is from 7 to 7, and we usually are on day shift for three months, until we swap to night shift, and then we’ll do night shift for three months, and it keeps rotating.”
Officer Stone described his motivation for joining.
“Most of my family is law enforcement. My uncle is acting sheriff now, have an uncle that’s acting chief at South Georgia tech, also the chief in Smithville, and I have one that’s a state trooper.”
King described his passion.
“Investigation. I wanted to join as a patrol officer first, just to get my foot into the door, and to see how the streets work, and to make connections. I’m hoping eventually to get back into criminal investigations back here.
I’ve had plenty of family members in military. I was actually planning on going military before I joined here, but something just told me to join here, so I came over here. But I’ve always been interested in investigation and figuring things out.”
He talked about his experiences.
“We’ve got shop liftings that we’re able to investigate and arrest, hit and runs. Just smaller incidents. Sometimes we’ll be able to investigate bigger incidents, but smaller incidents we usually try to handle all of it, but the bigger incidents they usually end up going to investigations.”
Stone described some of the challenges they faced.
“You never know what’s on somebody’s mind. Like traffic stops, I’m a real traffic person. You never know what you’re met with. Like going to the domestic calls, you never know when you arrive on scene who is the active threat person at that time.”
King also commented.
“I would say a big concern is mental health. I would say that America as a whole is going through a mental health crisis.”
Stone described one experience that stayed with him.
“We responded to an unconscious child one night. It was one morning, we responded. We got there, the parent told us that the kid was breathing the last time she checked, and she checked like an hour, come to find out the child had died three to four hours prior to that. So that really got to both of us, both of us working that same night, it was like three or four other officers that it really got to, because the baby wasn’t but like a month or two old, and that just hurt me, especially with me having one on the way.”
King talked about another experience.
“On a brighter note, we had, I think it was just last week, we had an overdose call that we were able to respond to first, administer Narcan. He woke up and was like ‘I didn’t do anything. I was just sleeping.’ Stuff like that is satisfying, to be able to help them out, even if they don’t feel like they’ve been helped out.”
Stone talked about community relations.
“If you see a police officer going through your neighborhood, or just out in general, just walk up and talk to us. We’re not here to harm anybody, we’re people just like everybody else. If you want to come up and have a conversation we’ll sit and have a conversation, we might even sit and have lunch together, you never know.”
King also commented.
“We love to see our community thrive, because we live in it too, and we want to see it as safe as possible.”