Who the heck am I to tell a cop what he needs to get the job done?

Who the heck am I to tell a cop what he needs to get the job done?

Most Lithos customers see my name on the website or in an email with “director of marketing and sales” after it. I know, typical white collar business guy, right? Not so long ago, I was a cop. How I came to the place in life where I appear in direct emails and trade shows is a story of good luck followed by really bad luck followed by good luck again.

This is my second marketing career. A long time ago, before I was a cop, I was a marketing director. I hadn’t set out to be one. It just sort of happened. To be honest, it an accidental career path. I come from a family of cops. My dad was a Buffalo Police Officer for 20 years. I was raised in a household where talk was tough—and dad was tougher. And I was going to follow in his footsteps, that was certain from an early age.

Then my father got sick—cancer—and, on his deathbed (literally) he asked me not to become a soldier or a cop. So, I went to college for graphic design and English. I became a freelance writer and graphic designer. I started a small graphics software business that evolved into an ad agency. Later, I went into public relations and then leapfrogged up the corporate ladder until I held a couple of director-level jobs in marketing. I was successful. And bored.

And then 9/11 happened. As someone who was raised by a cop, I grew up with a cop’s sense of responsibility for his community. Frankly, I had a hard time watching other people taking care of the injured, looking for the bad guys, and seeing my neighbors in fear of the terror that unfolded that day. As it was for many Americans, it was a life-altering time. So, I tried to enlist in the Marines and Army. Both said I was too old. Today, they’d snap up a fit, willing applicant in his mid-thirties. One recruiter suggested a different path. “Try law enforcement,” he said. “Serve closer to home.”

So, I did.

I became a deputy sheriff in a rough part of Florida. It was a great place to be in law enforcement. Lots of drugs (85% of all prescription drugs sold in the US are in Florida, and we had the highest per capita usage of crack cocaine in the nation for a while), home invasions, endless burglaries, gang violence, and more drugs. Florida is the wild west. There’s something about the heat, the mix of cultures, the inherent transience that makes it a hotbed for bad behavior. Have you ever watched America’s Most Wanted? Where do they find all of the fugitives? Yep. Florida.

Since this is going to be read mostly by other in law enforcement, I can say this without giving away any secrets: being a cop is the most fun you can have while working. Yeah, it’s stressful, it’s dangerous, and it can be tedious. But, you see more in a shift than most people do in a lifetime. You experience more in a year than civilians do in a lifetime. And you take it all in stride. I loved it. I was on the bomb squad. I went to every tactical school I could find. I was a patrol defensive tactics trainer. I tried it all and it was fantastic. Law enforcement is a great profession for people who like to keep learning. This was the first good luck part of the story: I had opportunities to learn everything I could want to in the law enforcement catalog of study topics.

But what happens when you stop being a cop? I couldn’t really imagine that possibility but I figured I had about fifteen years to figure that out. Except I was wrong. One speeding driver, a missed stop sign, and a nearly head-on collision at a combined speed of about 110mph changed that. That is the bad luck part of the story.

In my case, I was lucky. I fell but landed on my feet—and running! I went to work for Lithos Robotics, a company with whom I had been consulting for six years after meeting the company president at a bomb robot demo. We hit it off. By sheer coincidence, the company was based not only in my hometown but 100 yards from my older sister’s back door. This is the good luck part.

Allen Mann started the company that would become Lithos Robotics twenty years ago. He is passionate about what the company does. He, too, was moved by the events of 9/11 and wanted to help create new ways to keep America safe. The company did a lot of Department of Defense work to start with, but eventually domestic law enforcement became Lithos’s focus.

Allen is not a cop, but he GETS it. Some people get it; most don’t. Allen gets it. He gets it that the job is dangerous and that, at the end of the day, we all want to get home to our families. And he gets it that technology can help this happen. He gets it that cops break things. (Let’s be honest…the term “cop proof” didn’t come about on its own.) He gets it that, though we mean to, cops will not really train much with their equipment until the day of the callout—and then it needs to be easy to use and foolproof. Or cop proof, in this case. 

I could have gone to work for a lot of companies. I have a diverse background and can do that whole white-collar corporate thing if I have to. But, that would take me away from the career I CHOSE: law enforcement. One of our customers, a grizzled SWAT sergeant still on the job but well past retirement age,  said to me after a demo at his agency: “You never stop being a cop, you know. You may have this job but you are still a cop. You’ve see too much to go back.”Fortunately, I don’t have to go back. I get to hang out with some of the brightest, most talented SWAT, EOD and crisis negotiators in America. Hopefully, I get to make a difference in their lives and maybe—just maybe—I will be responsible, at least in part, for making sure one of my brothers or sisters gets home at night after a rough callout.

So, who am I to try to tell you what you need to get your job done? Actually, it’s the other way around. I don’t tell YOU what you need to get the job done. You tell ME. And I tell my boss and he will make it for you. That’s the real reason I picked Lithos. The company is adamant in its belief that the real experts are the boots on the ground. You know what you need. It’s our job to make it come to life.  

That old sergeant was right: despite the tie and white collar (which, to be honest, I never actually wear), I am still a cop. And I look forward to many more years of service to the law enforcement community even if my uniform looks a little different these days.

Richard Williamson

Director of Marketing and Sales

Former cop