In High School from 2001-2003 I started doing ride-alongs with City of Dumfries,VA Police Dept. where i did 6 ride-alongs totally around 30 hours. This came after growing up loving police work and studying the LAPD. After watching so many episodes of COPS, LAPD:Life on the Beat, and Real Stories of the Highway Patrol, finally I was the passenger in a police cruiser getting to learn about the job, see it and experience it first hand while responding to real calls. After High School I moved 30 miles north of Dumfries where I had spent 17 years to Arlington County,VA. Since then I have studied the Arlington County police force and from 2005-2007 was a member of their ride-along program in which I did 6-7 rides with them and 30 more hours. It was through Police work that I actually got interested in the news media and "stringing" which then had me studying photography. Photojournalism isn't the only type of photography I do but to me it is the most important. Telling a story with photographs is most inspiring to me, and usually I find that police work is my lead and most interesting story. For a while at Northern Virginia Community College I was a photography student then later switched to their Criminal Justice program. I hoping that in the near future I'll finally get into police work and I'm looking at many local agencies that I think would be good places for me such as the Arlington County Sheriff's and the Metro-Transit P.D.
As a photographer I've had many encounters with local police, mainly Arlington who already knew me well from ride-alongs. A few have been somewhat bad encounters but many were good yet all had to do with photography laws and filming in public areas however a few went a little further into the breaching of civil liberties.
No comments:
Post a Comment