'An amazing career'

On June 24, after 34 years with the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office, Maj. Paul Brown hung up his uniform.

“I have loved this job and this work; it has been an amazing career,” Brown said prior to his retirement as he sat in front of empty boxes waiting to be packed.

At his retirement luncheon on June 25, Sheriff Larry Ashley promoted Brown, a captain at the time, to the rank of major as a tribute to his three-plus decades with the department.

Brown's law enforcement career began in June 1977, when he was hired as a jailer for Okaloosa County, just two weeks after he got married.

“That job was how you cut your teeth in the sheriff’s department back then,” Brown said. “If you proved yourself, you got to go out on patrol.”

In October 1977, after a half day ride-a-long with a deputy, Brown was tossed car keys and told to go to work. On his first call as a deputy, Brown said he reached down to crank open the car window and inadvertently turned on his blue lights unbeknownst to him.

“The new guys on the block, the ones that were just eat up with being a deputy, could always be identified by the way that they jumped to use the blue light,” Brown said. “I headed out of the parking lot and out onto the road and the traffic started to part like the red sea. I thought in my youth, ‘Wow look how they respect the patrol car,’" he said.

“The one stigma that I did not want to have attached to me would have been radio broadcast, had it not been for a senior deputy, Dave Murphy, who saw me and just quietly said, ‘Ya lights are on.’ Of course I then spent ten minutes trying to figure out how to turn them off and realized when I saw the switch how they were turned on,” Brown said with a smile.

For the first two years Brown said, he "didn’t have an opinion unless someone gave it to him," and that was the best way to learn.

 “I learned to think on my feet and be respectful of the person I was sent out to deal with,” he said. “And that always seemed to work and got me into fewer fights.”

He had help along the way. Brown remembers deputies like Roy Parker and Cliff Florence showing him the ropes. Larry Bowling, Ron Terry, Dick Dristoll, Chuck McCoy, Joe Nelson, Hank Berry, Marvin Bass, Buzz Hughes, and Richard Posey were all mentors for the new deputy, and they left their mark on him. Everett Helms, “Mama Jo” Hunter and Jewels Borio also tucked Brown under their wings. He apologized for names he omitted and people he didn't thank for their leadership.

His first years were forms on carbon paper, no portable radios and no cellular phones. Equipment consisted of personal dress shoes or Vietnam-era combat boots, a utility belt and a border patrol-style holster that was "like patent leather" and prone to stretch, causing guns to fall out.

Deputies wore grey Stetson style hats, and Brown still wears one. When a deputy responded to a call, he called the communications dispatcher when they arrived to say that they were OK.

Brown tells the story of a call where a woman asked to have her large son Baker Acted –– to take someone with suspected mental problems into custody for their own safety.

“I started to use their rotary dial phone and he (the son) walked over and depressed the button on the phone cradle to disconnect the call," Brown said. "This went on several times before the scuffle began. We wrestled in their Florida room and finally out into the yard. It became a sheer case of someone was going to wear someone down and there were moments I was afraid that someone was me.”

“Eventually I heard my supervisor pull up in the yard and he wanted to jump me for not responding that I was OK at the call, and I was not OK at the call and glad to see him,” Brown said with a laugh.

He talked of the 1978 Plymouth Fury, with a 440 cubic inch engine that was "like a guided missile with a single bubble gum machine blue light on top.
 Brown can even describe the evolution of the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s badge to its current size and makeup. It is the people he most fondly recalled, however.

 “We have all raised our families together, suffered losses and shared joys," Brown said. "It will be strange not to get up and go to work with them every day.”

Brown credits his wife of 34 years, Brenda, who raised eight children with him, for much of his success as a law enforcement officer. She supported him through five sheriffs' administrations, the effort it took to work his way up through the ranks and the time missed with family, he said.

 “I have not always had a lot of time for family, like in hurricane evacuations," Brown said. "She took the kids and left while I was here taking care of everybody else’s homes and families.”

And communication with his wife about his job was difficult at times.

 “Sometimes you are so frustrated when you finally get home that you don’t want to talk and sometimes you just can’t talk about things and your better half always gets that,” he said. “Brenda is a perfect companion and she has always understood through the years.”

And while there are many good memories Brown will take with him, there are others he would just as soon forget.

 One in particular stands out.

“We answered a call one night to home that was the typical American home, toys in the yard –– a Big Wheel –– just like the toys in our yard, and a little picket fence," Brown said. "It had been storming and lightning had hit the back of the home and started a fire.

"The mother was home with two small children. She called for help, grabbed one of her two children up and ran out the door. We assume she was going to put the children in the safety of the car and try to put the fire out. But when she got into the yard with the first child, lightning hit again; it hit her, and killed her and the child."

"The younger toddler was still inside the home with the small fire and the starkness of the scene was almost overwhelming to us as we responded,” he said with tears in his eyes. “That memory just makes me tear up my man card and throw it out there doesn’t it?”

So what words of advice does Brown have for new deputies?

“The best advice I could give to anyone starting out in law enforcement is to try to treat the people the way you would want to be treated if the situation was reversed,” he said. “Deal with them as human beings who have made mistakes but are still due respect. Treat them as best they will let you treat them in the moment.”