Latest / APD Pod Squad / Season 2, Episode 19; Sgt. Justin Booth, SPO Travis Pisani, Lt. Brian Hogan with Immersion Academy participants Jackson Knight and Milinda Aguilar Santana, and Hannah Silberman with The History Minute

Transcript

Season 2, Episode 19; Sgt. Justin Booth, SPO Travis Pisani, Lt. Brian Hogan with Immersion Academy participants Jackson Knight and Milinda Aguilar Santana, and Hannah Silberman with The History Minute · APD Pod Squad

0:00
SPEAKER_04: This is the APD Pod Squad.
0:04
SPEAKER_04: I'm Rick Rice, and in this episode, with May being Motorcycle Safety Awareness Month, Sergeant Justin Booth, who is an avid rider, will get to know senior police officer Travis Pistani.
0:14
SPEAKER_04: May 13th was National Third Shift Workers' Day.
0:17
SPEAKER_04: Now technically the APD doesn't exactly have a third shift, but he does work nights, and that's close enough for me to get him to join me.
0:24
SPEAKER_04: Also, Lieutenant Brian Hogan with the Community Engagement Division and two of the participants in the inaugural Immersion Academy, which just wrapped up, Jackson Knight and Melinda Aguilar Santana.
0:36
SPEAKER_04: And Hannah Silberman joins me for a very special history minute.
0:40
SPEAKER_04: On the heels of Police Week and our nation's Memorial Day holiday, we shine a spotlight on two officers from the 1930s who were recently recognized as line of duty deaths and added to the National Law Enforcement Memorial in Washington, D.C.
0:56
SPEAKER_04: We'll discuss that process and how and why they qualified.
1:00
SPEAKER_04: It's all coming up on season two, episode 19 of the APD Pod Squad.
1:06
SPEAKER_04: Getting to know Patrol Division Sergeant Justin Booth pulling him off the road and into the podcasting studio today.
1:13
SPEAKER_04: And thank you for taking some time to join us.
1:15
SPEAKER_04: Of course.
1:15
SPEAKER_04: You were saying it's a busy day out there, right?
1:17
SPEAKER_02: Yes, yes.
1:18
SPEAKER_02: It's been very steady.
1:19
SPEAKER_02: That heat is hitting everybody pretty hard, and uh yeah, it's been been a little buck wild this morning.
1:23
SPEAKER_04: You know, some people, and I had to you know learn this as well, don't quite get how this this world that we're in is seasonal.
1:30
SPEAKER_04: Like the weather gets warm, people get out and start doing things.
1:34
SPEAKER_04: Yes.
1:35
SPEAKER_04: You know?
1:35
SPEAKER_04: Yep, absolutely.
1:36
SPEAKER_04: And then it's almost also like by the end of the summer, they're sick of it being warm and they stop doing the things.
1:42
SPEAKER_04: Like it can slow down like in August.
1:43
SPEAKER_04: Yes, yes, and so it's not just that it's warm out, it's like that they're they've been cooped up during the winter.
1:48
SPEAKER_04: Yep.
1:49
SPEAKER_04: And now they're out and shenanigans ensuing, and right.
1:51
SPEAKER_04: Yep, cabin fever at its fullest.
1:53
SPEAKER_04: All right.
1:53
SPEAKER_04: So we have got several things in common.
1:56
SPEAKER_04: First of all, we both grew up in the 716.
1:58
SPEAKER_04: Yes, sir.
1:58
SPEAKER_04: Uh the Buffalo Area Code, same county, as a matter of fact.
2:01
SPEAKER_04: That's right.
2:02
SPEAKER_04: Niagara County.
2:03
SPEAKER_04: Also, if I were to say I had an old mule and her name was Sal.
2:08
SPEAKER_04: Does that ring a bell?
2:09
SPEAKER_04: Anything there?
2:09
SPEAKER_04: It's an old song?
2:10
SPEAKER_04: It's an old 15 miles on the Erie Canal.
2:15
SPEAKER_04: Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
2:16
SPEAKER_04: So, yeah, your hometown, Lockport, New York.
2:19
SPEAKER_04: You can't get more Erie Canal than a city named Lockport.
2:23
SPEAKER_04: And I'm from just down the Erie Canal.
2:25
SPEAKER_04: Yes.
2:26
SPEAKER_04: Uh closer to the Niagara River in North Tanawanda, New York.
2:28
SPEAKER_04: No one has heard of that one.
2:29
SPEAKER_04: No one's probably heard of yours either.
2:31
SPEAKER_04: Just a couple of small town suburbs of Buffalo, New York.
2:33
SPEAKER_04: Oh, yeah.
2:34
SPEAKER_04: But this is kind of interesting.
2:36
SPEAKER_04: At one point, there were three people from Lockport, New York, as a member of the Asheville Police Department.
2:42
SPEAKER_04: Yes, sir.
2:42
SPEAKER_04: That's correct.
2:43
SPEAKER_04: It's a town of like 20,000.
2:44
SPEAKER_02: It's not big.
2:45
SPEAKER_02: We ended up recruiting each other.
2:47
SPEAKER_02: We all grew up together, went to high school together, played sports together.
2:50
SPEAKER_02: So Matt Woolban was the original one that came down here first, was in the academy before me.
2:55
SPEAKER_02: And it was during uh 08, during the recession.
2:58
SPEAKER_02: Uh law enforcement and teaching jobs were very scarce, if any, up in the Northeast.
3:03
SPEAKER_02: So got a little bit burned out on the college and spending the money that you don't have and going further in the debt, and decided it was time to go ahead and jump.
3:11
SPEAKER_02: And uh fortunately, my friend Matt Woolban said that they were still hiring.
3:15
SPEAKER_02: I applied and I've I've been here since.
3:17
SPEAKER_02: So that was a plan with all three of you guys.
3:20
SPEAKER_02: Well, uh-ish, ish.
3:22
SPEAKER_02: So I went back to visit my family on uh some downtime and I ended up seeing Josh Mindle, who once again we've grown up together, we played sports together, went to high school together, we've always been friends and just happened to catch each other.
3:34
SPEAKER_02: And I explained to him where I got hired at and what I was doing, and it initially he seemed a little maybe reluctant, but um pretty quick on board after we talked a little bit, just because once again, the that area was terrible for any law enforcement jobs, and he came down and we've been here since.
3:51
SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell And Lieutenant uh Josh Mindel, who you referred to, he is still here with the Asheville Police Department.
3:56
SPEAKER_04: So two of the three still apart.
3:58
SPEAKER_04: So was law enforcement kind of definitely what you wanted to do, and then Asheville just happened to be hiring?
4:04
SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Oh, absolutely.
4:05
SPEAKER_02: Absolutely, yeah.
4:06
SPEAKER_02: So I made the mistake of going to college and seeking my criminal justice degree.
4:11
SPEAKER_02: Lessons learned that maybe I should have gone to something else, because all you need is the piece of paper.
4:15
SPEAKER_04: Aaron Ross Powell Yeah, which for s some people that aren't aware is like, yeah, I hadn't thought about maybe being an officer, but you know, I I'm not sure I want to go to college.
4:22
SPEAKER_04: And and I guess that's a good degree to have if you want to further into the world of being a lawyer or something else, or being a professor, or a teacher.
4:30
SPEAKER_04: But not necessary to just be a police officer.
4:32
SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
4:32
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
4:33
SPEAKER_02: You don't have to, but it if you do that, it kind of pigeonholes you.
4:36
SPEAKER_02: So say you get into this career and you decide that 30 years is not for you, you've got nothing really to fall back on.
4:42
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's true.
4:43
SPEAKER_04: So I got a friend that has that degree, and he ended up working for the IRS at one point, which didn't it didn't help him at all either.
4:51
SPEAKER_04: It just gave him, you know, it gave him that piece of paper.
4:53
SPEAKER_04: It just I think what college does, and I forget who said this recently, but I've always felt this.
4:59
SPEAKER_04: It just says to a future employer, I went somewhere for four years and I I mostly showed up on time and did something and completed a task.
5:08
SPEAKER_04: Exactly.
5:08
SPEAKER_04: That's what it means.
5:09
SPEAKER_04: Exactly.
5:09
SPEAKER_04: You know, and now there's obviously specialized degrees where it means more, but so I went to school for communications, right?
5:15
SPEAKER_04: I got a bachelor in arts in communications, a minor in English, and I'm not going to pretend that particular degree means anything.
5:21
SPEAKER_04: It doesn't mean much at all.
5:23
SPEAKER_04: It really doesn't.
5:24
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
5:24
SPEAKER_04: It's it's kind of like that generic degree that gives you the nice basis for a whole lot of things in your life.
5:30
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah.
5:31
SPEAKER_04: You know, but uh you could do anything with it.
5:33
SPEAKER_04: It's like, hey, I got this degree.
5:34
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
5:35
SPEAKER_04: How about it?
5:35
SPEAKER_04: And so that was 08.
5:37
SPEAKER_04: Yes, yes.
5:38
SPEAKER_04: And so when did you start here?
5:39
SPEAKER_04: What was your class with the uh Asheville Police Department, your B L E T class?
5:42
SPEAKER_02: I was class of 05-08.
5:44
SPEAKER_02: So I got hired by the department March 17th, 2008.
5:48
SPEAKER_02: That's a date that has stuck in my head for very long.
5:50
SPEAKER_02: I got sworn August 6th of 2008.
5:54
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
5:54
SPEAKER_02: I actually, during my uh field training phase, uh I want to say it was like the third phase, I ended up breaking my neck.
6:01
SPEAKER_02: I had a compression fracture during a foot chase.
6:03
SPEAKER_02: What is now Lee Garden used to be Lee Walker Heights.
6:06
SPEAKER_02: Uh-huh.
6:06
SPEAKER_02: And we were out there doing some crime prevention and came across somebody else shooting at somebody else.
6:12
SPEAKER_02: Got in a foot chase with them, and uh when I tackled him, I ended up getting a compression fracture in my spine, had to have emergency surgery and everything.
6:21
SPEAKER_02: So getting out on the road was a little bit delayed, but thankfully went through a quick well, I say quick.
6:26
SPEAKER_02: It was like six, six and a half months.
6:28
SPEAKER_02: Decent recovery, was able to get full recovery, get back out on the road and finish field training.
6:32
SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
6:33
SPEAKER_02: Did you know it when it happened, like how bad it was?
6:35
SPEAKER_04: Oh, absolutely.
6:36
SPEAKER_04: I mean, it sometimes people get injured in any way, shape, or form, like sports-wise or otherwise.
6:41
SPEAKER_04: You don't know how bad the injury is.
6:42
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
6:43
SPEAKER_04: And you say to yourself, it didn't hurt that much at the time that I found out this was torn.
6:46
SPEAKER_04: Aaron Ross Powell One of the most painful things I've ever felt.
6:49
SPEAKER_02: It sounds bad.
6:49
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
6:50
SPEAKER_02: Do you play like uh contact sports or anything like that?
6:53
SPEAKER_02: I did.
6:53
SPEAKER_02: I mean I'm 57 now.
6:54
SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell You know what a stinger is, right?
6:56
SPEAKER_02: Oh yeah, oh yeah.
6:57
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
6:57
SPEAKER_02: So it felt like that, except the feeling doesn't come back into your fingers and like just the pain all throughout my arm was just atrocious.
7:05
SPEAKER_04: Aaron Powell I had one in my shoulder really bad one time playing hockey.
7:08
SPEAKER_04: And it for the rest of the night I couldn't feel it and I wondered.
7:11
SPEAKER_04: Yes.
7:11
SPEAKER_04: And we were this close to going, you know, to the ER or whatever it was, and then it came back before I went to bed.
7:16
SPEAKER_04: And I'm like, well, I don't feel like the old chicken winger like I don't it feels normal.
7:21
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
7:22
SPEAKER_04: Everything seems to be in place and it came all back, but in your case, obviously it took more than that.
7:26
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
7:26
SPEAKER_02: Plates and screws on my neck and got a fusion, and you know, here I am 18 late years later and still still plugging along.
7:32
SPEAKER_04: So Sergeant Justin Booth joins us, and it is uh motorcycle safety awareness month.
7:38
SPEAKER_04: It obviously hasn't prevented you from getting on a motorcycle, which a lot of people consider that to be a pretty dangerous leisure activity.
7:45
SPEAKER_04: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
7:45
SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
7:46
SPEAKER_04: But that's why you do it.
7:49
SPEAKER_02: Oddly enough, and anybody who rides knows this that even though there's that air of danger at the same time, it's just there's something so calming in zen about it.
7:58
SPEAKER_02: Just it's just you and the road and that machine, and there's nothing really to protect you, but it's just beautiful.
8:04
SPEAKER_02: It really is.
8:04
SPEAKER_02: There's just something incredible about it that I've always loved.
8:06
SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
8:07
SPEAKER_04: I uh rode for a very short period of time, never able to achieve that level of zen.
8:11
SPEAKER_04: I wasn't good at it.
8:13
SPEAKER_04: Uh you know, I always envisioned exactly what you described, though.
8:16
SPEAKER_04: I always wanted to ride.
8:18
SPEAKER_04: Always.
8:18
SPEAKER_04: Like it was something from like a little kid, the romanticism of motorcycles, right?
8:23
SPEAKER_04: And so I finally pulled the trigger on it, and I just I never got the hang of it.
8:29
SPEAKER_04: Uh uh I now it probably part of it could have been the bike was a little too big.
8:34
SPEAKER_04: I was it was a harley, a hardly soft tail.
8:36
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that was probably it was probably too much bike for a guy that hadn't ridden before.
8:41
SPEAKER_04: Yes.
8:41
SPEAKER_04: And now when I did the classes at A B Tech, I I certainly was not on that type of a bike.
8:47
SPEAKER_04: You know, it was it was one of those one of the smaller ones that typically they train out with.
8:52
SPEAKER_02: Which is what you need.
8:52
SPEAKER_04: It was either a Kawasaki or a Suzuki or it was something, but it was it was tall.
8:57
SPEAKER_02: I had one of the taller ones because I'm a tall guy, but it was also a lot lighter and a lot less powerful.
9:01
SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
9:02
SPEAKER_02: And that's that's something, even though it's when you get on something like that, you're like, ah, this isn't that great, but I mean you you gotta crawl before you walk, you gotta walk before you run.
9:10
SPEAKER_02: It's just learning all that so you don't end up killing yourself or getting seriously injured.
9:15
SPEAKER_04: I tried a couple different times to get out there, and I actually had someone that I I rode with, he owned a local motorcycle shop.
9:22
SPEAKER_04: Remember the one on uh I guess it's on uh South Tunnel, it's right there by the DMV.
9:25
SPEAKER_04: It was a used motorcycle dealership.
9:27
SPEAKER_04: Oh, okay, yeah, yeah.
9:28
SPEAKER_04: Okay, so the when I was in my world of radio, they were an advertiser, and so we were working with them.
9:33
SPEAKER_04: So basically I was riding to kind of endorse them, and so I was riding different bikes, and that would they probably should have given me a different bike for starters.
9:40
SPEAKER_04: So we went one day on uh Riverside Drive right past the waste treatment plant.
9:45
SPEAKER_04: Are you familiar with that road?
9:46
SPEAKER_04: Yes.
9:47
SPEAKER_04: So you you pass that, of course it's on the way out to the training center.
9:50
SPEAKER_04: You know then right after you get past the waste treatment plant, there's an S curve.
9:54
SPEAKER_04: Yes.
9:55
SPEAKER_04: And so it had rained really hard a couple days right before.
9:59
SPEAKER_04: And on that particular S curve that moves to the right, right up on that hill was a was a gravel road.
10:04
SPEAKER_04: And the gravel had been pushed down uh into the onto the asphalt.
10:08
SPEAKER_04: Yep.
10:09
SPEAKER_04: Right?
10:09
SPEAKER_04: And so I was going probably a little too fast for that turn.
10:12
SPEAKER_04: And instead of downshifting, I had this bad habit of just dropping into neutral and just gliding through.
10:17
SPEAKER_04: I don't know.
10:18
SPEAKER_04: I was a new rider, I just wasn't that comfortable in the downshifting thing, and I'm like, I'll just drop it in a neutral and just glide through.
10:23
SPEAKER_04: Bad idea.
10:24
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
10:24
SPEAKER_04: So I did I do that, I have no control of the bike, I skid to a stop, didn't hit anything.
10:30
SPEAKER_04: I got so lucky.
10:33
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I wrenched my wrist just a little bit, scraped up the bike a little bit, but even the damage wasn't too bad.
10:39
SPEAKER_04: And I just basically skidded to a stop and I check everything.
10:44
SPEAKER_04: And I'm I'm like, okay, I think I'm okay, and nothing's hurt.
10:48
SPEAKER_04: Am I here?
10:49
SPEAKER_04: Am I all obese, nothing broken?
10:51
SPEAKER_04: Well, we had to have somebody come into it.
10:52
SPEAKER_04: The bike was not going to work anymore that day, so we had to have someone come out.
10:55
SPEAKER_04: And that was the last time I rode.
10:57
SPEAKER_04: That was the second time I dropped it in a month.
11:00
SPEAKER_04: And I just decided this isn't for me.
11:02
SPEAKER_04: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
11:03
SPEAKER_04: Fair enough.
11:03
SPEAKER_04: But you know, but I got it out of my system at least.
11:05
SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Yeah, that's true.
11:06
SPEAKER_02: That is true.
11:07
SPEAKER_02: It was something I always wanted to do, and I wasn't good at it.
11:09
SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
11:09
SPEAKER_02: I I hate that it it went that way for you, though.
11:12
SPEAKER_02: If if it could have been a different story if you started with something a little bit smaller, just to get the hang of everything first, because a lot of those Harleys, they are big bikes.
11:19
SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
11:20
SPEAKER_02: It's they're it was too powerful for me.
11:22
SPEAKER_04: You know what though?
11:22
SPEAKER_04: I I did I'd like that I tried it.
11:24
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
11:24
SPEAKER_04: And I did it.
11:25
SPEAKER_02: And how long have you been riding?
11:26
SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell Like on the street, I think I started, it was either 19 or 20 years old.
11:31
SPEAKER_02: I got my first actual motorcycle.
11:32
SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
11:32
SPEAKER_04: So you had a dirt bike before that then, probably?
11:34
SPEAKER_02: Uh some trailbikes.
11:35
SPEAKER_02: My grandfather had them actually he was the one that taught me how to ride a motorcycle, actually.
11:39
SPEAKER_02: Um so probably about 11 or 12 years old, I was riding around on little trail bikes and stuff like that.
11:44
SPEAKER_02: So that's why I learned, and that's where my basis come came from.
11:48
SPEAKER_02: And of course, that's where I fell in love with it as well, too.
11:51
SPEAKER_02: And I want to say I was about 19 or 20 years old when I saved up enough money working um and going to college, and I I bought for like 800 bucks, it was a 1979 Honda CBR 550.
12:03
SPEAKER_02: It was a cool little bike.
12:04
SPEAKER_02: It definitely screamed the 70s.
12:06
SPEAKER_02: It was uh brown and black, a little bit of chrome on it, and it had those big old uh long leather seats.
12:13
SPEAKER_02: They almost looked like the old school touring bikes, but the thing sounded like uh a sport bike because it would rev out at like 9200 RPM.
12:20
SPEAKER_02: Um that thing was fun to ride around on.
12:23
SPEAKER_02: So I had that for a few years.
12:25
SPEAKER_02: I ended up um moving down here when I got the job.
12:28
SPEAKER_02: I left that bike there.
12:29
SPEAKER_02: Uh my pop sold it for me, and I ended up getting a 2008 Yamaha VStar.
12:36
SPEAKER_02: I had that for about a decade and maybe a little bit longer than a decade, it crapped out on me.
12:41
SPEAKER_02: I ended up in 2021, I got a brand new the Honda Rebel 1100.
12:46
SPEAKER_02: All right.
12:46
SPEAKER_02: So something with a bigger engine, more power, but something that's not just insane.
12:53
SPEAKER_02: Umce again, I don't want I want a bike that can do something absolutely crazy where I end up testing it and then ending up you know getting hurt.
13:01
SPEAKER_02: Nobody buys a 1,000cc engine bike and doesn't mess with it.
13:04
SPEAKER_02: You know what I mean?
13:05
SPEAKER_02: So um I got something that was reliable, nice, fun to ride, and something that I know when I get on and I turn it on, it's gonna fire up every time for me.
13:13
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
13:14
SPEAKER_04: There's that aspect too, right?
13:15
SPEAKER_04: Oh, yeah.
13:15
SPEAKER_04: So you've been riding a long time, right?
13:17
SPEAKER_04: Dirt bikes and street bikes, with May being motorcycle safety awareness month.
13:23
SPEAKER_04: Is there something that you have learned that you'd like to pass along from your years of experience that it's not in the textbooks?
13:30
SPEAKER_02: Well, it probably sums up a lot of what you're taught already.
13:34
SPEAKER_02: And the best thing that I've um learned is just you have to be a defensive driver.
13:39
SPEAKER_02: Like assume everybody's trying to kill you, and I don't mean that to be like dark or cynical.
13:43
SPEAKER_02: It's just folks get distracted, they're not paying attention, they don't expect to see a motorcycle because it's mostly cars on the road, and you don't want to become a statistic, so the best thing you can do is you can't control what others do.
13:56
SPEAKER_02: You can only control what you do, so put yourself in a good position when you're, you know, riding on the roads.
14:01
SPEAKER_02: And that means if having to adjust from lane to lane or where you're in specifically inside the lane, whether middle right or left.
14:07
SPEAKER_02: And the only other thing is once again, it comes back to the gear is uh dress for the uh the slide, not the ride, is is one of the best sayings that I've ever heard, and it's true.
14:16
SPEAKER_02: It's just like anything else when we come here.
14:18
SPEAKER_02: You're you're gonna train and prep for the worst, right?
14:21
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
14:21
SPEAKER_02: And you don't want to be in shorts and a flip-flop if you go down.
14:24
SPEAKER_02: So find good gear, don't get cheap gear, because you'll end up buying twice.
14:28
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
14:28
SPEAKER_02: I've learned that as well, too.
14:30
SPEAKER_02: And find something that you're gonna be comfortable as well, because if you're not comfortable in it, you're not gonna wear it, and that doesn't help you either.
14:38
SPEAKER_04: What I learned, the one thing they said was be predictable.
14:40
SPEAKER_04: Yes.
14:41
SPEAKER_04: It's like, you know, don't don't make any sudden movements, but you see that a lot with some of these riders.
14:45
SPEAKER_04: There's iggin, there's zaggin.
14:47
SPEAKER_02: And then you're like, man, you're just asking for it.
14:50
SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
14:50
SPEAKER_02: Well, and a lot of those uh not all, but a lot of times you see that it's it's younger riders that are thrill seeking and I don't know, just maybe don't understand the concept of what what their actions can really cause.
15:01
SPEAKER_02: And I've got to see it for years and years of the outcome of making poor decisions like that.
15:07
SPEAKER_02: And I try to stress to folks that it you know you can do something 99 out of a hundred times and get it, you know, be fine ninety-nine times.
15:15
SPEAKER_02: All it takes is that one time for something to go wrong.
15:17
SPEAKER_02: And, you know, you seriously hurt yourself, lose your life, hurt, kill somebody else, you know.
15:22
SPEAKER_04: APD used to have a motorcycle unit.
15:24
SPEAKER_04: Yes.
15:24
SPEAKER_04: Uh I know it's a very expensive thing.
15:26
SPEAKER_04: The motorcycles themselves are expensive.
15:28
SPEAKER_04: Uh many times are Harley Davidson's, and they're all stocked up with all the all the gadgets, right?
15:34
SPEAKER_04: Scott Pruitt, I think, was probably the last one we've got.
15:36
SPEAKER_02: We still have uh Scott Fry, Sergeant Scott Fry's.
15:38
SPEAKER_02: Scott, I'm sorry, Scott Fry.
15:40
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
15:40
SPEAKER_02: So Scott Fry.
15:41
SPEAKER_02: Sergeant Pruitt was one as well, too.
15:43
SPEAKER_02: Okay, so it's okay.
15:44
SPEAKER_02: Retired Deputy Chief Yelton was also certified.
15:48
SPEAKER_02: And I think that's it as of right now.
15:50
SPEAKER_02: I could be missing somebody, and I'm sorry if I am, but I think that's who we have as of right now.
15:53
SPEAKER_04: Aaron Ross Powell The one thing I've learned uh from watching some of these uh these TV shows about like they'll show these guys going through the course to get certified.
16:01
SPEAKER_04: Some of these riders that are get certified for like motorcycle police, that is some difficult stuff, man.
16:07
SPEAKER_02: You have gotta be good.
16:08
SPEAKER_02: You talk to anyone that's gone through the program, it's one of the toughest trainings that you can go through.
16:14
SPEAKER_02: You're gonna get messed up, you're gonna dump the bike several times, you're gonna be frustrated, um, just like the other officers that I've talked to over the years, it's just you stick with it.
16:22
SPEAKER_02: Um it's something that I wish I'd gone through, but at the same time, maybe I don't know, maybe it would have made it miserable for me.
16:31
SPEAKER_04: All right, changing the subject, just a little bit a question I ask everyone that sits in that chair, one thing that most people don't know about you.
16:38
SPEAKER_04: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
16:39
SPEAKER_02: I do got one thing.
16:39
SPEAKER_02: I mean, just coming back to funny enough, just places that you live before that did spark one off that most don't know is I actually was born in Dallas, Texas.
16:46
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
16:47
SPEAKER_02: Um my father and I moved up to Western New York when I was about three years old.
16:51
SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell So you don't remember Dallas at all, I wouldn't imagine.
16:53
SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
16:53
SPEAKER_02: Not at all.
16:54
SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
16:56
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, you can't be a Cowboys fan, though, at least, right?
16:58
SPEAKER_04: You gotta guess.
16:59
SPEAKER_04: Go Bills.
17:00
SPEAKER_07: Right.
17:01
SPEAKER_04: So what made the move uh what turned the move from Dallas to Buffalo?
17:04
SPEAKER_04: What was part of that, what precipitated that move?
17:06
SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.
17:06
SPEAKER_02: So that's actually where all my family's at, uh grandparents, um everybody, uh all my mom's side of the family as well, and my dad's side of the family for the most part.
17:16
SPEAKER_02: I was born in 84, so we're talking about 87-ish uh is when we moved back, and there was a a pretty decent sized boom for construction and carpentry, which is what my father does.
17:25
SPEAKER_02: So amongst him, he was a single father at the time.
17:29
SPEAKER_02: Um and my mother were split.
17:31
SPEAKER_02: So uh he also needed help with raising me.
17:34
SPEAKER_02: Well, he could work as well, uh, make money for us and everything like that.
17:38
SPEAKER_02: So I very much got to spend a lot of time with my grandparents growing up, incredible people.
17:43
SPEAKER_02: I consider them my second parents, and and I'm good lord, I know how lucky I am to have been in their lives and have them in mine.
17:50
SPEAKER_02: Very, very incredible people.
17:52
SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell What you say those years, 84, 87.
17:55
SPEAKER_04: God, I graduated high school in 86.
17:59
SPEAKER_02: It's it's times like this that I feel especially happy.
18:02
SPEAKER_02: I don't mean to dangle that in your face, I'm sorry.
18:05
SPEAKER_04: As soon as you said 84, I'm like, oh, born in high school when he was born.
18:12
SPEAKER_04: Oh man.
18:12
SPEAKER_04: The 80s were great, though.
18:14
SPEAKER_04: I I did enjoy the eighties.
18:15
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah.
18:16
SPEAKER_04: But you you got to enjoy, I guess you were uh coming to age in like the early 2000s, I guess, huh?
18:22
SPEAKER_02: Uh so the nineties and early two thousands, yeah.
18:25
SPEAKER_02: So I graduated high school, started in ninety eight, graduated in 02.
18:29
SPEAKER_04: All right.
18:30
SPEAKER_02: So I got I got to have a good taste of the nineties, which oh my God, beloved, love it.
18:35
SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Oh, 90s were good, too.
18:37
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, nineties were good.
18:38
SPEAKER_04: So you remember then, of course, the big panic, the uh Y2K.
18:41
SPEAKER_04: Oh my god, yeah.
18:42
SPEAKER_04: Everybody So you know, every generation seems to have its own version of panic.
18:46
SPEAKER_04: Of course, we have COVID and other different things.
18:48
SPEAKER_04: For some people that are too young to remember, 1999 turning into 2000, they thought everything would stop working.
18:55
SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell Yes, yes.
18:56
SPEAKER_02: They thought that no computers or any of the digital age that they were pretty heavy into at that point for controlling a lot of the stuff that was just completely going to crash because it wouldn't understand how to change into the new millennium.
19:07
SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
19:07
SPEAKER_02: All the ones and zeros.
19:08
SPEAKER_04: And so apparently some genius didn't write that into the code like way back when like, oh crap, we didn't think we'd be around that long or something.
19:15
SPEAKER_04: I don't know.
19:16
SPEAKER_04: I mean, it was even to the point where they recommended people not go out for New Year's Eve because they didn't know the street lights would work.
19:22
SPEAKER_04: Exactly.
19:23
SPEAKER_04: Trevor Burrus It was like everything was supposed to not work, and it turned out everything was fine.
19:28
SPEAKER_04: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
19:28
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
19:28
SPEAKER_04: It was a big nothing burger.
19:31
SPEAKER_04: A single thing that happened.
19:32
SPEAKER_04: It was a great panic button, I'll tell you what.
19:35
SPEAKER_04: Everyone freaked out completely.
19:36
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
19:37
SPEAKER_02: It was kind of disappointing, but it was a little bit.
19:40
SPEAKER_02: We expect something that big and it doesn't happen.
19:42
SPEAKER_04: We did a radio station giveaway of a Volkswagen bug and called it the Y2K bug.
19:46
SPEAKER_04: It was kind of just you know playing into it.
19:48
SPEAKER_04: It was it was just kind of fun.
19:49
SPEAKER_04: That's what I'm saying.
19:49
SPEAKER_04: No, that thing did break down uh not long after it well, because it was like a 1977 Volkswagen Beetle or something.
19:56
SPEAKER_04: Right?
19:56
SPEAKER_04: And so you couldn't keep those things running forever.
19:59
SPEAKER_04: So you got to get back on the road, I imagine, right?
20:01
SPEAKER_04: Yes, sir.
20:02
SPEAKER_04: Okay, so Motorcycle Safety Awareness Month, the month of May.
20:05
SPEAKER_02: Wear your helmet.
20:06
SPEAKER_02: Anything else?
20:07
SPEAKER_02: Dress for the slide, not the ride.
20:08
SPEAKER_02: That's the biggest thing that always sticks with me whenever I go riding.
20:11
SPEAKER_04: There we go.
20:12
SPEAKER_04: All right.
20:12
SPEAKER_04: Sergeant Justin Booth, thank you for joining me today.
20:14
SPEAKER_04: Yes, sir.
20:14
SPEAKER_04: Happy to.
20:15
SPEAKER_04: Appreciate you.
20:15
SPEAKER_04: Go Bills.
20:16
SPEAKER_04: Go Bills.
20:18
SPEAKER_04: With me now, Senior Police Officer Travis Pisani.
20:21
SPEAKER_04: Thanks for joining me.
20:22
SPEAKER_04: Thanks for having me.
20:23
SPEAKER_04: Coordinating this wasn't as easy, maybe as it could have been with somebody else, but that's because of the shift you work, which is actually why you're here, right?
20:30
SPEAKER_04: It is.
20:30
SPEAKER_04: Because you work nights.
20:31
SPEAKER_04: The night shift.
20:32
SPEAKER_04: The Asheville Police Department essentially has two shifts days and nights.
20:38
SPEAKER_04: And May 13th was National Third Shift Day.
20:41
SPEAKER_04: Now, technically our night shift is longer than a third shift would be, which would be eight hours.
20:47
SPEAKER_04: Ours is twelve hours, but close enough for our purposes here.
20:50
SPEAKER_04: So we'll get into that a little bit coming up.
20:52
SPEAKER_04: The pros, the cons of working nights.
20:55
SPEAKER_04: But first, the origin story.
20:56
SPEAKER_04: Where was Senior Police Officer Travis Pisani born?
20:59
SPEAKER_04: I was born in Kearney, New Jersey.
21:01
SPEAKER_04: Kearney, New Jersey?
21:02
SPEAKER_03: Mm-hmm.
21:03
SPEAKER_04: Named after like the people that do carnivals?
21:05
SPEAKER_04: Uh named after General Philip Kearney.
21:07
SPEAKER_04: I was not expecting that.
21:09
SPEAKER_04: That's an interesting factoid.
21:10
SPEAKER_04: So who was General Philip Kearney, do you know?
21:13
SPEAKER_03: Uh I'm not really a Civil War buff necessarily, but I've recently been interested in reading about it, and I know he was a big part of the Civil War.
21:19
SPEAKER_03: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
21:20
SPEAKER_03: That's cool.
21:20
SPEAKER_04: See, I am a Civil War buff, but I'm not familiar with that name.
21:22
SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Yeah, he was a one-armed general.
21:24
SPEAKER_03: Um I think he died in Virginia in 1862.
21:27
SPEAKER_03: Um but yeah, Carney, New Jersey.
21:29
SPEAKER_03: He was born in that area in New Jersey City or whatever, and he had like a family house there.
21:34
SPEAKER_03: And I'm not too sure of the origins of that, but I know that that's the town is named after him.
21:39
SPEAKER_04: Aaron Ross Powell, so Carney High School was your high school?
21:41
SPEAKER_04: I was actually homeschooled.
21:42
SPEAKER_04: Oh, okay.
21:43
SPEAKER_04: So not Kearney High School.
21:44
SPEAKER_04: Is there a Kearney High School?
21:45
SPEAKER_04: There is a Carney High.
21:46
SPEAKER_04: They've got to take a little bit of ribbing, don't they?
21:48
SPEAKER_04: Uh because you know that's what they call the carnival folks.
21:50
SPEAKER_04: They're the Carneys.
21:51
SPEAKER_04: The people that work, like they travel with the carn carnivals, they're the ones that kind of work all the stuff behind the scenes, those are carnies.
21:56
SPEAKER_04: So I just didn't know if that I'm not sure.
21:58
SPEAKER_03: I mean they're the Cardinals, I believe.
22:00
SPEAKER_04: Both my case.
22:01
SPEAKER_04: Yep.
22:01
SPEAKER_04: Yep.
22:02
SPEAKER_04: Oh my, this keeps getting better and better all the time.
22:05
SPEAKER_04: But that's awesome.
22:05
SPEAKER_04: What part of New Jersey is that?
22:07
SPEAKER_04: That's North Jersey, right outside of Newark.
22:08
SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Okay.
22:09
SPEAKER_03: So what brought you down here?
22:10
SPEAKER_03: Well, my wife needed a kidney transplant, and that was kind of the main focus.
22:15
SPEAKER_03: But also, you know, things were getting real expensive in New York and it was getting hard to live off of one income.
22:20
SPEAKER_03: And then I had a brother that moved to Candler back in like 2015.
22:23
SPEAKER_04: Aaron Powell Oh, so you're a little bit familiar with the area?
22:26
SPEAKER_04: He probably bragged on it a little bit, said we all this is the great outdoors here and everything like that.
22:30
SPEAKER_03: You know, he told me a little bit about how it is geographically, um, with a much more mild winter.
22:35
SPEAKER_03: And you know, I was at the time living in the Hudson Valley, New York, which is geographically pretty indistinguishable from this.
22:42
SPEAKER_03: Uh, and that's, you know, so it was an easy transition.
22:45
SPEAKER_03: It's a little colder up there, though.
22:46
SPEAKER_03: I think a lot more snow, and yeah, um definitely a different climate.
22:52
SPEAKER_03: But we still, you know, as you know, it still gets pretty cold here in Nashville, which is nice.
22:55
SPEAKER_04: It does.
22:55
SPEAKER_04: I almost took a job in that general area, Poughkeepsie, New York, which isn't too far from there at one point.
23:01
SPEAKER_04: Actually, when I was deciding between two jobs, it was Asheville and Poughkeepsie.
23:05
SPEAKER_04: At the time I was living in Fayetteville, and that was 1999.
23:08
SPEAKER_04: And I interviewed here, liked it.
23:10
SPEAKER_04: I had an interview scheduled for Poughkeepsie, and I'm just like, you know what?
23:14
SPEAKER_03: I think we're just gonna go to Asheville and I actually lived in Highland, New York, right outside of Poughkeepsie, over at Kingston Rhine Cliff Bridge, and I was working at an architectural lighting company around the time that we started to look at North Carolina seriously.
23:26
SPEAKER_04: Okay.
23:27
SPEAKER_04: So law enforcement, where did that come from?
23:28
SPEAKER_04: Where did your interest come from?
23:30
SPEAKER_03: Uh when I was really young, um, I met a Kearney cop.
23:35
SPEAKER_03: Uh I think his name was McCaffrey, and we did like a bike ride along through the Dare program, and I had been interested.
23:42
SPEAKER_03: I kind of waned on the idea of being a police officer for a while and had some knee injuries and things, but then when I came here, I, you know, was talking to my older brother about it, and he spoke highly of Asheville PD officers, and I thought, well, let me give it a shot.
23:56
SPEAKER_03: I was, you know, 30 when I got into it, so a little bit later than normal.
23:59
SPEAKER_04: Aaron Powell And you've been with the APD how many years?
24:02
SPEAKER_03: Next month will be eight years.
24:03
SPEAKER_03: Eight years.
24:04
SPEAKER_04: Always on nights?
24:05
SPEAKER_04: Always on nights.
24:06
SPEAKER_04: Was that my choice?
24:07
SPEAKER_04: Or is that just where you landed?
24:09
SPEAKER_03: Well, I landed there initially and enjoyed it, and then it's been more of a conscious decision over the past several years.
24:15
SPEAKER_03: So you like it?
24:16
SPEAKER_03: Uh parts of it.
24:17
SPEAKER_03: It can be it can be a challenge in some ways, but I do like what I believe it offers me, which is to be a little bit more of a mentor to the newer people in their career.
24:26
SPEAKER_03: And then some of the just challenging aspects of the schedule, um, I've found some relative success navigating them.
24:34
SPEAKER_03: And I like to kind of share that knowledge with the newer people who like the work that's on nights.
24:38
SPEAKER_04: Senior police officer Travis Pisani joins me right now.
24:41
SPEAKER_04: He is one of our nights officers, and we're celebrating third shift day, which was May 13th, which is kind of about the same timeframe.
24:48
SPEAKER_04: And so now growing up and even anytime before you did law enforcement, did you do any jobs that was overnights that was that late?
24:55
SPEAKER_04: Or was this your first kind of jump into it?
24:58
SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell So I had a job where I worked till like two in the morning.
25:01
SPEAKER_03: So not really night shift, kind of like a third shift.
25:03
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
25:04
SPEAKER_03: Um and then a few odd jobs here and there.
25:06
SPEAKER_03: Never like a full, completely overnight job like this, but something that I had, you know, a little bit of familiarity with um from when I was younger.
25:14
SPEAKER_04: Aaron Powell Let's talk pros and cons of working overnights.
25:18
SPEAKER_04: Now uh there's I I can definitely see the pros, right?
25:22
SPEAKER_04: Especially on your days off and how that works uh that way.
25:25
SPEAKER_04: But the cons are obvious.
25:27
SPEAKER_04: Sleep schedules, right?
25:28
SPEAKER_04: I so I've never had a job that had me working overnights, at least not for any stretch of time, but I did do, you know, morning radio, which had me waking up in the middle of the night, and which is I guess different.
25:38
SPEAKER_04: But I was up at you know three at work by four.
25:42
SPEAKER_04: And once I was there, I was fine, but the getting up part was the worst.
25:47
SPEAKER_04: Do you sleep like a day like today where you're going to work?
25:51
SPEAKER_04: Do you treat that like another day and you just kind of you've slept from the night before, or do you like sleep in the afternoon leading right up to it?
25:57
SPEAKER_03: So I've adopted the like pivot to a day shift schedule when you're off, just out of necessity, because you know, I have a son that's in high school, my wife has things, doctor's appointments, everything else.
26:08
SPEAKER_03: Um they say it's not really good to do that, but I tried to, you know, work and sleep on the same schedule when I was off or not, and it just didn't really go over too well.
26:18
SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
26:19
SPEAKER_03: Um, so what I do is on my first day, like tonight, I go to bed pretty early, like whenever my wife goes to sleep the night before, and I got up at nine o'clock this morning.
26:28
SPEAKER_03: So I'll just be up until I get off tomorrow.
26:32
SPEAKER_03: I'll usually lay down when I take get home, get a sh and take a shower, and go to bed around 7 30 in the morning.
26:37
SPEAKER_03: And then tomorrow being an off day, I'll probably get up around 11 30 noon, handle like the business of the day, stuff that needs to happen, and just kind of rock and roll.
26:47
SPEAKER_03: On the days that I work overnight and then have to go back into work, I try to sleep till at least two o'clock.
26:52
SPEAKER_03: Sometimes it's sometimes they're easier than others.
26:55
SPEAKER_03: But that's what I do.
26:56
SPEAKER_03: You know, it can be challenging, it's tough.
26:58
SPEAKER_03: There's a lot of like not a lot of sleep sometimes, but uh it's just I think necessary to continue to be a married person with a son and work nights.
27:08
SPEAKER_04: There's all that stuff, right?
27:09
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
27:09
SPEAKER_04: So now for the people that are listening that are officers, they get your schedule and they understand how it works.
27:15
SPEAKER_04: But for people that don't, our officers work generally on two days and then off two and then on three.
27:22
SPEAKER_04: Is that how it works?
27:22
SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell So it would be every other weekend that we'd work.
27:24
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
27:25
SPEAKER_03: And that weekend would be a Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
27:27
SPEAKER_03: So like this week, I'm working Monday, Tuesday, off Wednesday, Thursday, and then I'm on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then it switches next week.
27:34
SPEAKER_04: Aaron Powell That's got to be difficult on the sleep schedule, though, when your body knows to rest and when it knows not to be rested.
27:39
SPEAKER_04: Do you find yourself being a little sleepy sometimes, like in the middle of the night?
27:42
SPEAKER_03: Aaron Powell Yeah, I picked up a crippling caffeine addiction.
27:45
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that'll do it.
27:46
SPEAKER_03: Not good.
27:47
SPEAKER_03: I've tried to cut back on it, but you know, coffee, energy drinks, whenever it's necessary.
27:51
SPEAKER_03: Certainly not the healthiest way to go about it, but like I said, it's it becomes a sacrifice the longer you're on it.
27:56
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
27:57
SPEAKER_03: Um and I would think that that would fall into one of the cons of the position.
28:00
SPEAKER_04: What time does that happen generally?
28:02
SPEAKER_04: What's the what time of the is it the is it two, is it three?
28:05
SPEAKER_04: Is it four when you need that jolt?
28:08
SPEAKER_03: It depends.
28:09
SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, it's depend if it's busier, you kind of just you you stay just doing what you're doing.
28:14
SPEAKER_03: For me, around uh like like this morning I got up at 9 a.m.
28:18
SPEAKER_03: So by midnight I'm gonna start to feel it.
28:21
SPEAKER_03: I would say usually between two and three o'clock, if we have a little bit of a lull in the calls for service, it can be it can be tough.
28:28
SPEAKER_03: You know, at somebody with my experience level though, I would say like it would be incumbent upon me to make those necessary adjustments.
28:33
SPEAKER_03: I've just this particular sleep schedule that I've I've adopted is what I found to work the best with what you know my wife needs of me, my son needs of me, and what APD needs of me.
28:42
SPEAKER_03: So um, but I wouldn't recommend it to everybody.
28:45
SPEAKER_03: It can be a bit extreme.
28:46
SPEAKER_04: So sleep schedule that be the major con, you would say, probably.
28:49
SPEAKER_04: Uh yeah, I would say so.
28:50
SPEAKER_04: Okay.
28:51
SPEAKER_04: So how about the pros?
28:52
SPEAKER_04: What do you like about it?
28:52
SPEAKER_03: Well, there's a lot less traffic at a certain way.
28:54
SPEAKER_04: That's the truth.
28:55
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
28:56
SPEAKER_03: Um the roads are pretty empty at that hour.
28:59
SPEAKER_03: And we also have, I would say, and again, I've never worked days, so it's hard for me to really say that it's to compare and contrast it, but pretty regularly we have the need for immediate law enforcement intervention type stuff.
29:10
SPEAKER_03: So I would say that both makes me old and keeps me young.
29:13
SPEAKER_03: Um but when you're trying to, you know, take on a mentor role with the newer officers, I find that there's a need for people who have been around the block and kind of know what to do.
29:22
SPEAKER_03: So that's what kind of satiates me and keeps me coming back for more on nights.
29:26
SPEAKER_04: So are you an FTO?
29:27
SPEAKER_04: I am.
29:27
SPEAKER_04: Okay.
29:28
SPEAKER_04: Field training officer.
29:29
SPEAKER_04: Do you got one now?
29:30
SPEAKER_03: Uh not yet, but I'm getting one on May twenty-eighth.
29:33
SPEAKER_03: Aaron Ross Powell Okay.
29:33
SPEAKER_04: So that's the ones that are they're gonna go solo in July approximately, I guess those.
29:37
SPEAKER_03: This one's a little bit behind, but um I think so.
29:40
SPEAKER_03: The plan is for me to have him end of May, early June for phase three.
29:44
SPEAKER_04: So who was your FTO back in the day?
29:47
SPEAKER_03: Uh my first FTO was Sergeant Booth.
29:50
SPEAKER_04: Aaron Powell Really?
29:50
SPEAKER_04: That's a cool coincidence.
29:51
SPEAKER_04: I I did not know that.
29:52
SPEAKER_04: He is also on this particular podcast.
29:55
SPEAKER_03: Yep.
29:56
SPEAKER_03: He was my phase one field training officer.
29:58
SPEAKER_03: Awesome.
30:00
SPEAKER_03: My phase two, I had Sergeant Aubrey Wood and Trey Rubel.
30:03
SPEAKER_03: All right.
30:04
SPEAKER_03: Uh phase three would have been John Derrick and Matt Woollibin, and then phase four, I actually had Mercedes Chavez.
30:10
SPEAKER_04: All right.
30:10
SPEAKER_04: Phase four.
30:11
SPEAKER_04: Yep.
30:11
SPEAKER_04: So you mentioned Matt as one of your FTOs and also Sergeant Booth, and they're from the same town of Lockport, New York, which just makes this a whole series of interesting coincidences.
30:22
SPEAKER_03: I think former Sergeant Ward was also from that same area.
30:25
SPEAKER_03: Really?
30:25
SPEAKER_03: Ray Ward, yep.
30:26
SPEAKER_03: There's some there's some buffalo down here.
30:28
SPEAKER_03: There's a little bit of buffalo down here.
30:30
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I see your uh your Buffalo Bills.
30:33
SPEAKER_04: Oh my Bills.
30:34
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I I'm also from Buffalo.
30:36
SPEAKER_04: Anyone that knows me knows that.
30:37
SPEAKER_04: I'm pretty obnoxious about it generally.
30:38
SPEAKER_04: Uh so I I've tried to consciously not bring it up as often.
30:42
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I'm a Jets fan, so there's some rivalry going on here.
30:44
SPEAKER_04: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
30:45
SPEAKER_04: There really isn't, though, because Yeah, I guess so.
30:49
SPEAKER_04: I'm just kidding.
30:50
SPEAKER_04: You guys have had your your years too.
30:51
SPEAKER_04: Heck, you you've got a Super Bowl and we don't.
30:53
SPEAKER_04: So it was back a ways.
30:55
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it was back when the Dead Sea was still sick.
30:57
SPEAKER_04: It's true.
30:58
SPEAKER_04: It's but a bump.
30:59
SPEAKER_04: Joe Namath years guaranteed the win.
31:01
SPEAKER_04: Uh but hey, you guys had three uh number one draft picks this year, so we'll see what happens with them.
31:05
SPEAKER_04: Are you are you kind of a big fan, diehard?
31:07
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I'm a I'm a like a long-suffering Jets fan since I'd say the early 90s.
31:11
SPEAKER_03: And you know, the weird thing is my father's a big Rams fan, has been forever.
31:16
SPEAKER_03: And so growing up, I had the choice between being a Rams fan, like him, or the Jets or the Giants, and I picked the Jets.
31:23
SPEAKER_03: So not very smart on my part.
31:24
SPEAKER_03: Well, it's gotten to the point now with the way the Jets are as an organization where even fans of rival teams like the Bills, the Patriots, the Dolphins, feel sorry for me and they don't really make fun of me as much.
31:37
SPEAKER_03: So that's been, you know, kind of nice uh because we've been as a franchise, the Jets have been so inept for so long.
31:43
SPEAKER_03: But uh yeah, I mean, I don't know.
31:44
SPEAKER_03: I'm with them.
31:45
SPEAKER_03: I can't, you know, I've tried to not root for them.
31:48
SPEAKER_03: It's just kind of baked into the Pizzani cake at this point.
31:50
SPEAKER_04: You know what?
31:51
SPEAKER_04: It's something to be said for loyalty, though.
31:53
SPEAKER_04: I mean, when it does eventually pay off, how glorious is that, right?
31:56
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
31:57
SPEAKER_04: That day.
31:57
SPEAKER_04: So you know that uh detective Sean Parker, also a Jets fan?
32:00
SPEAKER_04: I did know that.
32:01
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, there's not many of us.
32:02
SPEAKER_03: I'm trying to get Sergeant Schope onto the Jets fandom.
32:05
SPEAKER_03: He's resisting, but I think I might break him at some point.
32:08
SPEAKER_04: I think there's a few other people from here, from the general Jersey area.
32:12
SPEAKER_04: Uh matter of fact, from last week's podcast, uh John Perez, although he is not a Jets or Giants, he's from New Jersey as well, originally.
32:20
SPEAKER_04: That I did not know.
32:21
SPEAKER_04: And then he moved down to uh Miami for like his uh South Florida for his formative years, but his parents, when they immigrated from Cuba, moved to New Jersey.
32:29
SPEAKER_04: And so he's uh originally a Jersey guy, but I don't think that is his I know he's a big Carolina Hurricanes guy.
32:36
SPEAKER_04: So his his NFL team, I don't think we got into it talking about that.
32:39
SPEAKER_03: Any other sports you got on your teams there?
32:40
SPEAKER_03: I'm a huge Knicks fan, and they're playing tonight um in the Eastern Conference Finals, so I'm hoping.
32:45
SPEAKER_03: But again, just like the Jets, I'm snake bitten with them as well.
32:48
SPEAKER_03: So I'm in the I'll believe it when I see it category.
32:51
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
32:51
SPEAKER_03: But they are playing well, they have a really strong bench, so we'll see what happens.
32:55
SPEAKER_03: I know um they're playing Cleveland, which I think is a good good matchup for the Knicks, and you know, I'm just hopeful.
33:02
SPEAKER_04: I guess that would be maybe another con of working the night shift is if you are a sports fan and your team makes it to say the playoffs or something or just regular games, it makes it tough to catch the games.
33:11
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, but nowadays, you know, everything like is recorded and what I try to do is I try to just not check.
33:16
SPEAKER_03: I mean it's easier than that's tough to do.
33:19
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
33:19
SPEAKER_03: I think if my team ever played in a meaningful game, their season's usually over before, you know, Halloween.
33:26
SPEAKER_03: That's true.
33:27
SPEAKER_03: Um uh it might be more difficult, but since they've been so bad for so long, I found it pretty easy to not watch them.
33:34
SPEAKER_04: Well, if you've got a D VR or something where you can tape it and you can avoid it.
33:38
SPEAKER_04: I did that for the longest time.
33:39
SPEAKER_04: If I had other stuff going on, I would just set the DVR and tell my whole universe not to tell me anything and then get home and watch it and pretend like it's live.
33:47
SPEAKER_04: That that works once in a while.
33:48
SPEAKER_03: I was working the night that Aaron Rodgers tore his Achilles on like the fourth play.
33:52
SPEAKER_04: Oh, yeah.
33:53
SPEAKER_03: And I had you know said maybe a couple months before that to a buddy of mine, I was like, watch what's gonna happen, he's gonna break his leg or something, just because that's that's the New York Jets luck.
34:00
SPEAKER_03: Wasn't that against the Bills?
34:01
SPEAKER_03: It was.
34:03
SPEAKER_03: Uh sure enough, uh, my phone started going off, and we were pretty busy that night, and I was not watching it because I was working.
34:09
SPEAKER_03: That was a tough day to be a Jets fan, but I I can't say that it caught me off guard.
34:13
SPEAKER_03: I was expecting it.
34:14
SPEAKER_04: Senior police officer Travis Pisani, just one more thing before you go.
34:17
SPEAKER_04: So a question we ask everybody.
34:20
SPEAKER_04: One thing that most people do not know about you.
34:25
SPEAKER_04: I know.
34:25
SPEAKER_04: Can I say that I was homeschooled from the fourth grade?
34:28
SPEAKER_04: Well, if people don't know, do they know?
34:30
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I would think I would think most people maybe don't know that.
34:33
SPEAKER_03: Some people that are in my atmosphere would know that.
34:36
SPEAKER_03: Um but yeah, I was homeschooled from the fourth grade on.
34:39
SPEAKER_03: Um I have no college.
34:40
SPEAKER_03: So I would say this might be going on a limb here, but I think I'm probably the least formally educated person in the entire police department.
34:47
SPEAKER_04: How about that?
34:47
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
34:48
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, but Street Smarts goes a long way in this job, more so than official education.
34:52
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I guess so.
34:53
SPEAKER_03: I'll be uh I've been doing okay, I think.
34:55
SPEAKER_03: Uh the plan is to at some point look at a degree program, you know, but as of right now, I think that's something that people might not know about me.
35:02
SPEAKER_04: How about uh, you know, when you were homeschooled, when you get toward the level of, say, you know, high school age, did you have other kids that were also being homeschooled?
35:10
SPEAKER_04: So you had kind of group outings, things like that, group classes, sports.
35:14
SPEAKER_04: I know there's some organizations for homeschooled kids.
35:16
SPEAKER_04: Did you have any of that?
35:17
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we had like a homeschool group and we used to meet up at a horse farm in upstate New York a lot.
35:22
SPEAKER_03: As far as like sports, not too much.
35:24
SPEAKER_03: I did want to go to high school for that.
35:26
SPEAKER_03: But um we wound up sticking with the homeschooling.
35:29
SPEAKER_03: I met my wife uh when I was fifteen, and she was in high school in like South Jersey, so I kind of lived vicariously through her experience, you know, doing like the proms and all that stuff.
35:39
SPEAKER_03: Um but for myself, you know, I I wanted to play football and wanted to play baseball in high school, but just never materialized.
35:46
SPEAKER_04: So you met your wife when you were fifteen.
35:48
SPEAKER_04: Or you she was fifteen.
35:49
SPEAKER_04: How old were you?
35:50
SPEAKER_04: I was fifteen, she was sixteen.
35:51
SPEAKER_04: Oh, so fifteen and sixteen.
35:52
SPEAKER_04: Oh boy, an older woman.
35:54
SPEAKER_03: Yep.
35:55
SPEAKER_04: I mean, now it doesn't seem like anything, but when you're fifteen, a sixteen-year-old is I was you're doing pretty well for yourself.
36:01
SPEAKER_04: I was pretty popular in my homeschool group on the horse farm.
36:04
SPEAKER_04: Well, how old were you when you got married then, if you met when you were that age?
36:08
SPEAKER_03: Well, it's a sore subject.
36:09
SPEAKER_03: I held her off until 2015.
36:12
SPEAKER_03: So it was what, 11, 12 years?
36:14
SPEAKER_03: Oh wow.
36:15
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
36:15
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
36:16
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
36:16
SPEAKER_03: Well, you finally pulled the trigger, though.
36:17
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we we've been married for a while, and it it'll be 22 years.
36:21
SPEAKER_03: We've been together July 5th.
36:23
SPEAKER_03: And that's the number you're gonna go with.
36:25
SPEAKER_03: Yep.
36:25
SPEAKER_03: Yep.
36:26
SPEAKER_03: I have to check my math.
36:27
SPEAKER_03: Uh I'm sure she'll tell me if I'm wrong, but I think I'm right on that one.
36:30
SPEAKER_04: Well, I'm sorry to bring that up.
36:31
SPEAKER_04: I hope she doesn't listen to up if it's a sore subject.
36:33
SPEAKER_03: No, no, it's no problem.
36:35
SPEAKER_04: Well, I really appreciate you coming in, taking time to talk with us in the podcast.
36:39
SPEAKER_04: Thank you for having me.
36:40
SPEAKER_04: Senior police officer Travis Pisani, be safe out there.
36:42
SPEAKER_04: I appreciate it.
36:44
SPEAKER_04: So this is cool.
36:45
SPEAKER_04: Not only are we to talk about the Immersion Academy with Lieutenant Brian Hogan, but we have two of the participants.
36:50
SPEAKER_04: Or, Lieutenant, are we calling them cadets or are they just participants?
36:54
SPEAKER_05: I would say participants.
36:56
SPEAKER_05: Okay.
36:56
SPEAKER_04: All right.
36:56
SPEAKER_04: That hasn't been decided, it sounds like correct.
36:59
SPEAKER_05: That's the first time anyone's ever asked that question.
37:01
SPEAKER_05: I asked the heart.
37:02
SPEAKER_05: We just went over this.
37:03
SPEAKER_05: You're about to give us the question beforehand.
37:05
SPEAKER_04: No, no, I'm not absolutely not doing that.
37:07
SPEAKER_04: So, Lieutenant Brian Hogan with the Community Engagement Division, uh, you and the rest of your folks have been hosting the Immersion Academy this week.
37:15
SPEAKER_04: The first time we have done this, so we've got the Citizens Police Academy, the Junior Police Academy, first time for the Immersion Academy.
37:21
SPEAKER_04: Just a quick little synopsis, nuts and bolts, what is the Immersion Academy?
37:25
SPEAKER_05: So we wanted to highlight, obviously, the profession itself, but also the Astral Police Department to post-high school graduates who may be considering a career in public safety.
37:36
SPEAKER_05: That was the main goal.
37:37
SPEAKER_04: Mm-hmm.
37:37
SPEAKER_04: How many uh participants do we have?
37:39
SPEAKER_04: Seven this year.
37:40
SPEAKER_04: Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.
37:40
SPEAKER_04: Seven?
37:41
SPEAKER_04: And for our first go of it, that's not bad.
37:42
SPEAKER_04: Is that about how how many you were expecting?
37:44
SPEAKER_04: How many you were hoping for?
37:45
SPEAKER_05: We were hoping for more.
37:46
SPEAKER_05: Okay.
37:46
SPEAKER_05: But seven we're happy with.
37:48
SPEAKER_05: All right.
37:48
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, we had a great seven.
37:51
SPEAKER_05: It's better to have, you know, a good seven than a bad ten.
37:54
SPEAKER_05: I would agree.
37:56
SPEAKER_04: And we've got two of the best with us today, right?
37:58
SPEAKER_04: The absolute best.
37:59
SPEAKER_04: Top of the class.
38:00
SPEAKER_04: The cream of the class.
38:01
SPEAKER_04: Top of the class, right here.
38:02
SPEAKER_04: The valedictorian and the salutary.
38:03
SPEAKER_04: That's right.
38:04
SPEAKER_04: If there was such a thing in the immersion academy.
38:06
SPEAKER_04: So we've got Jackson Knight and Melinda Aguilar Santana.
38:09
SPEAKER_04: We'll start with Jackson.
38:10
SPEAKER_04: Now I understand both of you guys are uh at WCU, right?
38:14
SPEAKER_04: I heard you say go cats.
38:15
SPEAKER_04: Yes, sir.
38:15
SPEAKER_04: So what made you want to be a part of the Immersion Academy, Jackson?
38:20
SPEAKER_01: Well, I started at Western as a business major, and further into the major I got, I realized I really didn't enjoy the classes and I really couldn't see myself in an office all day.
38:30
SPEAKER_01: Isaiah Signet came and spoke to my criminal justice class and was talking about the upcoming Immersion Academy, and I thought it was going to be a great opportunity to get a new perspective on law enforcement and make sure that it was something I was really interested in.
38:43
SPEAKER_04: And so what did you learn this week about you and about the academy and possibly your future?
38:48
SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell I've learned a ton.
38:49
SPEAKER_01: It's so hard to put it into a short sentence, but really just what law enforcement is about, not just patrol, but the day-to-day stuff and just the possibilities of that goes into working at a police department, because there's way more than I initially thought.
39:03
SPEAKER_01: There's an unlimited number of jobs that you could have working in law enforcement.
39:07
SPEAKER_01: And yeah, that's been a great perspective to gain.
39:10
SPEAKER_04: So one thing you probably wouldn't have the chance to do if you had a job where you sat in an office all day long was physical fitness.
39:16
SPEAKER_04: So you just completed the Popat, which, for those folks that are not familiar, basically a physical agility test.
39:22
SPEAKER_04: How did you do?
39:23
SPEAKER_01: Uh yes, sir.
39:24
SPEAKER_01: I'm about 10 minutes off my Popat, and I'm still kind of catching my breath.
39:27
SPEAKER_01: I'm leaning away from the mic to kind of huff and puff in the corner.
39:31
SPEAKER_01: It was fun.
39:33
SPEAKER_01: He passed.
39:33
SPEAKER_01: I did pass.
39:35
SPEAKER_01: Nice.
39:35
SPEAKER_04: Yes, sir.
39:36
SPEAKER_04: Well, congratulations on that.
39:37
SPEAKER_04: Thank you.
39:37
SPEAKER_04: Melinda, how about you?
39:39
SPEAKER_04: You're also from Western Carolina, correct?
39:40
SPEAKER_08: I am.
39:41
SPEAKER_08: Born and raised in Asheville, though.
39:42
SPEAKER_08: Aaron Powell, Jr.
39:42
SPEAKER_04: So what's your major out there?
39:44
SPEAKER_04: He was trying business.
39:45
SPEAKER_08: I'm a criminal justice major.
39:46
SPEAKER_08: I've always known I want to do criminal justice.
39:49
SPEAKER_08: Shout out Irwin Clyde.
39:51
SPEAKER_08: I took criminal justice classes with A V Tech over there.
39:53
SPEAKER_08: And then I graduated, decided I want to be a criminal justice major, went to Western Carolina.
39:58
SPEAKER_08: And yeah, now I'm in my senior year when I go back in August.
40:01
SPEAKER_04: Is there like a family history in law enforcement?
40:03
SPEAKER_04: What got you interested?
40:05
SPEAKER_08: No, I'm a first gen.
40:06
SPEAKER_08: I've always been interested in like law enforcement.
40:08
SPEAKER_08: I've always wanted to be like maybe like in a male-dominated field, so I could feel like myself, like I could be like, oh yeah, I got this.
40:14
SPEAKER_08: Like I'm a woman, I got it, I can do what other men can do.
40:17
SPEAKER_08: And so far it's been good.
40:19
SPEAKER_08: Like I uh signed up to the police trainee.
40:22
SPEAKER_08: I've passed basically almost all of them.
40:24
SPEAKER_08: I did my Popat also.
40:26
SPEAKER_08: I passed that.
40:27
SPEAKER_08: Like him, I was catching my breath for the rest of the day.
40:30
SPEAKER_08: My chest was hurting that whole day.
40:32
SPEAKER_08: It was a little traumatized, but it's okay.
40:36
SPEAKER_04: Well, congratulations to you as well.
40:37
SPEAKER_08: Thank you.
40:38
SPEAKER_04: Lieutenant Hogan, I was encouraged to see that about half of the participants were females.
40:43
SPEAKER_05: Absolutely.
40:43
SPEAKER_05: That's pretty cool.
40:44
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
40:44
SPEAKER_05: We noticed that last year in uh last summer's junior police academy.
40:48
SPEAKER_05: I think we had about a 50 percent ratio for young ladies, and by and large, they were awesome.
40:54
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
40:54
SPEAKER_04: The Asheville Police Department is part of the 30 for 30 initiative to try and encourage more women to enter law enforcement.
41:01
SPEAKER_04: Our numbers are actually slightly higher than the national average here and increasing.
41:05
SPEAKER_04: And we've got women in positions of leadership here.
41:07
SPEAKER_04: Heck, Chief Jackie Stepp, our chief of police, our term chief, is a is a woman, and we have uh lieutenants and captains.
41:14
SPEAKER_04: So did it push you in any direction this week, Melinda?
41:18
SPEAKER_04: Like as far as what you learned and your possible career, and like, okay, I think this is for me.
41:23
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, definitely.
41:24
SPEAKER_08: I already knew that I wanted to be in Asheville.
41:26
SPEAKER_08: I live here.
41:26
SPEAKER_08: My mom's from here.
41:27
SPEAKER_08: I'm always in Asheville.
41:29
SPEAKER_08: I love Asheville.
41:30
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, a lot of the stuff that we've done is like really opened my mind more about what we do, like the scenarios.
41:36
SPEAKER_08: That was insane.
41:37
SPEAKER_08: But I loved it.
41:38
SPEAKER_08: I would definitely recommend for others to take the Emergent Academy.
41:41
SPEAKER_04: So you could see yourself as a future Asheville Police Department officer.
41:44
SPEAKER_08: Oh, yeah, definitely.
41:45
SPEAKER_04: Jackson, how about you?
41:46
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, as of now, absolutely.
41:48
SPEAKER_01: Um, I didn't come into the Emergent Academy with that idea, but over the past now five days, I have gotten to meet so many people and have really opened my eyes to how great Asheville PD is.
42:00
SPEAKER_01: And absolutely a place that like feels like home when you come in.
42:03
SPEAKER_01: Everyone's super caring, and the camaraderie is very real, just watching the officers talk to each other.
42:07
SPEAKER_01: Like, definitely want that.
42:08
SPEAKER_01: It's very interesting.
42:09
SPEAKER_04: What was your favorite or most memorable experience during the week?
42:14
SPEAKER_01: I think Wednesday we went to A B Tech and it was our simulations day, and we had fake guns that shoot paintballs, kinda.
42:22
SPEAKER_01: And we got to do simulated scenarios that you would encounter as a patrol officer.
42:28
SPEAKER_01: It was extremely immersive.
42:30
SPEAKER_01: It really felt like you were there, adrenaline going.
42:33
SPEAKER_01: It's not a real scenario, but absolutely felt like it was real.
42:36
SPEAKER_01: And by the end of the day, yeah, I was I was hooked.
42:38
SPEAKER_04: So both of you agree with Wednesday.
42:40
SPEAKER_08: Yes, definitely Wednesday.
42:41
SPEAKER_04: Being the best day.
42:42
SPEAKER_04: How about was it really different than what you had imagined being an officer would be after the week, seeing what you experienced, being immersed in the program?
42:52
SPEAKER_04: Do you think it matches up with what you thought, or is it different than what you thought perhaps the life of an officer?
42:58
SPEAKER_04: We'll start with you, Melinda.
42:59
SPEAKER_08: I feel like it was what I thought because of the classes that I've taken before.
43:02
SPEAKER_08: We've spoken about it sometimes, like how police officers have to face like a lot of things, think on the spot, really hard to sometimes just like think on the spot and just like know what you're about to do.
43:13
SPEAKER_08: Or like discretion and but other than that, for Wednesday the the chase was really fun.
43:18
SPEAKER_08: That was really fun.
43:19
SPEAKER_08: Got my adrenaline really high, and I was really excited being in the cop guard with Carrie Lee.
43:24
SPEAKER_08: But definitely I knew what was going on and yeah, I loved it.
43:28
SPEAKER_04: Uh Jackson, you were not part of a criminal justice program.
43:30
SPEAKER_04: You were a business major, so you may have had some different expectations.
43:33
SPEAKER_04: How about you?
43:33
SPEAKER_04: What are your thoughts?
43:34
SPEAKER_01: From the perspective of law enforcement that you get through TV and the media and everything, I kind of already knew a little bit.
43:42
SPEAKER_01: But coming in and actually seeing it firsthand, there's so much more that goes into it than that I had previously understood.
43:48
SPEAKER_01: And there's a lot that happens behind the scenes that you don't see um on TV.
43:52
SPEAKER_01: Like the movies make it look really clean and fast, and there's more to it.
43:56
SPEAKER_01: And it was really cool to get to see the behind the curtains look.
44:00
SPEAKER_04: So what is the next step for both of you?
44:02
SPEAKER_04: Okay, you've taken the immersion academy.
44:04
SPEAKER_04: Uh, Linda, you're just about to graduate next year, right?
44:07
SPEAKER_08: Next year, yes.
44:07
SPEAKER_04: Okay, so wh what's the next step for you after you graduate?
44:10
SPEAKER_08: Well, I'm gonna apply for the academy and try to get into the academy, become a police officer.
44:16
SPEAKER_04: So we can see you in the B L E T uh here in about a year or so?
44:18
SPEAKER_08: Oh yeah.
44:19
SPEAKER_04: Awesome.
44:19
SPEAKER_04: How about you, Jackson?
44:20
SPEAKER_01: I psyched that.
44:21
SPEAKER_01: I thought about applying last night, but today we're talking to the um hiring team here at APD, so I figure I'd wait to chat with them first.
44:28
SPEAKER_01: But yeah, application and coming and hopefully be in B L E T.
44:31
SPEAKER_04: Well, congratulations again to both of you, and thank you for participating in the inaugural immersion academy.
44:36
SPEAKER_04: Lieutenant Hogan, how about you?
44:38
SPEAKER_04: Did it meet or exceed your expectations?
44:40
SPEAKER_05: First time doing it?
44:41
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it was a it was a brainstorming session, and we come up with the idea, and I think we absolutely are going to be doing it again, and we'll just keep refining it.
44:52
SPEAKER_05: And I was talking to Officer Signac about it, and we have a we're already starting the vision for next time and kind of how we will shape the week, and it's gonna be really good.
45:01
SPEAKER_05: Well, Officer Signac's the right guy.
45:03
SPEAKER_05: He's quite the Renaissance man.
45:04
SPEAKER_05: He's the guy.
45:06
SPEAKER_04: He is the guy.
45:07
SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
45:08
SPEAKER_04: Thank you to Jackson and Melinda, and we hope to see you in the uh halls and walls of Asheville Police Department next year.
45:14
SPEAKER_04: Thank you so much.
45:15
SPEAKER_08: Thank you so much.
45:17
SPEAKER_04: Time again for another History Minute with Hannah Silberman.
45:20
SPEAKER_04: Thank you so much for joining me.
45:21
SPEAKER_00: Glad to be back.
45:22
SPEAKER_04: You know, we were scheduled to have this, but we were gonna have a different topic, and then we got to talk about these two former officers that you played an integral part of getting their names on the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Wall.
45:36
SPEAKER_04: So you just returned from that trip in Washington, D.C.
45:39
SPEAKER_04: as part of uh National Police Week.
45:42
SPEAKER_04: So that must have been exciting for you personally, right?
45:44
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
45:44
SPEAKER_04: Let's talk about the officers first and foremost, two officers.
45:47
SPEAKER_04: And this dates back to the 1930s and the similarities between the two of them and how they died, it's actually kind of eerie.
45:56
SPEAKER_04: So let's talk about the officers.
45:58
SPEAKER_04: First, how about Sergeant Frank J.
46:00
SPEAKER_04: Hagen, 12-year veteran of the Asheville Police Department?
46:03
SPEAKER_00: Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.
46:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so Frank Hagen was a motorcycle officer who was very well loved and very popular.
46:09
SPEAKER_00: And he was a sergeant.
46:11
SPEAKER_00: He had been on the motorcycle squad for many, many years.
46:14
SPEAKER_00: And in August of 1933, he was in pursuit of meter thieves on Mount Vernon Circle in North Asheville.
46:22
SPEAKER_04: Now is that what it sounds like, meter thieves?
46:24
SPEAKER_04: Like the these are parking meters.
46:26
SPEAKER_00: I presume, yes.
46:27
SPEAKER_04: So with coinage in them, and people are either trying to break him, knock him over, take him with them, I guess.
46:32
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
46:32
SPEAKER_04: Okay.
46:33
SPEAKER_00: And it was at night, and he didn't see a car in front of him, and he crashed into the car, and his motorcycle sort of pinned his leg in between the car and his motorcycle, and it led to a really severe compound fracture.
46:46
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, sounds painful.
46:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
46:48
SPEAKER_00: Um so he had a pretty long recovery period from that, and he kind of came back to the department in different capacities as a dispatcher, as a detective, and then eventually he got sick again, related to his original injury, and he passed away in 1937.
47:05
SPEAKER_04: Aaron Powell The injury was 1933.
47:07
SPEAKER_04: Right.
47:08
SPEAKER_04: Dies four years later at the age of 37, it says here.
47:11
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
47:12
SPEAKER_04: Young man.
47:12
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
47:13
SPEAKER_00: And he had um a wife, four sons, and a daughter.
47:16
SPEAKER_04: Wow.
47:17
SPEAKER_04: That survived him.
47:17
SPEAKER_04: Trevor Burrus, Jr.: But at the time when that happened, that wouldn't be something that would have been categorized as an on-duty death.
47:24
SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell That's correct.
47:25
SPEAKER_00: So our understanding of what a line of duty death has changed significantly in terms of the 1930s to today.
47:33
SPEAKER_00: The law enforcement memorial wasn't started until the 1980s.
47:37
SPEAKER_00: And so for most of our history, it was an active assailant.
47:42
SPEAKER_00: So you got attacked or you got shot and you died immediately.
47:45
SPEAKER_00: That was a line of duty death.
47:47
SPEAKER_00: But today we understand it as you were on duty.
47:49
SPEAKER_00: You were doing something related to your duty, and it ultimately leads to your death.
47:54
SPEAKER_00: That's a line of duty death.
47:55
SPEAKER_04: Aaron Ross Powell Okay.
47:56
SPEAKER_04: So that's the first one, Sergeant Frank J.
47:57
SPEAKER_04: Hagen.
47:58
SPEAKER_04: Then we have police officer Arthur Ramsey, also a 12-year veteran of the department.
48:05
SPEAKER_04: And he had something similar, at least involved a vehicle, in a couple of years prior, right?
48:10
SPEAKER_04: 1931 for this one, I believe.
48:11
SPEAKER_00: Aaron Ross Powell Yes.
48:12
SPEAKER_00: So in April of 1931, you know, speeding vehicles and vehicle crashes were a really big deal starting about in the 1930s through the 1950s because cars started to get faster.
48:24
SPEAKER_00: There wasn't a lot of safety, and you didn't have power anything.
48:27
SPEAKER_00: No power brakes, no power steering.
48:28
SPEAKER_00: So people died pretty often in car crashes.
48:32
SPEAKER_00: So they were actually investigating a little girl who had been picking flowers and got hit by a car.
48:37
SPEAKER_00: So they were visiting this little girl in the hospital, and a hospital that used to exist on Haywood Road.
48:43
SPEAKER_00: And as they were leaving the hospital at night, a car hits Offsra Miles and Officer Ramsey.
48:49
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
48:49
SPEAKER_00: And Offsra Miles initially seemed far more injured from it, never really fully recovered.
48:54
SPEAKER_00: He came back as a dispatcher for many years.
48:56
SPEAKER_00: Arthur Ramsay ends up with a spinal injury.
48:59
SPEAKER_07: Oh.
49:00
SPEAKER_00: So he slowly deteriorates until he goes out on disability, and then he ultimately died in 1935.
49:06
SPEAKER_04: Aaron Powell You know, the sad thing about both of these, sad and tragic, is these are the type of injuries that had they occurred, let's say this year, these are things with modern medicine, it probably wouldn't have resulted in their death.
49:17
SPEAKER_00: Aaron Ross Powell That's 100% true.
49:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's it's one of those things where it was probably just a lack of medical knowledge and tools that led to their death.
49:26
SPEAKER_04: Aaron Powell So let's fast forward to today and the effort, your effort to get these men's deaths determined to be a line of duty death and then honored on the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington, D.C.
49:40
SPEAKER_04: Tell us about the genesis of that.
49:42
SPEAKER_00: Aaron Ross Powell Well, you know, as I finished up the history projects, I knew that these two would qualify.
49:48
SPEAKER_00: And then I wanted to reach out to their surviving family.
49:52
SPEAKER_00: And actually, funny enough, I didn't know how to find Arthur Ramsey's family.
49:56
SPEAKER_00: And out of the blue, I got an email from somebody who was related or working on research for his granddaughter.
50:02
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
50:03
SPEAKER_00: And wanted to know if we had any information on him.
50:05
SPEAKER_00: And they were actually able to provide me all of the information that I needed.
50:10
SPEAKER_00: And Frank Hagan happened to be related to former Chief Lamb's wife.
50:14
SPEAKER_04: Okay.
50:15
SPEAKER_00: And their family had always considered him to be a line of duty death and were very supportive and wanted to be part of the process to have him added.
50:22
SPEAKER_04: So did you have the idea before you got that just random email?
50:30
SPEAKER_00: Because that you want the surviving family members.
50:32
SPEAKER_00: I know it happened in the 1930s, but I wanted them to be part of the process.
50:52
SPEAKER_00: So my understanding is that they took it to the North Carolina Industrial Commission, and I know this for Arthur Ramsey and appealed it, and the Industrial Commission said the city had to pay them out because it was a duty-related death.
51:04
SPEAKER_00: And so those documents and that information really backs up the connection between the injuries they received and their ultimate deaths.
51:11
SPEAKER_04: Aaron Ross Powell If you're looking at at least a little bit of a silver lining, at least at the time then, during a very difficult time for our country, their families at least were helped.
51:18
SPEAKER_04: Yes.
51:19
SPEAKER_04: So tell us about your trip to the nation's capital, all that it involved, and then of course their names being added to that wall that was part of that.
51:27
SPEAKER_04: Aaron Powell Yeah.
51:28
SPEAKER_00: So once an officer gets added to the memorial wall, there's these two big curved sections of wall and they engrave each officer's name into the wall.
51:37
SPEAKER_00: So people go and take rubbings and pictures, and it's kind of a place where they'll always remain to not be forgotten.
51:43
SPEAKER_04: Aaron Powell So kind of similar to the Vietnam Wall in a way where you can get the etchings on to put the piece of paper on.
51:49
SPEAKER_04: So how many officers are there, do you know?
51:51
SPEAKER_00: Thousands.
51:52
SPEAKER_00: It's uh it's actually very sad when you go just to see the number of officers that have been added to this wall, and they have to they're gonna have to expand it.
52:00
SPEAKER_04: You know?
52:00
SPEAKER_00: It's they're running out of space.
52:02
SPEAKER_04: Aaron Powell I had uh Captain Coward and Lieutenant Rollins in here uh in a previous episode of the podcast uh when we had the bicycle unit and they rode up as part of National Police Week and they told me how impactful it was when the the bicycles kind of they kind of finished their ride right there at that officer's memorial.
52:19
SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell They have a series of events that they do.
52:21
SPEAKER_00: A lot of motor motor officers come to do escorts for the family, the honor guards come and do watches for the fallen and um escorts for all of the families.
52:30
SPEAKER_00: There's a candlelight vigil where they read the names of every officer that's added to the wall, and then there's an official memorial ceremony on the lawn of the Capitol for the officers who fell in the more recent years.
52:42
SPEAKER_04: Aaron Powell It's gotta be a really emotional week for for you and for Captain Silberman and for anybody that was there, right?
52:49
SPEAKER_04: I'm I mean you just think about all the names, and then of course you have the ceremonies, and I'm sure there was did they play taps or anything anything like that?
52:56
SPEAKER_04: So it's just gotta like was there bagpipes?
52:59
SPEAKER_00: Aaron Ross Powell Lots of bagpipes.
53:00
SPEAKER_04: Oh, I love it.
53:01
SPEAKER_04: These bagpipes, they tend to kind of put me over the edge.
53:04
SPEAKER_04: It's like I can do okay until the bagpipes, and then I kind of just go right downhill and I'm a big pile of mush after that.
53:11
SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell It's the taps for me.
53:13
SPEAKER_04: Is that that that's pretty impactful as well.
53:15
SPEAKER_04: So is there anything that'll happen here in Asheville for these two officers?
53:19
SPEAKER_04: Do we have anything planned or is there any kind of thought to do anything?
53:22
SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell There is a memorial in front of the courthouse that has all of the fallen officers from Muncombe County.
53:28
SPEAKER_00: So it would probably be prudent to see if we could have their names added there.
53:32
SPEAKER_04: Aaron Ross Powell, okay.
53:32
SPEAKER_04: All right.
53:33
SPEAKER_04: Well, we'll look forward to maybe something like that happening for these officers in the future.
53:37
SPEAKER_04: At least they're remembered forever in Washington, D.C., along with the thousands probably of other fellow officers that have died in the line of duty.
53:44
SPEAKER_04: So fantastic.
53:45
SPEAKER_04: I love hearing about this and the success that you had with this, and kind of it all spurned because of the History Project, which became the book, right?
53:54
SPEAKER_04: Yes.
53:54
SPEAKER_04: So the gift that keeps on giving.
53:56
SPEAKER_04: For sure.
53:56
SPEAKER_04: Hannah Silberman once again with the History Minute.
53:58
SPEAKER_04: Thank you so much for sharing.
54:01
SPEAKER_04: That's it for another episode.
54:02
SPEAKER_04: Thank you to my guests, Sergeant Justin Booth, Senior Police Officer Travis Pisani, Lieutenant Brian Hogan, Immersion Academy participants Jackson Knight and Melinda Aguilar Santana, and Hannah Silberman with The History Minute.
54:15
SPEAKER_04: And thank you for listening.
54:17
SPEAKER_04: We covered a lot of ground in this episode, but if there's a topic you'd like discussed or someone you'd like to hear from, call 828-250-8800 and leave a voicemail.
54:26
SPEAKER_04: That's 828-250-8800.
54:29
SPEAKER_04: Or you can email me at APD Podcast Feedback at AshevilleNC.gov.
54:35
SPEAKER_04: That's APD Podcastfeedback at Ashevillenc.gov.
54:40
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54:43
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54:44
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54:46
SPEAKER_04: I'm Rick Rice, and this is the APD Pod Squad.