One works at a bank, another at a sprinkler business. One is an armed guard at a security company and another is chipping in weekend shifts at his family’s construction business. And after a year of protests against the police across the country, they all decided they wanted to become cops…
This is Part Two of an article by Allison Sherry that appeared on CPR News on November 2, 2021. Read Part One here.
Kristen Heinonen: ‘In my community, you don’t take this path’
Kristen Heinonen’s mother wanted her to go into the medical field. So when she graduated from Alameda High School, in Lakewood, she studied biomedical sciences at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.
But she wasn’t happy. She left school and mulled over joining the military — something all the men in her family have done — before deciding that too wasn’t for her. And then last year, amid all the protests for racial equity, she began to think that she would like to be a police officer.
“In my community, you don’t take this path, you take a different one,” she said. “We’re not really fans of the police over there.”
Heinonen, 23, is married and calls her wife “my number one supporter… without her I wouldn’t be able to do this. I would really just be floating around and working.”
Heinonen works at a bank now — a job she says she hates because it’s so repetitive. She doesn’t have many outside interests, mostly because she’s been working since she was 16 years old.
“So instead of going to hobbies in high school, going to parties, getting drunk, I always was working:, work, make money, work, make money,” she said.
Though Heinonen, who is Black, never had any bad experiences with police, but when she has been pulled over on occasion, she was petrified.
“One night I was driving down Wadsworth coming home from my job and my lights were turned off and I got pulled over, and I just remember shaking (while) getting my ID out of my wallet and I had to tell them I’m sorry,” she said.
She wants to be a traffic cop, so she can help make the most common type of interaction regular people have with law enforcement officers be a better experience.
“You see cops on your worst day. I don’t want to be like that,” Heinonen said. “I want to be like, ‘Oh, you have a flat tire? Let me help you.’”
Jay O’Bara: ‘What does God want me to do with my life?’
For O’Bara, 29, the path to becoming a police officer started with a series of conversations with friends, his pastor and God.
He had graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2014 with a psychology degree and was working with Loomis, the cash handling company. He thought about going back to graduate school to become a teacher, but his hours at Loomis weren’t flexible enough so he went to work at an auto body shop in Boulder.
O’Bara spent much of his 20s living with roommates, active in his Boulder church and wrestling with a looming question:
“OK, what does God want me to do with my life? What am I supposed to be doing?” he said.
He started to think the answer might lie in law enforcement; around that same time, he said a lot of people he cared about started telling him, unprompted, that he “seemed like a cop,” — in a good way.
“My pastor just one day, said, ‘Jay, I could see you being a police officer. You’d be a good police officer,’” he said. “And I thought, OK, I’m getting something here.”
O’Bara needed to keep working full-time to support himself — a story echoed by all the cadets at the academy — and was drawn to the community college program because all the classes are at night or on the weekends. He currently has a job at a sprinkler company and lives in Longmont.
While he said he’s open to all kinds of law enforcement jobs, he wants to be in a place where officers are respected and take training seriously. O’Bara eventually wants to be a detective and, down the road, a commander or a chief.
“I do believe I’m called for that, to start making the changes I’m talking about today. The best police chiefs are the ones who get there, do the job and they’re not afraid of anyone,” he said. “I want to get up every day and do the right thing. Doing the right thing is what I care about.”
Victor Dominguez Ramirez: ‘It can get tough, but I just know it’s going to pay off’
Ramirez, 23, fell into wanting to become a police officer after obsessively watching “The First 48” — a documentary series about homicide investigations across the country.
He was studying general psychology at Colorado State University and thought he wanted to be a therapist — but eventually he decided isn’t suited for a desk job. He wanted to be more hands-on, but he still wanted to help people.
Within the academy, Ramirez’s fellow students often gently poke fun at him for having all the right answers, for doing the best on the exams and for generally being among the top students.
For Ramirez, who takes pride in his top status, the reason for his success is simple: he just likes school.
He graduated from CSU in the spring of 2020 with the goal of applying for police departments right away. But in those early days of the pandemic, almost everything was on hold: hiring, ride-alongs and shadowing opportunities at various agencies.
“I wasn’t getting as far as I wanted to in the hiring process,” Ramirez said. “I thought I had something going for me.”
Instead, he went back to his old summer and weekend job, working construction with his dad’s company in Aurora. His parents helped pay for college and supported him all the way through, so he felt like it was only fair to pay them back.
Ramirez did a little digging and discovered that if he was certified by the Police Officers Standards and Training board, he might have a leg up on other applicants, so he threw in an application for the Community College of Aurora’s night program to get his POST certification.
With this schedule, he could also continue to help his dad when he wasn’t in class.
“It’s working during the day, do this at night, I work some Fridays and I work some Sundays,” he said. “It can get tough, but I just know it’s going to pay off in the end, if I keep working, keep going.”
Ramirez likes the mountains and wants to apply for metro area agencies that are a little closer to them than Aurora — including Thornton, Lakewood, Boulder and Fort Collins.
“I love Aurora, but I’m ready to at least get a little bit away,” he said.
Maiwand Ahmadzai: ‘For the most part, people like you … I think that’s still true’
Ask about his childhood growing up in Kabul, Afghanistan, and 35-year-old Ahmadzai doesn’t have many memories.
He does remember an uncle visiting his family from Virginia in the early 1990s and bringing him a bike — it’s the one thing that stands out to him.
“I wouldn’t say it was normal because I spent my childhood growing up in war after war after war,” he said. “I usually tell people I’m a product of war. I was born when we had war. I went to school during war.”
Ahmadzai was the youngest of five kids and has two older brothers and two older sisters.
He attended some university classes in Afghanistan and then, for six years, he worked as a translator for the U.S. military and NATO in Kabul before moving over to the United States Agency for International Development for various projects.
He was approved to come to the United States in December 2016. He brought his wife and young son.
“It wasn’t bad, people talk about a cultural shock, but I didn’t feel it,” Ahmadzai said. “I was already exposed to the culture working with the U.S. military.”
The family settled into an apartment in Aurora and he started working in a warehouse. Within a month, he got a security job downtown with the Grand Hyatt.
Ahmadzai said was drawn to security because it felt like he was helping people. He worked at the hotel for four years and then the pandemic hit and he was asked to go part-time — he preferred full-time work.
He has since transitioned to armed security and works for an apartment building company.
“I like policing; I think it’s a good career field. The pay is good. The benefits are good. For the most part, people like you,” he said. “I think that’s still true.”
He sees POST certification as an avenue to better pay, even if he stays in private security for now. His ultimate goal is to finish his bachelors degree and to eventually move into intelligence work.
Colorado’s freshly passed reforms don’t worry him — neither does the movement against police brutality.
“I’ll do the right thing,” he said. “You can pass 10,000 laws, it’s not going to scare me.”