My days as an active alcoholic police officer
I was an alcoholic police officer back in 2007, 2008, and 2009, and these are my stories of what my days used to be like as an active alcoholic police officer. I was sober for probably about six months or so out of the few years that I was a police officer, and I consistently kept relapsing because I thought I could just not drink and keep living the same way. The picture of me from back then is from 2009.
Here is what my day looked like if I was working. I would wake up, and often I would try not to drink the day before I had to go to work, because it was difficult. But one night, I worked a 12-hour shift on a Saturday from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and then my friends came over and wanted to go out to the bowling alley, so I started drinking. I started drinking pitchers and pitchers of beer with them. Then we went back to my apartment and drank a whole bunch more liquor until 2:30 or 3 in the morning.
By the end of the night, my gun had been pointed at me. My friend was just playing around and pointed my gun at me — which was loaded, with one in the chamber, because I had thrown it down on my nightstand after I got home from work and went straight out to the bar. I didn't know anyone was coming over afterwards. And that's what happens when you're drunk. So one of my friends points my gun at me, fully loaded, with one in the chamber, his hand on the trigger, and he was just playing around. There was no call for that. He was just having fun. And I'm glad I didn't get shot that night. By the end of the night there were multiple people crying, all kinds of drama. I finally showered and went to bed about 3 a.m.
Going into work still drunk
Then I woke up at 5:30 a.m., still with alcohol in my system. And for some reason, I didn't want to call out to work, even though it would have probably been much safer. I had used so many sick days already that I hardly had any left, and I was afraid that if I called out, my alcoholism was going to be more obvious. So I went into work anyway. Looking back, realizing that was a bad decision — to just go into work still drunk, figuring, hey, I showered, I'm in a clean uniform, nobody will notice.
I sit down at roll call, and there's maybe eight of us in the room — several other officers, my sergeant, a couple of dispatchers. And my sergeant takes a sniff. It's Sunday morning. He goes, "One of y'all was out drinking last night." And I'm surprised he didn't look into which one of us it was. That's how close I came to getting in trouble at that point. I did end up having to quit over my alcoholism soon enough.
That day at work, I was feeling pretty good until about 8:30 or 9 in the morning. I had breakfast, and then I started to go into withdrawals. Then I was feeling absolutely miserable and sick. By 4 p.m. in the afternoon, I'm begging my sergeant to let me go home early because I'm not feeling good. By now it's obvious to him who was drinking the night before. And he does let me go early — it's a slow Sunday. Then I end up going right to the bar afterwards with the same friends I was out drinking with, to watch football. But I'm so sick at this point I don't even want a beer, which was unusual.
The drinking strategy around my shift schedule
Most of the time when I drank as a police officer, my strategy revolved around the schedule. I worked a 2-3 shift, where you'd have two days you'd work, then three days off, then work three, then two days off, and so on. Basically you'd work about half the days — you'd work like Monday and Tuesday, have Wednesday and Thursday off, work Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, have Monday and Tuesday off, then work Wednesday and Thursday, and then have Friday, Saturday, and Sunday off — all in 12-hour shifts.
What I would usually do in that schedule is drink hard as soon as I got off work. For example, if I had just worked Monday and Tuesday, I'd drink hard as soon as I got off, wake up the next day, drink hard again, and then take a day off to kind of detox and rest, so I could go into work at a hundred percent, work a couple of days, and then do it all over again. But by the end of my time as a police officer, I was getting so sick and so far into my alcoholism that I often was drinking the night before I had to go into work, and then coming in either with still some alcohol in me or in the middle of a detox. And I'm glad they finally let me go as a result of all the stuff I did while I was drinking off duty.
Sober almost ten years now
Here's another example of a day in my alcoholism as a police officer — and I'm sober 10 years now, almost 10 years, exactly a month from today as I'm filming this. Another typical day: after I'd work a Monday and Tuesday, the next Wednesday, if I worked night shift, I'd get off at seven in the morning. Sometimes I was tired enough that I didn't even want to drink until I woke up the next day. So I'd get off Wednesday morning and wake up Wednesday at like 5:30 in the afternoon. Then I'd go straight out and drink what to me was breakfast with my friends at the bar.
I drank for like five hours with them. I often would catch rides with other people, but I drunk drove a lot as a police officer, too, which is one of the many reasons I'm sober today. I'm glad all I ever did was wreck my own car and not anybody else — but that was just lucky that it went down that way. Then after I'd get home at about 11:30 at night, I would often drink until 10 in the morning, playing Call of Duty: Zombies and watching movies. Some nights I actually enjoyed myself, but lots of nights it was just sad, lonely drinking.
Occasionally I'd get somebody to come over, especially a girl. And often that was one bad decision or another — whether it was a strip club, or the phone book, or trying to get a coworker or somebody I knew from work to come over. That's where some complaints were generated as well, with my crazy drunk 3 a.m. Facebook messages. Those nights started to get more frequent and more scary. I would get sober sometimes after a night where I had nearly harmed myself or others, or where I'd embarrassed myself — I'd try and get sober. But as soon as I felt better, I just couldn't stand how boring it was.
Bored sober, and what the job really felt like
I remember being at work as a police officer sober and thinking I was so bored. A lot of being a police officer, at the departments I worked at, was just sitting in your patrol car waiting for a call, waiting for something to happen. A lot of the job was very boring. And then all of a sudden you'd go from boring to stressful as you got into a dangerous situation. There was also a lot of boring paperwork — you get called to something and almost all you're doing is filling out paperwork and taking notes as a result of that call. So one time when I had a few months sober as a police officer, I was thinking I either needed to do something crazy, like go in the Air Force, or to just drink. And it was easier to just drink.
If I had not been an alcoholic as a police officer, my performance would have been such that I would possibly still be a police officer today. The one thing I'll say that was good about my alcoholism is that it ruined my law enforcement career. I just couldn't keep drinking and doing dumb stuff off duty — going to strip clubs, sending crazy messages at 3 a.m. on Facebook and scaring people, creating drama with hookups with coworkers, drunk driving all over the place, going out to these bars and clubs.
One night when I was out drinking, I showed my badge to get into a bar, and the bouncer was a police officer himself, and he didn't think it was funny. He said, "You better watch yourself doing stuff like that. You'll end up one of them — that's not cool. And we don't care that you're a police officer. You're a police officer coming into this bar and you could lose your badge doing that." He was pretty nice about it. And yet it didn't matter. For some reason, I was just committed to being an alcoholic. I had given up on trying to stop by the end of my time as a police officer.
Even when I lost my job, my dad asked, "Boy, do you think your alcoholism had anything to do with this?" And I'm like, "No, it was the police department." Now I can see clearly — drunk driving all over the place — that if I had been a sober police officer, things would have gone really well for me, because I did my job well when I was sober.
Seeing people at their worst
At the same time, though, I probably wouldn't have chosen to be a police officer if I was sober, because one thing about being a police officer is you often see people at their worst. Whereas the life I live now — I go to yoga, I go to AA meetings, I have a family, I'm a father and a husband — I often see people at their best, or in a normal, healthy, happy life. But when I was a police officer, you're consistently running into people who are having a miserable day. You could look at that as a chance to help, but at the time, to me, it was purely stressful.
Being a police officer was also lonely, like doing those night shifts from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. Lots of times my friends would be in bed. I'd try and call my parents while I was at work to pass the time. But especially at 2, 3, 4 in the morning, sometimes we'd get up to Super Troopers kind of antics and start screwing around. And then that's often when you'd actually get a real call — somebody's hurt from drunk driving. It really did bother me when I was at work and I'd see the consequences of people drunk driving, flipping their cars over and getting hurt, going the wrong way down the street. I was arresting people for DUIs at work, and then I was off duty doing the same stuff I was arresting people for when I was on duty.
The hypocrisy I couldn't unsee
What made being a police officer really unbearable was looking at the hypocrisy and the irrationality in myself. But if I hadn't been an alcoholic, always chasing excitement in my life, I don't think I'd have been drawn to being a police officer either. I had no interest in law enforcement until I started drinking in college. After drinking for a couple of years and thinking about how I didn't want a boring office job, I got drawn to the idea that being a police officer would be an exciting way to pass my time.
My alcoholism meant that whenever I was off duty, I was either drinking or nursing a hangover. And when I was at work, I remember the routine of leaving. We were supposed to get off a little before seven, and when I was on day shift, the liquor store closed at seven. I remember flooring it, driving 20 or 30 miles an hour over the speed limit after getting off work, racing to the liquor store to grab gallons of vodka for the weekend because the liquor store was closed on Sunday. Looking back, it's insane to have been living that way.
The night my whole shift took me out
I'm glad the fellow officers took pretty good care of me. At the same time, many of the officers I worked with were alcoholics too. In fact, the officers on my shift were the ones who took me to my first strip club. I had the good sense to know that an alcoholic like me would be better off not going, but my whole shift went, including my sergeant, my corporal, and several other officers. There were only one or two who didn't go, probably the non-alcoholic ones. There were guys who were married, out late drinking and being unfaithful to their wives, who were there. We all went out to dinner, and they all egged me on and encouraged me to go with them.
I dropped a thousand dollars at the strip club that night, which was about a week and a half of my paycheck, and they all thought it was hilarious and a great story. Yet after all of them went home, and some of them were alcoholics as bad as me, I ended up being the last one there and drunk driving all across town to get home. To be fair, the whole time I was on that shift they only invited me out once. Maybe it's stereotypical and they felt like they had to do it. But once I went that first time, I couldn't be bothered to wait for another invite from the whole shift.
So I started going back on my own with some of the same people. I definitely went out multiple times with several of the other officers. Me and one of the other 25-year-old guys would say, hey, what are you doing? Nothing? You want to drink and go to the strip club tonight? Yeah, let's go. But I'm not spending a thousand dollars this time. Then I'd go and spend hundreds of dollars anyway. Those police buddies were the main people I went out to the club with.
Why I'm grateful for a sober life today
I'm really grateful to have a sober life today. I'm glad I lived through that period, because I was doing lots of dangerous things, as I've described. And it's good for me to remember these stories, because it's easy to look around and judge other people and say, look how crazy this person's driving, look at how this person's drinking and ruining their life. It helps to remember that 15 years ago, that was me.
After I stopped being a police officer, I thought I could drink reasonably, since I didn't have my gun and my badge anymore, or my squad mates. That worked well enough for a while, but eventually, in my experience, sobriety became the only option. I probably could have kept my police career if I had just admitted I was an alcoholic, gone to treatment, gotten sober, and worked a program in AA. They probably would have kept me. But I'm glad I didn't go down that path. I'm glad I became a YouTuber and Twitch streamer, a musician, a crypto guy, and all that other stuff instead, and you can follow more of that journey through my Life playlist.
So I hope you enjoyed these police officer stories, and I hope you got something out of seeing a day in my life as an active alcoholic police officer, and what that was really like.