National Police Support Fund would like to highlight advisory committee member, Mike Casey.
Casey has spent 29 years in the military and retired as a full Colonel in the U.S. Army. His last job in the Army was spent as an Inspector General doing investigations, inspections, soldier and commander assistance and was the organizational diagnostician and troubleshooter for a 24,000 person organization.
In addition to Casey’s undergraduate from the University of Notre Dame, masters degree in strategic studies from the U.S. Army War College, and another masters degree in public administration degree from Shippensburg State University in Pennsylvania, he also has a doctorate in organizational leadership from the University of Phoenix. He has taught in a high school on the south side of Chicago as the senior military instructor and organized a Junior ROTC program in Morgan Park High school in Chicago for five years. Since then, he has ran his own business, and he and his wife have moved back to Minnesota to be closer to his kids. He now works as an insurance agent.
Casey has always had a great deal of respect for law enforcement. Thirty years ago, he considered applying for the State Police Academy in Massachusetts. He feels that law enforcement in this country is under siege. “With the emphasis and the persecution of law enforcement officers, you know, the Ferguson, Missouri riots and the uproars that that caused and its put a lot of negative attention paid to law enforcement,” said Casey. “Law enforcement is the front lines out there. You know, every week you hear about some law enforcement officer that has given his life in support of his community, and my 30 years in the military line up pretty nicely with that.”
Casey feels that the military and law enforcement have a lot of the same sets of values to include selflessness. “You know, in the military, I wrote a blank check to the U.S. government for everything up to and including my life, and the law enforcement people in a sense, do the same thing,” said Casey. “They never know what they are going to face. You know, a routine traffic stop can turn deadly, and so, it takes a lot of dedication and persistence to be a law enforcement officer, and a lot of the integrity and a lot of the discipline that the military instills, it’s the same thing you find in law enforcement. And again, I have a tremendous amount of respect for law enforcement, but especially lately with a lot of the lawlessness that is happening in our society. Since such as the immigration issue all comes into play here. Really, law enforcement is kind of the thin blue line sometimes between civilized society and anarchy. Maybe that’s drawing too stark a picture, but I believe in many cases, that’s correct.”
Read Part 2 of the interview: Media vs Law Enforcement
