Interview Summary: Officer Danny Rabelos - From Adversity to Law Enforcement Inspiration Danny Rabelos' conversation with Jennifer Darling provides insight into how personal experiences can shape one's career path in law enforcement. During "A Duty to Act", Rabelos recounts growing up in challenging circumstances within a poor community where encounters with police were often negative due to abuse at home and racial injustices faced by friends. These experiences fueled his determination to change perceptions of policing by joining the force himself. Rabelos describes key moments that propelled him toward policing—specifically recalling when he was unfairly detained alongside a friend who had been racially targeted; this incident left a lasting impression leading him towards seeking justice through fair treatment within law enforcement. His career trajectory took him from high school football fields under mentorship guidance through college education at WSU earning degrees in psychology and sociology before embarking on testing for various departments ultimately landing at Everett PD. With retirement looming due to an injury sustained while on duty, Rabelos looks forward to exploring photography further while reflecting fondly upon nearly three decades spent serving the Everett community. The interview also touches upon effective recruitment strategies highlighting how Rabelos championed Everett PD’s embrace of Instagram against initial resistance favoring traditional platforms like Facebook; this move significantly enhanced engagement particularly among younger demographics crucial for future recruitment efforts. In addition, Rabelos sheds light on fostering interdepartmental camaraderie sharing anecdotes about friendly competitions between police officers firefighters raising funds for charitable causes showcasing solidarity beyond professional duties. An intriguing aspect discussed is Rabelos’ extensive tattoo artwork covering both arms featuring superheroes villains each symbolizing aspects of good evil respectively reflecting personal growth overcoming adversity throughout life’s journey; these tattoos played part influencing changes regarding visible tattoo policies within Everett PD enhancing relatability amongst officers communities alike. About Officer Danny Rabelos: Name: Danny Robellos Department: Everett Police Department Career Span: 25 years (retiring soon) Educational Background: Degrees in Psychology Sociology from Washington State University (WSU) Tattoos: Both arms covered representing superheroes villains signifying life struggles triumph
Danny Rabelos' conversation with Jennifer Darling provides insight into how personal experiences can shape one's career path in law enforcement.
During "A Duty to Act", Rabelos recounts growing up in challenging circumstances within a poor community where encounters with police were often negative due to abuse at home and racial injustices faced by friends. These experiences fueled his determination to change perceptions of policing by joining the force himself.
Rabelos describes key moments that propelled him toward policing—specifically recalling when he was unfairly detained alongside a friend who had been racially targeted; this incident left a lasting impression leading him towards seeking justice through fair treatment within law enforcement.
His career trajectory took him from high school football fields under mentorship guidance through college education at WSU earning degrees in psychology and sociology before embarking on testing for various departments ultimately landing at Everett PD.
With retirement looming due to an injury sustained while on duty, Rabelos looks forward to exploring photography further while reflecting fondly upon nearly three decades spent serving the Everett community.
The interview also touches upon effective recruitment strategies highlighting how Rabelos championed Everett PD’s embrace of Instagram against initial resistance favoring traditional platforms like Facebook; this move significantly enhanced engagement particularly among younger demographics crucial for future recruitment efforts.
In addition, Rabelos sheds light on fostering interdepartmental camaraderie sharing anecdotes about friendly competitions between police officers firefighters raising funds for charitable causes showcasing solidarity beyond professional duties.
An intriguing aspect discussed is Rabelos’ extensive tattoo artwork covering both arms featuring superheroes villains each symbolizing aspects of good evil respectively reflecting personal growth overcoming adversity throughout life’s journey; these tattoos played part influencing changes regarding visible tattoo policies within Everett PD enhancing relatability amongst officers communities alike.
Name: Danny Robellos
Department: Everett Police Department
Career Span: 25 years (retiring soon)
Educational Background: Degrees in Psychology Sociology from Washington State University (WSU)
Tattoos: Both arms covered representing superheroes villains signifying life struggles triumph
Welcome to A Duty to Act with your host, Jennifer Darling. Danny, thank you so much for coming here today, coming all the way up to Bellingham, especially because you're on duty for Everett Police Department. Can you introduce yourself and the context of your job? Yeah, I'm Danny Robellos. I'm with Everett Police Department. I've been there 25 years, and currently I'm our recruiting officer. All right, what brought you toward recruitment as a specialty in law enforcement? It's kind of a long story, but I became a cop for some different reasons. One of those reasons was I grew up in a very abusive household, criminally involved family, poor community, and so forth. And police weren't always the friendliest to my community or poorer people when they were growing up. And so I've spent a career building trust and relationship in the city of Everett. So I thought I'd do my part at the end of my career and try to inspire more young to come into policing, especially with everything that we have going on with the negativity around it, because it's a fabulous job, and we need to do better at inspiring our young to take up the next step. And you said that you got into it because your background was police weren't the most positive influence in your life. Can you think of a specific. They were not. They were not. Can you think of a specific moment where you said, I can do that better? Is there a moment that that happened? Yeah. I may had an incident with me and one of my friends. He was assaulted for the color of his skin. Unfortunately, he was not a violent individual. Didn't grow up in anything like that. So the kid that beat him up, I grew up in violence, and I thought it was crap that this other kid beat him up. So, unfortunately, I got in a fight with that kid, and the parents got called. The persons that wound up in handcuffs or detained were my friend, who was the victim of this assault because of the color of his skin, and me, because we're poor. Right. And in that contact, I did not like the way the senior officer was being to us. So, of course, being a young kid, and, I don't know, 15 years old, I think I was so running my mouth like kids do, and the younger cop looks at me and says, if you don't like this, do something about it. And at the time, I was like, whoa, tough guy. Going to beat up a kid in handcuffs? And that's what I said back to him. He goes, no, you want to change your life, and you are doing what we do for people. You just stood up for this kid here. Right. Because that's what's right. Now, if you don't like the way police treat people, then why don't you become a police officer and treat people how you feel that they should be treated? And so that was kind of the inspiration moment of this officer giving me some guidance and kind of taking me under his wing, and ultimately, here I am. I guess if I've been a cop for 25 years, I don't know, that's probably 30 years later. 30 years or more. Yeah. Because I had my 30 year reunion this year, so. 30, 35 years ago. Wow. Yeah. And led me to where I'm at now. That's amazing. Yeah. What was your path from 15 on? So you're teen years and trying to make your decisions, so on. Did you high school into college, high school into a department's recruitment program? Yeah. So with the environment that I grew up in, I had a lot of stuff that typically I tell new recruits are people, potential applicants. You may need time, distance, and space or make yourself a better candidate because of some stuff that's happened in your life. So, a girlfriend at the time in high school, football coach, and this officer who had been kind of mentoring me, said that I should go to college to help improve myself or marketability to law enforcement. So they got me into college or helped me get into college, and so I went to WSU, ultimately graduated from there, and then after WSU, began testing with departments and was fortunate enough to get picked up by Everett. All right, and so that's been your job the whole time, is with Everett? Yeah. I've been a police officer with Everett all 25 years. Well, June will be 25 years. Almost there. Okay. What is your undergraduate degree in? So, I actually have two degrees. I listened to an advisor, and I ran into him years later. He was a doc officer. He told me that I need to take 1819 credits to graduate on time, which I later on learned that, no, you should take 15 or so. So junior into senior year, I had a new advisor, and they asked me why I didn't graduate, and I said, well, because I got one more year. So with that, I was fortunate enough to get two degrees. So I have a degree in psychology and a degree in sociology, and then I also studied some psychology while I was there as well. Okay. You've mentioned years of service, and you've mentioned 25 years. You mentioned 30, and so on. Do you have an expectation on how much more time you have? Yeah. Fortunately, and unfortunately, I'm leaving on my 52nd birthday. So that's coming up in the next three years. And that's just because of I had an injury in 2016 that makes it difficult to continue. So I'd love to stay and continue doing it. I love my job every day. I do a variety of stuff besides recruiting, and so it's a great job. Yeah. Okay. Do you have plans for after? Well, fortunately, working for the city of Everett and city Everett takes good care of us. So if I want to retire, retire, I can retire. But I took up photography, so, I don't know, maybe wander around and take some pictures. All right. You just made an excellent segue to talk about the other things that you do in the context of your job, and you brought photography into it. So tell me about your social media. So, social media. The department has several pieces of social media, but I run our instagram. If it's okay, I'm going to throw it out there. It's Everett police with a wa at the end of it. My push for Instagram, for us, it took me almost a year into our recruiting to get it because the city's comms team kept telling us that we have Facebook. Well, Facebook, as you and I know, that's for our generation, and that's not what our target audience is. Our target recruit is, it's the younger generation. So last January, we finally were given an Instagram account, and I produce all the content on there, whether it's videos, pictures. It's actually one of our biggest recruiting tools. We reached people. We have followers from all over the world, which is kind of honorable to have that occurring. But, yeah, it's a lot of work. How many followers do you have? I think we're almost at 2800 now. I think roughly right around there. So part of the thing that I do with it is I'm always engaged in it. Everybody that follows us, they get a personal message sent to them. Somebody comments on one of our posts, our pictures, they get a response from us. And so that's part of what Everett police department is. We're very involved in our community, and whether that's through in person or even virtually, I guess we try to interact with people as much as we can. And I understand that maybe there's a little bit of competition with the fire department and maybe you're winning. Well, yeah, they had their account a little longer than ours, and I think we're over double it now. And the person who runs the fire account is a good friend of mine. So, police, fire, there's always some banter there, but they do great things. We've done some great collaborations with them. There's actually a funny video that plays on police wanted to be firefighters and firefighters wanted to be police. That we did. We did a wing eating contest fire against police that raised money for several charities. Ours money went to make a wish and then trying to blank on it. But it has to do with the run they do up and down the stairs for a form of cancer, lymphoma, leukemia. Stairclim. Yes. We both raised $1,000 for each one of those charities, which is awesome. We work well with our fire department. We had to make a wish this last fall of a young individual that was going off to Disneyland and he could not fly for some reasons, and so they wanted to give him a special send off. So us, Everett, fire, state patrol, just everybody in the community came together to, his name's Carson. To give Carson just an awesome send off to Disneyland. Oh, very nice. Very nice. How do you come up with the ideas for the things you're going to do? Because I'm really intrigued about that wing eating contest. I'm going to be competing in the stairclimb. We need a fundraiser. So already I've written that down as an idea. But how do you come up with these things? Or who comes up with them? So I come up with everything. I keep asking my officers, hint, if you're listening to this, come up with ideas and we'll film them. Right. And even if you don't want to be on the video, I'll do it, whatever. So I actually try not to duplicate what other agencies are necessarily doing because then it could be potentially stale. So a lot of times I take other reels that I watch that involve whether it's other businesses, other people, other ideas, and try to see how I can fit that into policing or play on some stuff like, our current chief is awesome, too. But our last chief was just absolutely outstanding. His last video that he made with us actually allowed us to dump a bucket of water on him. And so again, that's with working with a department that's supportive, with leadership, that's supportive of what you're doing. They support my crazy ideas. Sometimes I'm told no. A lot of times I'm told no. But for the most part, they see the value in it. A lot of the videos that we've produced have had just absolutely way more views than we have followers. One of our detectives last year for the 4 July played starts at Bangle Banner. To date that's our biggest video. We released that on the 4 July. And so there is people that help me on our department come up with ideas. I just wish that more of our officers would. And so the Star Spangled Banner, you're saying, like Jimi Hendrix style on the guitar. We went out. We have this cool park. Harbor view park overlooks Everett's, got beautiful marina there. One of the things that I do with our social media, too, is I don't focus on necessarily if the police stuff's kind of background or foreground. Right. Because the city, Everett, actually has a ton of beauty behind it. So we try to shoot around the city because as a police officer, you not only work in a building or your police car, you work in these areas. So you got to showcase that to people to detract them. So we have this beautiful park flagpole in the middle. And it was awesome because our community members, like they do with everything, they step up and help us out. But, yeah, he's just out in the middle of the park and we're filming them. A couple of different iPhones. Everything that I was doing on there was iPhone previously. The community came and they wanted to be involved in it, and so it just worked. It was a hit when we released it. That's great. Now, you started off by saying that the city said, we have Facebook, you don't need Instagram. Is the Facebook page still active? Is it still out there?
Yeah. So we do have Facebook. So we have two different missions. So we initially wanted Instagram just for recruiting. The city comms team has to ultimately overseas all of our social media, and they couldn't have too many out there. So what is managed by our pio is our Facebook, Twitter, our x is what it's called, and all other platforms of social media. I simply do the Instagram, and it's more based around appreciation of our officers. We showcase our officers, we showcase our community, and we try to attract people through that. So that's the goal. You won't necessarily see incidents of crime that occurred on there. Typically, I refer people to our Facebook or our ex or Twitter for that. But it's more of what we are about and what we are about with our community. So maybe Facebook is more like your news feed and Instagram is more like your personality. Yes. Yes. Okay. That's really an interesting division there. I spoke to someone, the episode came out today, actually. I spoke to someone who releases content on all different channels at different times. And I didn't think to ask if that was a differentiating feature. Or have to consider that one now. Yeah. And some of the stuff we cross post to Facebook because our pio does enjoy what we do. So certain things we cross post so that it does get out to our other audiences to see because it's fun. Like the first video I made with the chief, it was just a stick of I run a lot, so I have all kinds of different running shoes. Brooks produces holiday running shoes. And so I had a pair of St. Patrick's Day running shoes. And it's kind of fun because the chief's sitting on a bench and we got brand new jumpsuits and I didn't know how slick they were and it was a fake wood bench. And so when I slid into him to tell him I got this idea, he teased me afterwards that I bruised his hip because I had slid into him so hard. But it just was kind of funny. And the theme behind it was that we're going to wear these green shoes for the month of March so that people will be like, we're real human beings. And then ultimately his last video plays on. I guess the green shoes was the second video. In fact, the first video I did with him was a name of my recruiting car contest that was actually won by somebody up here in Bellingham. And he is actually now an officer with our department, which is awesome to have somebody go from winning a contest with us of naming our car. And our chief allowed me to drive it up to take pictures with him and his family with it. And ultimately he winds up applying to us and now is in FTO. So I think he's getting close. He's in there in phase two or three to get out on his own. So that's kind of a cool story from Instagram. Yeah, that's great. So let's talk about your car for a little bit. Your car has a name? Yes. And why does your car have a name? Tell me about your car. So the car has a name at least. My understanding of growing social media is engagement with your community. So I had this brilliant idea that at a thousand followers, we would do a name. My car contest the department has issued me. It's an electric mustang. It's fully wrapped in very bright colors that says, everett PD. We are hiring. In fact, I get waved down a lot because of it, and I think somebody needs help. And they're like, oh, no, we'd like to take a picture with you or the car. So that's kind of fun. So we did a contest to name the car and the stick in that video was after the chief said that I could name the car. He goes off the camera. So I'm saying, hey, if you win in the Puget sound region, we'll bring the car out to you, we'll take pictures with it, and I may even let you drive it. And our chief is, perfect timing. Yells at me, no, Danny. And so ultimately, we do that to name the car. The name was voted on by our followers, so it was named Bluey after a cartoon character. All my kids are growing now, so I had to look it up. But, yeah, so bluey, she's a blue healer dog. And from what everybody tells me, it's an awesome kids show. So it's kind of cool that it's named after it. That's awesome. I'm looking forward to taking a look at the car. I actually was outside when you arrived at the studio, moving some things in, and I just caught, like, this flash of yellow. And I was like, that's interesting. So I will have to go out, we'll get some pictures and put them in the show notes. I don't know how that works. I'm a little blank on that. Yeah, absolutely. Some of our guys, they don't like it because it's so flashy and bright. Like I tell people, though, it serves a purpose. And one of the things that departments, in my opinion, waste money on are these billboards. Nobody pays attention to billboards as they're going around, especially your target audience, who you want applying to us. And that was part of what I convinced them. We had an electric mustang that did not work for a patrol car. So I convinced them to give it to me as a recruiting car. And let's wrap it. And I'm not sure the exact cost of the wrap. I think it was under $5,000, whereas billboards, you pay up to $10,000 a month for those. And so now we have a rolling billboard that drives all over the city. Everett, as you can tell, I'm clear up here in Bellingham next week or week after, be driving it clear over to Idaho, and it catches people's attention. And so the guys that tease me about it and gals on our department, I just said, well, you don't have to drive it. I drive it. And it's working. And getting people's attention. Absolutely. We talk about the ambulances a lot as just driving around on the billboard. We just have the billboard. And a lot of effort is put into, of course, appropriate emergency lighting and reflectiveness and so on. Yeah, it's great if you have a good logo for your department. And not just anything generic, but I do think there's a lot of real estate that's being underutilized. And even my previous job, we used to advertise that the ambulances were paid for by our EMS levy. And with one step in another over the past mergers and break aparts and things like that, the agencies have gone away from putting that on the ambulances. And I think this ambulance was literally paid for by a levy. We're entering a levy year. It's not on there anymore. And stop, drop and roll, and all of the important things. So I really think that's great. Yeah, there's a lot that could be out there. I mean, like you're sharing with us. Without our businesses, our communities as civil servants, we don't function. And it's great to have that support. And that's part of the reason after 25 years, people ask, why are you so happy in this profession? And working in the community that I work in, that truly loves and supports us is absolutely amazing. And they do amazing things for us and to show appreciation for that. Cool. You guys, thank you for voting for this levy. I see what you're saying. It's awesome. Absolutely. I had an experience when I was a paramedic trainee, when I was a paramedic student, excuse me, right at the very beginning, I had this idea of what I wanted to be when I was 17 years old. I did everything in service to that. Graduated high school, started applying to paramedic programs, started volunteering at the fire department, and by the time I got accepted to a paramedic program, I was 20. And I still had limited. I just knew it's what I wanted to do. But I had limited contact with paramedics and limited experience with the world that I'd be responding to. And in fact, I grew up in a very large suburb, so very large, but suburb. When I did my training, I trained in the city of Pittsburgh, which was unbelievable. It was incredible. I'm a Steelers fan. To die now, I mean, it's just what it is. And I was assigned to three paramedics, Jane, Chuck and Mike. And I just had this experience where I was in the back of the ambulance, peeking out the little window, driving through the projects, through neighborhoods that would be considered very unsavory. And this was of course, in the early ninety s, so not war torn or anything, but still. And people would come out of the project, out of the apartment buildings, they'd come out waving their hands and they'd go, Sister Jane, Sister Jane, and they'd wave to her. And I just thought, like, this is an aspect I never thought of. I thought about serving a community, serving the community that I was living in and grew up in as a volunteer, but I didn't realize about becoming part of that community. And Jane was a part of that community. I'm sure she lived nowhere near there, but she just worked in that community for so long. So I love the idea that what you're doing personalizes you to your community, your agency to your community, and then builds on that. Yeah, we had an incident Monday on Casino Road, which is a high crime area. It can be. And I went out there, actually, to take pictures of our officers in action for social media stuff. So I was not dressed in uniform. I was in just pants, a hooded sweatshirt covering up all my tattoos so you can't see me. I ran into daycare to use the bathroom. And as I'm running in, I hear I got pictures with that officer of me and my kids, our family, we took. And then somebody else yells, is that Officer Danny? And that's something that I take an extreme amount of pride in. Right. The reason that I'm known in that community, because I spent so many years in that community, is very similar to the story that you just shared there with me. One of the things that you hear frequently is community policing is doing these events. Whether it's badges for baseball. Our department does. We do a soccer camp, we do a video game camp. We do a ton of different stuff in our community. But truly, the reason our community loves and supports us is not only because of me. We have so many great officers that actually know our community members, right? And they know them by first name, and they get excited by seeing them come into this community. And it's just so humbling to have that. And to all you officers out there that don't realize what you're doing, don't give up this fight of things. You are making a difference in people's lives. If I can share a quick story. One of our night officers was down on himself because he was frustrated with changes in policing and stuff. And I said, well, why did you become a police officer? And he says, to protect people. I said, okay, if that's the true thing that you're doing, don't give up. Because if our box is now smaller and then it's potentially more violent or dangerous for our community, we should be using all four corners of that box to make an impact, because we don't quit on our community, we don't walk away from our community. We continue to fight for our community because that's why you became a police officer, to protect them. And he shared with me because his whole career he's been on nights and he's like, well, I don't get to see a lot of the community that you get to. And so I was working nights that shift with him, and I pointed down the road that we're standing on, and I said, what do you see? And he goes, what do you mean what do I see? I don't see anything. It's dark out. And I said, exactly. I said, you need to find the positive in what you're doing. Why is the street dark like this? Why are all the lights off in this house? Because everybody that's on this street right now has no clue that we're out here and what we're doing. But they're so comfortable in the environment that we created them. Their lights are off and they're sleeping peacefully. And so as an officer, if you can't find any positive that you're doing, you need to look at things like that. And he said that was one of the biggest moments that made him feel like he was making a difference. And to realize, he tells me now, that he drives up and down streets to check and see, yeah, those lights are off. And that's because of the job that he is doing and his fellow officers are doing at night. So just continually take pride in what you do because you are making a difference. And you may never hear it from somebody, but you're making a difference for people. It's a great way to reframe what you're doing. I know a lot of people on the EMS side of things. We see recurrent characters, we see the same people over and over, and that can be very wearing, especially because we give medical advice, we have expectations, we take them to care, and then we watch people fail to meet those expectations. But one way to reframe that is to say it's been a week since we've seen them. There's something going right this week. And to take pride in those little moments or just to understand, like, we're going through a bad time right now, but we've done referrals and there's agencies out there helping. But even if it's just a little thing like a dark street, you just reframe it and look for the positive in it. What great advice you've had there. Because we see the negative in both of our professions. They're negative professions because we don't respond to somebody. Nobody calls 911 because they're having a great day. They call 911 because they're in some emergent situation. So we get to see people at their worst, and that can wear on you. But therapy is great, too. I go to therapy. If you need therapy, go to therapy. It helps, but find that positive versus that negative, because it's very easy to get caught in that negative and not realizing what you're doing. One more example that I'll give is our recruiting video was such a huge success. One of the things that I like to do is actually tell somebody and show them, and not for us just being the ones to tell it. I can sit here and I can tell you anything that I want to tell you. And, in fact, I see other departments do that sometimes. And to me, I kind of almost laugh at that. So, with the filming of our recruiting video, we wanted our community to come out and help us make that video. We had so many people come out to help us make that video. I got in trouble because we had to shut a street down. I thought we'd just throw some police cars at the end of it. Well, transit doesn't like that too much, and so I got a little bit of trouble for not getting permits and diverting people. But the most important thing is there was people in that video that I had put in prison over my career. Other officers had put in prison, but you don't know what potentially you can do to inspire somebody by, yeah, you may have to give them, like, a parent, tough love and put them in prison. You may have to do whatever, but they had changed their lives, and they were so excited to be part of making this video with the police, with their family and their kids. And that is something that is priceless. And some of the proudest things that you can do as a police officer, because ultimately, what we want is not everybody's going to go to jail forever. So ultimately, your goal should be to maybe inspire somebody to be a functioning part of a community. And so when you get that person that you're not responded to because they're on drugs, they od or whatever, and they go away. It may be years before they're comfortable coming back to you and saying, hey, you saved my life because of putting me in prison, taking me here, or just that careness of holding my hand while you're taking me to the hospital in the aid car for your profession, or you may never know that, but just take pride in that, that it does happen. And that's your ultimate goal. Is to take somebody who's not a functioning person of the society and community, and if you can inspire them to be a functioning member of society or community, that's huge. I think that's wonderful. We in a previous episode interviewed someone from the town. I work in Mount Vernon. We have an iOS team which is integrated outreach services. So they are social workers that were initially embedded with law enforcement. Now they're actually independent of law. They're still under that guise, but they have their own car. They respond based on their own dispatching, which has been a phenomenal program. And it was a great interview to have and to talk about what they're doing. I just happened to have an update at work the other day where the person I interviewed was presenting to all of us on duty and she mentioned some work that they're doing to reintegrate the homeless people, the people that are the frequent callers, the people that are really marginalized and that they've been able to help. They took them to the high school graduation. Apparently there's something I never knew went on, but apparently at our high school you blow bells and whistles and you tease the graduates like they go on a parade and you're supposed to make a lot of noise and just make a big fuss. And so they took a handful of the people that had been on the street, had been frequent callers, had been in just dire straits, and they took them to this to participate in teasing the high school graduating parade. And this is community thing that it's so wonderful that this organization is out there exists that they can take these ideas and that they can put the knowledge, the psychology, the sociology, the social work behind it, the study and say reintegration into society. Involving them is a component that's been neglected and may prevent relapse and it may prevent recidivism. And I was blown away. I was like, wait, we have a parade and I'm not there making noise. And they got to go. We need to be. And we have a similar thing. We have a coat team, which is our community outreach and enforcement team. They do absolutely amazing things with our community. There's also a program, know, I don't know if it's in Skagget County. I think they have a drug court as well. A lot of the courts do. It's so awesome. People will share with us on the Instagram that they're clean because of this officer and they invite that officer to their graduation at drug court. And that's very awesome to hear those stories. I try to share those. And it's more important, again, that it's heard in their words. I don't try to fancy it up. It's a screenshot that I black their name out so you can see that it's in their words. And we've gotten so many of those messages that officer so and so saved my life. Officer this and that. And so it's just a really cool thing to see as we're talking about just people integrating back into society and now being successful in the community and wanting to give back. You mentioned that you take these stories that people give you, you share, take their names out and so on, and you've talked about all the things that you're doing on Instagram. How do you get people from your department to want to be on camera, to be allowed to be on camera, or how do you get buy in for them to have their picture pop up? Well, that's a great thing, is sometimes first responders, civil servants, are kind of a pain to deal with. Right. And I have had a very successful career. Over my career, I've worked our anti crime team, gangs, undercover detectives. So I have a good reputation. And them seeing me put myself out there, the willingness to do like, I've done some pretty stupid videos. In fact, one of them, you'll appreciate this, when I was making, I fell off a fire pole. And so at first, when I took over as a recruiter, people were nervous because they didn't necessarily want to participate because they didn't like the way things previously were done. And so I started slowly with the people that I knew that would help me. And trust me, my goal is to, again, initially, everything that I was doing was with just iPhone videos, pictures, everything. And my goal is to showcase and give information about our officers. Right. If you remember, when we first started in this profession, what was it? There was baseball cards. I used to have when I was a narcotics canine handler, I had a baseball card that was me and Reno, my dog. And we had passed that out to kids, and people would love that. Well, nobody does cards anymore. Everything is virtual, right? So I equate it to, because I've had some people say, well, these cool cards are hanging up. Why don't we do these? And I simply explain, what do you think I'm doing on Instagram? That is your baseball card? And so not only will I take pictures that I took of them, and like I said, it's not just necessarily at the police station or in front of a police car. If it's in front of a police car. The police car is kind of background. Maybe it gives me cool lighting or something, but once I started rolling with it and taking pictures, they were like, whoa, this is kind of cool. Currently, as I shared with you, I just took up photography in my personal life. I'm enjoying that so much that I am now bringing my camera to work, and I almost feel like a police bunny chaser or a stalker. I show up on scenes, and obviously, if I'm needed, that's my first priority to deal with it. But then I get my camera out. We had a stolen car last week. I was the first on it. We got the suspects in custody. As soon as that, I'm like, hey, guys, I'm the recruiter. You got it. And then I go and grab my camera and get some cool shots. Then I edit them up, and then I send them to them personally and say, this is for your personal collection. If you would feel comfortable with me using them at social media at any point in time, please let me know. There are some people that no matter what, they're like, well, I really love your pictures, but I just don't want to be on social media. Completely understand that other people are like, yeah, this is cool. Can you do this? Or. I actually have had people that were very anti social media. After they see my pictures, they're like, yeah, you can post any picture you took of me. One of our sergeants, great guy. He's a sergeant of our bike unit and also sergeant of our dive unit. And I do some crazy stuff. Like I said earlier, they were doing a night dive, and so I have a pretty cool. We were talking about prime lenses earlier, 35 millimeter, prime lens, low light. I was out chest deep in shorts and a t shirt in the middle of the winter to take pictures. Well, I got some very cool pictures from them. And after them seeing that, it earns their respect. Yeah, please use these pictures. And one that I just posted recently was of this sergeant. So it's cool to see that evolvement of, yeah, this is kind of cool. Allows your community to know you. You give fun facts, give the officers career details, give some fun facts about them. The lieutenant that I just shot before I came up here, he's also kind of a comic superhero geek. I shot him with his Captain America shield. I got to edit and see how those work out. We may or may not use those, but just have fun with it. It's awesome. I like how many times you've brought up the individuals and their personalities coming in, like the person playing the electric guitar. And you've mentioned superheroes. You've also mentioned tattoos. And this brings it around to how I ended up calling you. So I'm going to give some background for everybody who wouldn't know this story, but the gist of it is that I have a side gig working in Snohomish County. I actually administer. I'm in administration for the EMS department there, and I teach EMT students in Skagit county, as well as my firefighting job. And one of the students, a handful of students, actually have expressed concerns about being able to get jobs in the future because of tattoo policies at different departments. I happen to work for a department, for a city that has a stricter tattoo policy. We have a lot of fights to fight. This is just not the fight we're having right now. But either way, this particular person had some concerns because the tattoos resembled gang style tattoos, but they weren't. He was quick to reassure me, just on quick look. So I started putting. I tried to make some connections, like, how can I reassure my students? What can I tell them about what's possible? So I spoke to someone at Everett Fire department who I work with, who put me in touch with Everett human resources department, who said, you know who you should talk to? And they said, officer Danny, so you have tattoos. You are known for having tattoos. They are in full effect right now. Talking about tattoos can be personal. I know that you don't have any problem sharing personal stuff, but I'll let you go as far as you want with this. But you talked to me about having tattoos, and I was able to go back to my students and say, I got somebody for you to talk to, because he's out there living large with his tattoos, showing. And it's helped me craft some ideas on podcast talks and things to share with my students and planning in the future for my department. So can you tell us a little bit about your tattoos and how they appear in recruitment? Yeah. So, as I talked about earlier, I was an abused child. My dad wanted very tough kids. I won't go into detail with it because it traumatizes people sometimes of what occurred. And like I share with people, don't ever feel sorry for me. When he was passing, he tried to apologize for what he'd done when I was a kid, and I told him, don't apologize because my hatred of you made me the man I am. We'd call it his pleasure beatings to make us tougher. So after that would occur, we would go and read comic books and hope that some superhero would come and save us. Of course, that never happened. So part of it, again, what leads me to policing is I don't view myself as a hero, and I think most cops don't. But superheroes got me through a horrific time in my life, and so it took me about six years. So I have superheroes and villains tattooed on me. My left arm is all superheroes. My right arm is all supervillains. People ask me, well, why do you got heroes and villains? It's my reminder of where I came from. It's my reminder of what I've been through in my life. It's my reminder of that I am no better than anybody else. I could have very easily been on the hero side or the villain side. So why would you treat anybody like that? Like you're better than them? Truthfully, I did not get these to show for policing. This is just for me. When I first had them, we had no policy. We couldn't show our tattoos. I got them simply for me. I still work patrol on a regular basis all the time when I'm on patrol, you don't see my tattoos. I spent a lot of money on my tattoos, and I don't want them messed up if something happens. So I wear long sleeves. So it took me six years to find the right artist. His name's London Reese. He's actually down in Dana Point, California. Shout out. London flew down there. God, I can't even tell you how many times I've been down there, because besides my arms, I'm covered in other locations as well. And it was so incredible, his art. Jim Lee, who is DC comic art designer, also drew several marvel characters. I met him one day, and I have a lot of his artwork tattooed on me. And it was pretty honoring that. He wanted to film my arms because he couldn't believe a tattoo artist had recreated his art on me. So that was pretty cool. But ultimately, that's the story behind my tattoos. And because I had very extravagant, nice tattoos, we had some of our officers say, hey, what's your thoughts on pushing for a tattoo policy? And I'm like, I'll work on anything for anybody, because truly, I believe this. You should be a reflection of your community. And if you're a reflection of your community, if somebody can see themselves in you, whether it's a tattoo or anything that they're looking at, then it breaks that barrier. There's a little bit more comfortableness. Maybe I approach you now, and they might want to talk to you about something completely else. But if the n is that tattoo or whatever. That's huge. And it started by I got permission to wear short sleeves for an event with Funko, and I was only supposed to be there, I think, until 02:00. But because of the DC superhero tattoos. And it was weird to me because I've always taken pictures with people. There's people that have polaroids of me and them together. I know we as police give out stickers all the time. What do they do? They fall off a kid. But you know what? If you take a picture with a kid or even an adult, somebody that sticks with them and that'll be with them, and then they can look at it and so forth. But it was weird because there was people lined up to take pictures, so they paid me and my partner longer to stay there. And there was people from all over the world because Funko's world known, and it was their year anniversary party and so forth. So I told the chief, I said, we got to change this tattoo policy. But his concern was he was worried the older generation may have problems with it. And you know who the older generation is that has problems with it? It's cops, not older people. It's the old school cops. This is the way it was, that machoism, which is ridiculous anyway. But I got a second exception to wear short sleeves during Aquaman. And I was leaning on the rail as people were going out, and I was saying goodbye to them working at the movie theater, and somebody swipes the back of my arm, and I spin real quick, and he's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Super sorry, super sorry. And I was like, what's going on? And he's like, I just didn't know if those were real. And I'm like, yeah, they're real. Come here. I let him feel my arms and stuff, and he had never had a positive experience with a police officer. Never wanted to. And I think he said he was 67, never even wanted to talk to a police officer, but because of those tattoos. And he actually came back in after he left and he shared with me, he was actually crying, and I thought his car got stolen at the time. When I'm an auto theft detective and I'm like, crap. Usually when people come back in after the movies, their car is stolen. So I was expecting that. I was like, oh, great, man. I just make this contact with this guy, and ultimately he shares with me that he would have never had that experience. And he's wasted a large portion of his life not realizing that us as cops were just like everybody else. What I tell people is we are a community member. That's all we are. We're not better than anybody else in the community. We're a community member just doing a job, right? So, anyways, I share that story with the chief. So our chief is awesome and freaking changes our policy. And he's like, I'm still nervous about the older people until one day we have the Everett Silver tips in town, and I was working a hockey game, and it was me and a sergeant working, and I think there was like 15 people lined up. They wanted pictures of the cop with the superhero tattoos. And the chief walks by, and they were all older. I think they're probably the youngest was probably 55. And the chief was so glad to see that there was older community members that just thought it was awesome that we had an officer that had tattoos. So ultimately, that's how our tattoo policy kind of comes into place. And we had a lot of other great officers, too, that we have a lot of officers with great artwork. Hopefully at some point I'm going to convince everybody we feature our artwork on Instagram as well. But that's kind of what leads it to it. If you're having people that are having trouble with tattoo policies, come see us. We hire people with tattoos. Don't go below your wrist or above your collar right now. That's not accepted, even with ours. And most agencies that have tattoo policies are not accepting that as well. But, yeah, that's where we're at with tattoos. I love all the parts of that story. So I think I've always thought of this, that self expression is fine, and I don't have a problem with tattoos or anything like that. You brought a component into it that really needs to be heard is that if you've decided to enter the community of EMS, the community of fire, the community of public service, police, all of those sort of things, if you've decided to enter that community, then having a tattoo that flies in the face of that is a problem. When your self expression, when either some flags that you shouldn't have, some symbols that you shouldn't have, and if that's who you are, then maybe this is not exactly the community that's reflected by that. So I think it's really interesting that you brought up community. You should display who your community is. And I also really like that it's this idea of how unifying it is. I know the worries. I've been doing this for a while. And ems, to be fair, what we see the most of are elderly people just right off the bat. So the people that you automatically assume have a stigma against tattoos. There's an assumption there. I've never found that to be true. I remember I dyed my hair pink once for breast cancer month, and it was rock star pink white hair. I'd dye it pink, too. I'd be the pink haired girl every day if the upkeep wasn't so hard. But anyway, I remember thinking, like, I'm going to go out in the world. I got permission. It's pink hair. It's one month breast cancer awareness. We're doing a thing, and I just showed up. I got more compliments from the elderly people. And this was prior to Covid, when everybody dyed their hair, right? Everybody started dying their hair. So I got little old ladies would just touch my hair, and that was a little creepy, but at the same time, they were really intrigued by it. So this idea that maybe it's not, we assumed that it was going to be off putting. We assumed that these things are going to be problematic. I can fully imagine right now if I had arms like yours going into a senior citizen nursing home or something like that and bumping into a retired naval officer or an 80 year old war veteran, and tattoos displayed as being something that would actually be unifying and not something that stands apart. But it's interesting, but it's more about who you do engage with and not who you disengage with. And we assume. We assume too much about who it would disengage with. But I do agree. The hands, the neck, the head, once it becomes sort of a disfiguring thing, something that makes you look not of something I can communicate with, be a problem. Yeah. And you touched on something that's really important there. We do have to get ours approved by our chief to be visible to make sure that they don't. One of the things that you got to remember as a police officer or working in any civil service position, you may have your beliefs and values, but your job is to protect everybody and their beliefs and values. And so, like you said, if you have something that is contradictory to community members, you should probably not be flying that around. Because even if you do a good job of putting your biases to the side, they see that, and then they might still feel that, because we as humans, where most of our judgments are made of people instantly when we see them. So if they see something that can give a biases towards them, they're instantly not going to trust you on that. And so that's exactly what you're talking about there. You just need to be careful with that. And you got to remember that we work for the community, not just part of the community. I remember early on when I was working with our anti crime team, I was working a high crime area, and a captain tells me, hey, you need to go up to Rucker Hill where all our well to do people are and work because they had a burglary. And I was so mad that he's telling me to do that because he said, well, they're the taxpayers. Okay, well, I don't work for taxpayers. I work for citizens of our community, whether they're paying taxes or not. And coming from a poor community. Of course, I got yelled at by the captain for having that view at the time. And this, again, is old school mentality type of thing. But you work for every single person in that community, even if they don't like you. I had a kid wearing a defund the police shirt and black lives matter walk up to me. He's like, you hate me. And I laughed. I'm like, no, why would I hate you? And he says, well, I'm defund the police. Can't you read? I'm like, well, I can't read that well, but, yeah, I can read what your shirt says. He's like, well, don't you hate me? And I'm like, no. And he's like, well, why not? And I said, you realize my job is to protect you. My job is to protect your views so that you can have those, because this country is great. You have your freedom of speech, and if you choose to hate me without knowing me, that's on you. I'd like to get you to know you, but, yeah, I will protect your beliefs for you because that's my job, is to protect you. And he really didn't understand that concept at first. And ultimately, another guy came up because it was at an event came up and was a similar type thing, and that individual actually started standing. Hey, did you know the police, they're here to protect all of ours. And even this officer is not mad that I said, defund the police. And I'm like, we may not agree with it, but my job is to make sure that you can do this in a safe manner. So anything that shows or whatever like that. Yeah, cover it. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So I'm going to narrate for everybody a little bit. So your left arm is right off the bat. The first thing is Batman just comes across really clearly. And the tattoos that I'm looking at are in full, vivid, vibrant color. They're really quite beautiful. Thank you. So I've got Batman on that side. I'm not sure who else I'm seeing. So my inner tharm is actually my favorite superhero. The only reason Batman's out there is because Batman is one of my favorite heroes. But it was my tattoo's favorite. Okay. So he wanted to put it out there. So on the inside of my forum, I have Green Lantern, who is my favorite superhero. Reason he's my favorite superhero is he gets his powers from willpower. And that's why I try to live my life with willpower. You can do anything and you can overcome stuff. So in my opinion, that's why he's the best superhero. On the backside of my arm. I didn't have room for Aquaman completely. So it's kind of an underwater scene with his symbol on the inside of my bicep. Hidden up here is flash. And then on the outside, I have Green Arrow. Okay. And then so high up that I can't pull up here because of the uniform, I have Hawkman, lesser known character, black Adam. Made it a little more now. But again, these are all characters from my life that had impacts on me. It's Hawkman engaged in a struggle with deathstroke, who is a bad guy, and to tie in both of the arms together. And then on this arm, the villain arm. So on your right arm is all the villains. And I just have to say this, though. I had no idea that Green Lantern was there just in talking to you that your arm hadn't turned to that. It's really vivid green. It's beautifully done with sort of that lightning light around him. But also, I love Green Lantern because of the oath, because it's a choice. It's an oath that they take that they're going to protect people. And it's an oath, it's a duty. Okay, sorry. Tell us about the right arm and. All the supervillains and fun story real quick. I don't know if you've seen my ring, but it's a Green Lantern ring. My wife is the coolest woman in the world. She supports all this stuff. And, yeah, so she got me a Green Lantern ring. Green Lantern ring, black with a green Lantern symbol. Nice. So I have reminders of, with willpower, you can do anything everywhere. So on my right arm is my villains. I get crap for this sometimes because they say, well, your right arm is your strong arm. Right? So why would you put your villains on that? I said, well, my heart's on my left side, so why wouldn't you put the Heroes running into the heart, and they're like, oh, it's funny how people get upset by your tattoos. And I'll tell you one, but they're engaging. Yeah. One gets a lot of negative attention, which is pretty funny. So on this arm, I have Catwoman and riddler to match up with Batman. They're two of my favorite villains. One of my all time favorite villains is Sinestro. But on this image, on the inside of the arm to match with Green Lantern, Sinestro is a yellow lantern, and as you can see, he's glowing in yellow, but he's in a blue costume. So what it is, is it's a new 52 image that was drawn by Tyler Kirkham. That's absolutely amazing. So I wanted to use it, but the blue costume in the picture, it's yellow. The whole costume is. But to pay tribute to Sinestro and his very first appearance, we used his very first appearance colors. So it throws a lot of people off because a lot of younger comic people, they know what they know. Well, I don't never seen him that. And then I just send them. Well, here's his first appearance. Oh, that's cool. And then on the inside of my elbow, I have a legion or hall of Doom for the Legion of Doom with the villains gorilla grod up higher with flash to match. Another one of my favorite supervillains is Black Manta. So I have him there. And then up high, you can't see it, but you have, you know, the ultimate villain. And then on the upper part of my bicep, I have kind of a Batman pow to fill space. And then on the backside here is actually Deathstroke's sword with Superman's cape hanging and tarnished from it. So that's what ties the two arms in. So you got Deathstroke's sword over here with Superman's cape kind of tied in. And then that's why Hawkman's engaging with deathstroke. So everything is, you have that chaos that's interwoven between each arm and the Batman pow. Coincidentally, kind of right at the elbow. So it's sort of like above it. Yeah, it's on the tricep. It's not on the elbow. It's just a back of. But it's sort of that. It's unequivocal. You know what that pow is? Batman's going to be around here somewhere. Yeah, it's from the Adam west era Batman. You get that pow that pops on the screen. We were be, that's going to be really cool. So that's what we put on. I pet peeve isn't quite the right way to say it, but one of my idiosyncrasies when I think about tattoos is I'm always interested in tattoos that people have, why they have them. You've given a lot of stories about your tattoos, but it's the intentionality. All of your tattoos sort of meld one into the next, and they inform on the other one. And so that's a really interesting thing. Every now and then, I worry when I see people that are sort of hanging tattoos on themselves like a Christmas tree. You express yourself and you say what you want, but I don't know what you're saying. And that's okay. I can ask you. But I look at it, and so I love that intentionality. I'm planning for a new tattoo. I'm planning to go to New York if the tattoo artist will take me. And it's flowers from my wedding bouquet I want to have. Not the bouquet, but those flowers. And it's an interesting thing, but I've got a couple little tattoos, and they mean stuff to me. They're my little symbols. This will be the first big work ever, and all it has to do is it has to look good with heels. That's the most. She'll do beautiful work. The flowers will be beautiful, but I've got to get the shoes to work with. Yeah, 100% intentionality. And that's every one of my tattoos. My chest is covered, and I do have one marvel character on me. I have wolverine on my chest. I'd show you, but my former chief says I got to keep my uniform on. That's a joke because we did a photo shoot for when I became the recruiting officer, one of our local, my Everett news, he wanted to do an article on me, and so we did a photo shoot, but he also photographs tattoos, so he asked if I would feel comfortable showcasing my tattoos everywhere. And so we did. And then what I gave the chief the picture of was me shirtless and said, this is the photo that we're running the article, so everybody can see all my tattoos. And I'm pretty sure the chief was ready to kill me at that point. But, of course, it was a joke. But, yeah, there is other tattoos. Every single one of my tattoos has a lot of meaning behind it. It's great because a lot of people look at my arms, and they just assume that I'm some dork or geek, and you never know what's inside of somebody. So it's one of those things. There's an interesting correlation to be made by your visual media use in Instagram. Your draw to taking photos of people and your decision to paint a picture on your arms of who you are is everything is very visual and reaching out to people. And I think that's a great message about what body art can be is this. It's not just for you. It's how you want people to see you and how you show up in the world. And I think that's really wonderful. And it's reflected in your car. Yes, it is. And in the work that you do. It is. All right, so I should tell you because you don't know this about me, but I'm in graduate school, and I mention this a little teeny bit every time I podcast because it comes up. And then my producer says, like, stop talking about graduate school because you're just. But this is an interesting. Inspire, people. I'm in graduate school studying communications, and one of the things that you do the moment that you start studying communications is you go off of all social media. You're just like, wow, this is crazy. I've been looking at Instagram observationally a little bit. But I have to tell you that you have completely convinced me to start seeking out Instagram as a way to get some of our messages at my department out, some of our messages here at a duty to act, and some of our messages at my consulting company out. I've really underestimated that as a way to get messages out. So thank you for that, for turning me back into social media person. I really appreciate it. And thank you so much for driving up here, for talking with us, for all the work that you're doing in the community. I love the city of Everett. I love that I have this role as an administrator in Snomish county and get to know all the agencies are all different personalities. But Everett's really in my heart because I just meet person after person like you. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Of course. Hopefully, one of the upcoming podcasts, I'm working with two Everett firefighters who are going to come on and talk about compassion fatigue and long term career people. If I said their names, you'd know them. But if I say their names and then they don't come on the podcast, then I'm a bad, you know, I'll. Make sure they come on and I'll be like, hey, you have to go up there. I was there that the competition, right? It kind of makes them drive. I'm all about that whole wing eating thing for that contest to raise money for my stairclimb. I mean, I don't eat wings. That's the hard part. But I'm all in for organizing that. One of the firefighters didn't eat wings, and I felt bad for him, and you could tell he was really struggling. I think basically his captain said, you're coming out there with us, and I felt so horrible for him. But, yeah, it's important, and I'm glad that you're going to have them on, because just like in our profession, they can speak to you. One of my recruiting aspects that I share with people is hopefully it came across today about how excited I still am in my job. Absolutely. And that's important. I think we do ourselves a disservice in the civil service profession when we complain about everything, right? So, well, God, somebody's seeing this officer or this firefighter complain about everything. If it's so miserable, why would you go into that profession? Don't listen to those people. Come into our professions. It is a great profession, and not only your profession, but your life is what you make of it. So if you want to have a negative life, you're going to have a negative life. If you want to have a positive life, you can have a positive life. But both of our professions are absolutely amazing. I recommend both of them. And so I'm glad to see that you're crossing all the lines here and stuff. There's so many memories over the years with our firefighters from different things. One of our newer officers, she was so excited that she ran into one of her friends, it's an Everett firefighter the other day. And she's like, I finally got a picture with them. And I said, well, you know what we used to do to them when we wanted to see, we'd have somebody who was drunk in the middle of the night, and we'd call them and wake them up because we're having a medical condition, because they're getting to sleep. And then they'd be like, you know, he's drunk. I'm not medically trained, but we used to do pranks on each other all the time like that. Our fire department is really great. I've seen a lot of the firefighter police officer puppets and things like that, but actually, I had an EMT student a couple of classes ago. She's very sweet, very soft spoken. I didn't know her motivation for being in the class. I'm at a community college, so we get all kinds of backgrounds coming together. And I requested a 15 minutes meeting with each of the students and just sit down, like, how's it going? Are you getting what you need? And she told me that she was in the law enforcement. She's actually on law enforcement track, but she decided to take EMT because it was recommended. We have criminal justice, we have firefighter, and we have park ranger training. And then EMT is this common thread that anybody can take, but it's a common thread that's recommended among them. So I learned that she was in this for law, and I thought, okay, well, that's great. And she wasn't really sure about law versus park service, but she said she was just really enjoying the EMT training, and she had told her parents that she felt more engaged with that training than she had with any of her training up until then. So then I'm like. I'm like, all right, we might be converting one from the dark side. And I've got my fingers crossed. And I thought, this is great. And then she was still police, but she was in it to win it with the class. And then she did her ride along with us, and we got a fire. We actually had a house fire. Flames, smoke, people evacuate. Very minor still, but evacuating water flowed and so on like that. And she was on a ride along with us. She was on a ride along with me, as a matter of fact. So we got to the house. I was on the primary crew on the ambulance that we bunked up, and we put her in this position and said, you stay here. You don't go past this line. If you need anything, get back in the ambulance. And then as soon as it was sort of stable, we brought her up as close as we could. And then once we knew the house was aired out, we took her through and toward the house. She said, I got to tell you, I might be changing now. And I was like, why is that? She goes, because the police officer never left the street. And I'm like, all we got to do is burn something down. And we've got. But I have to disagree with you, and I'm going to tell you why. And I don't know if I've shared this with you. Have you been to the national fire Academy? I have not had that privilege. So guess what? I've graduated from the National Fire academy. How is that possible? I was an arson detective. So in policing, especially in bigger agencies, you need us as police officers. We go in and investigate the arsons so she can come into the houses still like that. Like I said, a lot of our professions do crossover stuff. That's really amazing. Even as a police officer, I love when my coworkers, and we have a lot of coworkers, like I said, that are great. We have one of our patrol women, she is combat EMT, and, I mean, she's done amazing stuff out there for people's lives to save. And then also if an officer is injured, that's awesome to have there. So it's great for us all to be kind of cross trained with different things. And believe it or not, Everett fire. I've seen them jump in and help us on several occasions. Either profession you can't go wrong with. No, I think, first of all, if you're motivated toward public service, then let's just pull on that thread, let's unravel. Let's figure out what that makeup is, and then let's find the right one for you and understand that there's so much crossover that it's possible. I grew up in Delaware, and in Delaware, the paramedics are cross trained with state patrol to work on the helicopter. So they're actually trooper medics. This is true in Maryland and Delaware that if you want to be a flight paramedic, you become a state patrol officer. You become a paramedic. You have a flight suit and a shoulder holster and medical bags, and you fly around. One of the last calls that I responded to in Delaware before I went away to paramedic school, was sort of this homicide, double homicide, kind of. And I went in as a volunteer EMT and followed in the paramedics. And we're assessing the patients. And the helicopter crew came in their flight suits, their shoulder hosts with the medical bags. They came up, they're like, what do you need? And we're like, we're good here. And then they ran back out. They got in their helicopter, they flew around, they pinned the guy down, and they arrested the guy basically from the air. That's awesome. And I have to tell you that if anybody's listening to that story, it occurs to me it's 30 years old. I've been telling it that way for a really long time. Don't correct me, because that's my memory. But basically, that's the nature of that work. And so lots and lots of crossovers, and certainly a lot of people that were field nurses in Skaggett county that became paramedics, and a lot of paramedics becoming nurses, physicians, assistants, doctors. And then the prevalence of people marrying and meeting people, the interfaith there with the fire, police, EMS and so on. One more good plug for both of us, too, is a lot of agencies are. I shouldn't say agencies, professions, or careers. They no longer have pension plans. Boeing used to kill us for stealing people away because they had such a good pension plan. They don't even have that pension plan anymore. But as you and I know, there's a great pension plan with the state of Washington. I mentioned earlier that I'm retiring at 52 years old, and so that is a huge benefit to working in civil service with either one of our professions. So there's a lot of good benefits. How can you go wrong? You're helping people. You're showing your tattoos. You get to drive around in a cool mustang with a name. You get to patrol, as well as be a member of a community, serve the community. So good. Yeah. It's such a great job. Yeah, it is. Honestly, public service all the time. Us. All right, well, thank you very much for having me. It was very humbling to be here, and I truly appreciate it. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you.