From the time he was two years old, Al Lucier wanted to work as a police officer. Lucier is now a police constable. "What I'm doing now is far and beyond what I expected to do as a police officer," he says. "I saw myself as a person in blue doing what I thought police officers did."
Lucier has found being a police officer involves a lot more than putting cuffs on criminals. "What's fantastic about policing is the diversity of it," he says enthusiastically. "Every day, I come to work and I'm faced with a different problem -- everything from cats in trees to criminals in streets."
Lucier says you can be an officer for 25 years and have three or four careers in that time. "Patrol officer, accounting, forensic identification -- all these different things are part of the job," he explains. "That's the beauty of it."
Instead of just reacting to crime, many police forces are now working with community officials to help prevent crime. It's called community policing. Lucier meets with businesspeople, bank managers and the media.
Lucier also attends crime prevention conferences all over the country. "It's a better approach to make sure people who are paying for service are getting what they pay for," he says.
After a shooting incident, Lucier was glad the police had such wide community support. "Members of the force were required to fire their weapons at a member of the public," explains Lucier. "The suspect survived -- thankfully for that individual and our police officer. No one could say they took a person's life and enjoy that knowledge."
The move toward community policing has removed much of the bravado and machismo of the police force. "It used to develop unhealthy lifestyles," says Lucier. "A lot of the negative aspects of the job are starting to weed themselves out."
And despite what you see on television, Lucier says police work has a lot more to do with problem solving than taking mug shots. "Those programs show the excitement, the responsive style that I saw when I wanted to get in," he says. "It wasn't until I was in that I realized the picture was far broader than that."
It's not all that simple to become a police officer. But if you have what it takes, it can be a great job.
John Burpo is the director of the National Coalition of Public Safety Officers. He says police departments "are just looking for kind of regular people who are somewhat balanced and can make sensible decisions about things.
"There are a lot of attributes they're looking for. It's hard finding people. If you get a class of 25 police officers who are going to be hired by, let's say, the San Antonio Police Department. To get those 25 people, you might have to go through 1,000 or more applicants."
Cassondra Rowntree is a deputy with the U.S. Marshal Service in Waco, Texas. She agrees with Lucier. There is more to being a police officer than meets the eye. "Police work is law enforcement, but it's also helping people," she says.
When Rowntree was younger, she says she looked up to police officers, sheriffs, deputies and marshals who would come to see her father, who was a doctor. "I thought they were so neat," she says. "I grew up in West Texas watching John Wayne and True Grit and he was a Texas marshal in that movie!"
At 20, Rowntree became a police officer in San Jose. At 24, she took a government test to become a U.S. marshal. "It was a lot of multiple-choice questions," she remembers. "Lots of reading, writing and reasoning skills."
Rowntree passed the test and made it through the interview process. Her first job was a deputy position in San Francisco.
"Here I was, a country girl filling up my truck and driving off to the big city," she says. "I'd never seen anything like it. Culture, plays, museums, it was wonderful. I spent two years there and then transferred to Philadelphia."
Rowntree says she applied for the transfer because she wanted a new experience. "I wanted to do big stuff," she explains. "I wanted high-profile trials, trials on Mafia, organized crime, fugitive cases." Rowntree got her wish.
"I worked on two really big fugitive cases, and there were multiple defendants whom I caught," she says. "The main guy was apprehended in Jamaica. He was a leader of Jamaican organized crime and had brought crack cocaine into Philadelphia."
Rowntree says her job today is much different than when she first started. "Things have changed even in the years I've been in law enforcement," she says. "We didn't have computers in our patrol cars, and we do now."