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On Campus: The police officer

Posted at 10:56 PM on January 14, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Economy, News Cut on Campus

Corey Anorve-Andress, 19, of St. Paul wants to be a police officer, and that may come as bad news for his cousin, who runs in a St. Paul gang.

He's been at Century College since last summer, taking some general classes, including forensics and biology. He plans to get a degree there, then attend Metro State University to learn more about the psychology of juveniles.

He might be able to teach the class. "Where I grew up there are a lot of negative influences and a lot of bad things and I've seen how it looked on the other side of law and it wasn't good. So I started to help people out and I figured out I'm a leader and people started to listen to me. (I was) saving them from a lot of things," he said.

"Most kids were African American and they wanted to do what everyone else was doing in St. Paul, which is fighting and drugs and all that crap," he said. So he organized football games instead.

He says he talks to cops, even when he gets pulled over for a broken taillight, and asks what they like about being a cop, "and they say it's the best job ever. I always get their card and then I call them."

Economic worries? "Right now there's a lot of people trying to be a cop," he says, suggesting that may be because of the economy.

He's not thrilled by the idea of wearing a gun, and he realizes the nightmare scenario of living his dream. He might face his gang-member cousin. "I told him, 'if I catch you at the wrong time, I'm going to have to do what I'm supposed to do, but I said, 'if you need help, if you need help getting out of it, or you need some kind of protection, I'm there for you; I'm not going to just ditch you.'"

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Comments (1)

Even with all the job losses in America we Americans are still better off then many in the world that are suffering from extreme poverty and hunger.
I do encourage people to consider what jobs will be available in the next few years when taking classes in college.

Posted by Scot Harvey | January 15, 2009 9:50 AM