Officer Ryan O'Neal

What do you find most rewarding about your job?

It's a great Department to work for. For me, it's like a sense of purpose (like) my military background that I came from that joined after 9/11. I was looking for something else to do and went into law enforcement and I find it rewarding. You feel like you're doing something. You're making a difference and for the most part everybody at this department -- they treat you like family and everybody's great to work with here.

How do you handle the challenges and stresses of the job?

Pretty easy for me to you know leave my home life at home and my work life - to be separate -because you don't want to bring a lot of this stuff back home because it will impact your relationships. You have to be able to find that disconnect between your family life and your work life. For me, it was working out a lot. I also my spare time like to be outdoors do a lot of outdoor things - go riding, hang out with friends, fishing, be on the boat, stuff like that.

In what ways have you seen your work positively impact the community?

You see so many different things with what you do and the interactions with people and they tell you how much they appreciate you when they're seeing the things you. Back last week I had a call for a cat that was stuck in an engine bay and these people were extremely happy that I was able to get the kitten out of their engine bay and they thanked me, and they wanted my name and everything. It’s small stuff like that all the way up to when you have a good month, and you have a bunch of drug arrests, and you notice the difference in the neighborhood with how much traffic is coming in and out of it. So, I mean, there's so many different things you see it's kind of hard to put a point or finger on one thing.