THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 4, 1995 TAG: 9506020280
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Random Rambles
SOURCE: Tony Stein
LENGTH: Medium: 84 lines
It happened some years back when Jeff Warren was a young police officer patrolling the western end of Chesapeake. It was late at night, and the back door of a health club that should have been closed was open.
``I took my shotgun and went in,'' Warren remembers. ``I came around a corner and, all of a sudden, I was face-to-face with another man with a shotgun. I almost blew the mirrors off the wall before I realized it was me.''
As Warren told that story, he was sitting in his office at the Public Safety Building; now Maj. Jeff Warren, retiring from the police force to tackle a new career in private business. And if you blinked, you missed his ``retirement.'' He took off the uniform on a Friday. The following Tuesday, he was at his new company, Mid-Atlantic BellCom. With headquarters in Deep Creek, it deals in business telecommunications and computer wiring. Warren is administrative manager.
Raised in Portsmouth, he was a student at Wilson High School when he started working as a free-lance photographer with The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star. ``But I found out I was on the wrong side of the camera,'' he says. ``I wanted to be on the action side.''
That's what steered him to the fire department in Portsmouth, first as a volunteer, then as a professional firefighter. In 1971, though, he went looking for a different kind of action. He joined the Chesapeake Police Department.
It was a time of basic changes in police work, changes that Warren believes started in 1966 with the Supreme Court's Miranda decision. That was the one in which the court held that a suspect has to be advised of his rights. ``You have a right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney. . . .'' The legal litany that every watcher of TV cop shows has come to know.
Warren agrees with the suggestion that the decision was sort of like a good news-bad news joke for police departments. The bad news was that police work would become increasingly complicated by tough, sometimes tricky, legal guidelines. The good news was that educational standards for policemen began to rise.
``There was a new emphasis on education in police work,'' Warren says. ``When I came on the force, most new hires had only a high school education. Now half of the new hires have a two- or four-year college degree.'' Warren himself has a four-year degree in criminal justice from St. Leo's, a well-known extension university. He's also president of the national alumni association of the Southern Police Institute in Louisville, Ky.
Police work is a profession, and ``professionalism'' has been a key word for Warren. He retired as supervisor of the department's administrative and support services, but one of his jobs along the way was supervising the Animal Control Bureau. Kathy Umberger, now coordinator of the bureau, credits him with molding it into what she calls ``one of the most professional animal control organizations I have ever been in contact with. Plus he's such a nice guy.''
Warren's not much of a teller of war stories about his police career, and there's one incident that clearly hits him hard in the gut. He was there in 1981 when a berserk woman with a knife fatally stabbed police Sgt. John Cherry. The sergeant had been trying to disarm her without hurting her.
``My worst day as a policeman,'' Warren says. Ask him how a police officer deals with a tragedy like that and his answer is a grim insight:
``Police officers see so much of the sad side of life, so much of the grief in life, that there's a tendency to build a shell. You block out, and you become unemotional. Now that I've been in a desk job, my family tells me I've become more emotional.'' Then Warren grins and says ``I even cry at movies now.''
The family Warren talked about includes his wife Bonnie and three grown children, two sons and a daughter. His oldest son, Jeff Warren III, is a deputy in the Chesapeake Sheriff's Department.
Though taking off the badge and hanging up the uniform is a giant-sized career change for him, Warren says the new job is a really attractive business opportunity. Even so, he says he'll miss the people he's worked with for so many years. ``Finest group of employees anywhere,'' he calls them.
Looking back on those years as a policeman, he figures it has been a good run. But there's a dark side, and he gives an example: ``years ago, when a policeman turned a kid over to the parents, that was the end of it. Now the parents are likely to challenge the officer. You hear, `My child is never wrong.' It's part of a general erosion of respect for authority, and it's scary.'' by CNB