I Could’ve Gone Either Way: Why I Chose to Become a Police Officer

And we’re back with Our American Stories. Up next, we’re hearing from a listener and the author of Who I Am, The Man Behind the Badge. Jeff Shaw was a police officer in South Florida for twenty-four years, and he’s here to share some stories about his time in the line of duty and all that comes with it. Here’s Jeff. In high school, I got my first regular job. It was called Ranch House Restaurants, kind of a combination between a Denny’s and Texas Roadhouse. I worked for them on and off until I was twenty-six years old. Eventually I became a cook, and then I was made manager. During those years, in fact, right after high school, I started taking flying lessons. I went to Opa-locka Airport and I stepped inside a Cessna 150 with the instructor, and that was my first flight ever in an airplane, and I was flying it. I eventually got my license, my private pilot license, in July nineteen seventy-two, and I thought, ‘Okay, I’m on my way. I’m going to be a pilot.’ And about that same time, Vietnam was winding down, and thousands and thousands of pilots and mechanics were all coming back from the war and looking for jobs with the airlines. So I pretty much didn’t have a chance at that, you know, me with my fifty hours of flight time in a little Cessna, I was competing with these pilots with thousands of hours in complex jets. So I had to look elsewhere. And one night, while I was at Ranch House cooking, I was sitting at the counter. I remember it was a slow night, and I was sitting with a friend of mine. He was highly a police sergeant, and I think I must have mentioned my unhappiness with my career, and he said, ‘Jeff, you should go down to City Hall and put an application into be a police officer.’ He says, ‘They’re giving a test sometime in the summer.’ So I remember thinking being in law enforcement was probably the last thing I had thought of doing. Usually, I was like in the wrong end of law enforcement. I was one of those kids, you know, you look in the rearview mirror and see a police officer behind you, you start panicking. It was mid-nineteen seventy, and I had hair like Bon Jovi. It just didn’t… I had never thought of you being a cop. But I thought about it, and one day I went down to City Hall and I walked into the personnel department, and I remember asking the lady behind the desk for an application, and she looked at me right in the eye and she said, ‘Son, you can come back for an application when get a haircut.’ And I knew she was serious, so I walked out. I was pretty upset and remember driving home thinking, ‘Okay, I gotta find something else, you know, I don’t want to work here.’ But over the next day or two, I found myself in a barbershop getting a regular haircut. I went back to City Hall, walked into that same office. It was a different woman this time, and she gave me an application. I filled it out, and a week or two later, I got a letter from the city saying that my application had been accepted, and I would be notified when the test was being given. And eventually, I did get that notification. So I bought a study guide for law enforcement to be a police officer, and I studied that for probably the month between receiving that letter and the actual test, and I thought I was pretty prepared until I pulled into the parking lot. The parking lot was packed, and I walked in the door and I saw two to three hundred other applicants milling around, getting ready to take the test. So, you know, I didn’t really do well in school, so I thought, ‘This is not going to be easy.’ But I sat down. They gave me my number two pencil, they gave him a thick packet, which was the test, and then they said, ‘All right, everybody, start!’ I think we had a three-hour maximum, and so I started filling out all those little bubbles, and I remember it was, each question had five answers, you know, and the last two were ‘all of the above’ or ‘none of the above,’ so you couldn’t really guess too well. And about an hour and twenty minutes later, I think it was, I was finished, and nobody had stood up to give their test result in. So I thought, ‘Oh man, I must have rushed through this. I’ve blown it!’ So I spent another half hour just going through the test again, looking at my answers, and by that time, other people were getting up, too, and I handed my test in and I drove home. I wasn’t really optimistic, you know, I was trying to think positive, but I didn’t have the greatest success taking tests in high school. But within the first month, maybe two weeks, I got a letter saying, ‘Congratulations, I had come out number seventy-one on the list!’ It didn’t tell me how many other people were behind me, but I was number seventy-one. What I didn’t know was how long it would take to get to number seventy-one. And a year went by, and I think I was working at Ranch House that entire year, and I had almost given up hope when I got a letter saying, ‘Congratulations! You’ve been hired as a probationary police trainee, and I was to report to City Hall the following week.’ I went through a process that entire week of signing papers, going to different offices. I had to go to the city’s doctor and have a physical. I was a little worried about that because I was six feet tall and I weighed one hundred and thirty-five pounds. I thought I would be too skinny, but I passed that. I had to pick up my uniforms from a police supply products place. I had to get my gun. I had to buy my own handcuffs. The city supplied my leather belt, the shoes, and just about everything else. So that weekend I put it all on. I put the light blue shirt on, put the pants on. I stood in front of the mirror and just looked at myself. I had worn a Boy Scout uniform years before, and so it wasn’t a far stretch from wearing that Boy Scout uniform, but it meant a whole lot more responsibility. There were so many different classes; we had so many different instructors. Almost every day, though, we had a class of defensive tactics. We had driver training; we had weeks of constitutional law, state law, and traffic laws. We had people coming in giving classes on domestic violence—everything that we were supposed to learn in twenty-six weeks. So I was about three weeks into the academy when my training advisor was right in front of me—a Sergeant Yee. I remember I had skated through all the inspections. His nose was probably four inches away from mine, and he was looking right at my eyes, but I didn’t look at his eyes. And I could feel his hands touching my belt buckle, and he said, ‘Cadet Shaw, you have a fingerprint on your belt buckle! What do you think of that?’ And I’m thinking to myself, ‘There’s no way there was a fingerprint on my belt buckle. You just put that there!’ But of course, I say, ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ and he backs up and he says, ‘Give me ten push-ups!’ So I did my duty. I got down, I gave my ten push-ups, and I was probably good for another month or two. Then we started learning to march. You know, it was ‘right face,’ ‘forward march,’ ‘about face,’ ‘left face,’ you know, ‘class, halt!’ And we looked terrible the first several weeks. But I could tell there was a great amount of peer pressure between the classes to look good. He could really tell the senior classes looked really sharp. But I always wondered, ‘Why do police officers have to march?’ You know, all my life I’d seen police officers out on the street or in stations or on TV and on the news, and you never see it marching. You never see them in formations. It just doesn’t happen. So why, with so much importance, was it put into us looking sharp in those units marching? And you’ve been listening to Jeff Shaw tell his story about becoming a law enforcement officer, and by the way, his story is everyone’s story—who’s in law enforcement in this great country—our neighbors’ story, our friends, our family members—because that’s who steps are. Eight hundred thousand-plus state, local, and federal law enforcement agencies. It’s us, ‘we the people,’ a civilian law enforcement agency, a civilian military, too. What a beautiful idea, what a beautiful story. When we come back, what happens next in Jeff Shaw’s transition from sort of rocker-hippie restaurant worker to wearing a badge and all the responsibility that carries with it? More of Jeff Shaw’s story here on Our American Stories. And we returned to Our American Stories and to Jeff Shaw’s story, telling us about his time in the police academy. Here he is to tell us about some of the first calls he responded to and how they affected him. So, right after graduation, the very next assignment is riding with a field training officer. It’s part of your normal training. It’s usually three months, but I only got two months because there was a big criminal trial that was coming to an end. It was the McDuffie case, and all the departments in South Florida were on edge because we were expecting civil unrest. And during this time, in nineteen eighty, the Colombian Cowboys were very active in South Florida. A lot of homicide—I related to the drug trafficking. So our department canceled my last month of my riding assignment and put me out on my own. So I remember that first night I was transferred to midnights. You know, I had no seniority, and the only openings were available on midnights, so that’s where the rookies went. So they gave me my car key, and I walked out, found my car, and I remember getting into the car, and I’m in a patrol car and I’m going out on the street, and I have nobody to ask questions to, nobody to guide me, nobody to tell me to stop, ‘Don’t go down there!’ I’m on my own. So I’m driving around. It’s very quiet. I’m waiting for that first call to go out. You know, I’m in anticipation. I kept playing with the radio knob, you know, wondering if maybe I accidentally turned my volume down too low and I couldn’t hear. And they’d been calling me and I’m not answering every time. Of course, my valeting was firing. So I’m driving around, and all of a sudden, the alert tone comes on, so I’m thinking, ‘Oh, finally something’s going to happen! I’m going to be able to do something!’ And then of course she says my number—’Whatever this is, it’s going to be my call!’—and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I asked for too much here!’ Then she says the signal is a ‘330’ and an ‘R code.’ A ‘330’ is an emergency shooting, which means either it’s in progress or somebody has definitely been shot. My very first call is going to be a shooting. And she gives the address of the Sianira Bar, and I am looking at the Siganira Bar through my windshield. That’s how close I was. The drug cartels are known to habit this place, so I’m already going pretty fast. I didn’t even have time to put my blue lights on, and I’m in the parking lot. People are pouring out of the bar, and I’m standing with my door open, and I’m trying to use the door as a shield. And I remember that split second of wondering if I would hear the bullet before it hit me. And fear leaves you when that adrenaline rush hits you. My training just took over, so I can hear my backup getting closer. Now I can hear a siren, and through the corner of my eye—like my peripheral vision—I can see somebody lying down inside the bar. The lights are on, the door is open, and I can see him lying in there. He’s not moving. I keep my gun on all of them, trying to watch them. I’m trying to watch the door itself, and I start edging my way over to the door. One of the people in the crowd finally spoke English and told me that the subjects had fled. So I go inside the bar, and I look at the first guy, the one I saw Dowlan, and I know that he’s dead and there’s nothing I can do for him. But there’s another guy next to him, and this guy looks better, and now my backup’s in the bar. He’s looking around also. I kneel down next to the second guy, and although he’s not moving, his eyes are looking at me. They’re tracking me. So I said to him, ‘I’ve got you. You’re going to be okay.’ So as I’m talking to him and I put my hand on his throat, I can feel his pulse. It’s not real strong, and I see his pupils dilate, and he stops breathing. Seconds later, the pulse stops. I see… God, the guy had just died on me. But I stood back up. By now, there are dozens of police cars outside, two or three different fire rescue trucks. The supervisors are starting to arrive. News trucks are arriving with their little camera things, and the parking lot of this strip mall is just a full sea of blue lights, all flashing, red lights flashing, and it’s my call, and I’m like, ‘I’m not—I’m not ready for this!’ You know, I’ve handled simple burglary reports. I had to work the rest of the shift, which is another eight hours. But when I was driving home, I was thinking of all those things, like kneeling down next to the man, you know, feeling him die right there—my hand was on him as he died—and those other thoughts: ‘Was he a good guy? Did he have a family?’ Lots of thoughts like that. And I had very similar thoughts with a lot of my victims, which is probably not a healthy thing. So that was one of my very first calls—a mass shooting—and that entire scene, I can picture right now. My wife and I were in the process of adopting a girl from Colombia. This particular day, they had just finally assigned a girl to us. You know, we had waited two years, and we finally got her picture, and it was a cute little Spanish girl, you know, short, dark hair. It was so exciting for us. We had to leave in like two weeks to Colombia and get her. So that night I was trying to catch up on reports, and more often than not, before I could finish a call and write the report, the dispatcher would ask us to clear because she had another important call. So it started with the alert tone, you know, that long tone. The call was again another shooting—a ‘330’. So I’m driving as fast as I can, and I’m looking at these townhouses. Then I see the man standing in the front yard, and he’s waving at me. So I hit the brakes and slide up into his front yard. And as I’m doing so, the dispatcher comes on the air and says to change the call to a suicide. So I run inside the house as fast as I can, and the first thing I see is a young girl sitting on the couch. Her head is back, and she’s looking up at the ceiling. And lying on the floor next to this girl’s feet is a black .38 caliber revolver. I touch her neck; there’s no pulse. I sat next to her, you know, and got on the radio and told the dispatchers that the girl was ‘our code is forty-five,’ which means dead, and I requested a detective to respond. And the father went back outside, and I was alone in the kitchen with the mom, and she handed me a note. She didn’t say anything. She did speak a little English, but she never really spoke to me. And I read the note, and the first part of the note was, ‘I accepted you as my mother and father,’ and that was all I can remember. And I learned later that this was her aunt and uncle, and that her parents were actually in Cuba and she had come to the United States and was staying with her aunt and uncle. And I remember thinking how painful that had to be for this woman and this man. And she told me that what had happened was that she had started seeing this boy that she didn’t approve of, and prohibited her from seeing the boy anymore. And they had gone out to the store for just a few minutes, and you know, I just remember looking at this young Spanish girl, and somehow that linked to my picture of my daughter. And I remember going home that night, and that was like all I could think of. And what storytelling you’re hearing from Jeff Shaw. The things that law enforcement officers have to see, what they have to live with, and how in the end they’re humans, and they start to associate one thing with another—in this particular case, seeing that Hispanic girl and thinking about his little girl and wondering how these things can happen. And that first night, a ‘330,’ an emergency shooting at this on our bar. And imagine walking into this place on your first call, seeing a dead body, holding the hands of another wounded victim, only to have that person die while you’re holding their hands. He said, ‘I can still see the scene in that bar.’ Now we can, too, Jeff. When we come back, more of Jeff Shaw’s story, ‘A Life in Law Enforcement,’ his book Who I Am, The Man Behind the Badge. His story continues here on Our American Stories. And we’re back with Our American Stories and with Jeff Shaw, telling us about his time serving as a police officer and all the emotions and experiences that come with it. Let’s return to Jeff with the rest of his story. I was, I want to say, ten years in when I finally learned why officers had learned to march. My friend Emilio became a motorcycle officer, and that was his dream. And one day I was off duty—it was my day off—and he was patrolling the zone I normally worked, and they asked him if he could handle a suspicious person call, and he said, ‘Of course!’ And Emilio followed one of them inside of him all, and the guy was able to pull Emilio’s gun and shot him six times, and Emilio died immediately. So that was the first big funeral I went to. There were probably five hundred motorcycle officers from as far away as Las Vegas. I can remember her, the helicopters flying over. I remember standing at attention for probably forty-five minutes, as that line of motorcycles drove past us, following the hearse, seeing the doors opening, the casket coming down, you know, straight in the American flag, and somebody brought two thousand officers to attention and to salute the flag, and it was just an amazing sound, hearing all those officers coming to attention and then saluting. And then Emilio’s wife came out. She came down the steps with her kids, which were little, and I remember her, all the officers around me, sobbing. You could hear them ring and just crying, while all of them were at perfect attention. And then everybody kind of marched away, and it was… it was really cool. Yeah, that was it.