Officer Maizul Cobeo

 

  • Age: 25
  • Early Years: South Florida; moved to Cary, NC at age 12 (parents Puerto Rican)
  • College: East Carolina University
  • Asheville Resident: 4 years this August
  • Years w/APD: 3 years, 9 months
  • Rank: Senior Police Officer
  • Current assignment: Patrol officer, answer calls for service, conduct traffic enforcement, field training officer, member crisis negotiation team

Q: Why’d you decide to go into police work?

Cobeo: I actually didn’t know I wanted to go into police work until the last semester of college. I was a criminal justice major and I double-majored in English. And as I got to the end I realized, oh crap, I should probably find a job…figure out what I want to do. And what actually helped me decide to go into law enforcement was I did an internship with the Greenville (North Carolina) Police Department and I worked with their Victims’ Advocate program for a semester, so I got to do the civil side of domestic violence response. And as a result of that, I did a couple of ride-alongs and I’d go and see the criminal side of law enforcement, so I (knew) this is what I want to do, go and help people in domestic violence situations. That was ultimately what opened that door for me, was having that experience with the Victim Advocate. So now I’m here.

Q: How do you think your ethnicity, your background affects your police work here?

Cobeo: I think it’s—the demographic in South Florida is just very different than Asheville. I think it’s a much more diverse place.…So I think that experience growing up, that environment growing up – not necessarily law enforcement, people professions in general helped me learn how to talk to people and be able to connect to people. Honestly, now that I’ve lived in North Carolina for this long it’s more of a culture shock for me to go down to South Florida than it is up here.

Q: Are there any examples of being able to talk to people ….

Cobeo: Not anything specifically. I’m just this weird, sort-of Spanish-speaking kid. I didn’t really learn how to speak Spanish growing up. I have an older brother who has Asperger’s, and my parents wanted him to focus on learning one language and really grasping one language really well. So as a result being the younger kid I didn’t grow up speaking Spanish. So my ability to speak Spanish has kind of been cultivated over the last 5 to 6 years. My brother — he’ll be 28 this year; and my grandmother lives at home with my parents — she’s ailing, and she speaks much better Spanish than English and that’s always been the case. As I’ve gotten older I’ve had more opportunity. So that in and of itself has been helpful whenever I come in contact with Spanish speakers in Asheville, but I would say 95 percent of the job is talking to people and you’ve got to be comfortable talking to just about everybody. You spend all of the time just asking “So tell me what happened.”

Q: I’m curious what you have found so far to be some of the most fulfilling experiences in your job.

Cobeo: It’s hard to pick. I’ve been on nightshift for the last three years which I really enjoy. I don’t have any intention to go on day shift anytime soon. So it’s really hard to pick one. One of the things that I’ve found really gratifying is traffic enforcement, specifically DWI enforcement. I think this is one of those professions that there is some times when you can feel like you are not making a difference because you deal with the same calls for service all the time, you go to the same locations all the time. Asheville is beer city, and we deal with a lot of people who come to enjoy the beer. And there’s crime that comes as a result of that that we respond to on a regular basis. And sometimes it can feel – not that it’s not gratifying but at least with traffic enforcement, at least DWI enforcement, there is that sense that you’ve made an immediate difference. Because drunk driver or an impaired driver could kill somebody. They could kill themselves. We see horror stories of crashes that occur as a result of drunk driving so that’s one of those things that I’ve found really gratifying.

Also, domestic violence response. Not every domestic violence situation you respond to goes the way you prefer, you know. The victims don’t want help or they’re not always ready for help. They’re not ready to start processing and healing at that time. But every once in a while you get to respond and help somebody who really needs you right when you show up, and you get to connect them, essentially, with the resources to get them long-term help for their situation. So that’s a really awesome feeling, because you get to help not just that person but also their family. A lot of times we respond to domestic violence situations where there are kids present. Kids growing up in that environment, maybe they’re not being directly abused but that’s affecting them — watching Mom and Dad fight or get hurt or things like that. It affects how they grow up and how they view the world, so those are probably I would say the two biggest things. And I’m sure I could probably, if we sat here long enough, think of specific calls for service but it’s hard.

Q: One thing that I talked with Sgt. Loveland about – we just sort of wandered into it. What did you think of cops when you were a kid?

Cobeo: I didn’t have that much exposure to police officers when I was a kid. I can recall two specific moments when I saw a police officer. One, we got pulled over in South Florida … we had a busted taillight and we were on our way back from a long trip and we knew that, we just hadn’t had a chance to change it. So there was that, and I don’t think my parents got a ticket or anything for that. I was really young at the time. And then another time my brother got caught shoplifting at Walmart. And not only did Mom let the LP rip him a new one, and not only did she rip him a new one, she called the local police department — I think it would have probably been West Palm Beach County Sheriff ‘s office — and she asked them to send a deputy over and talk to my brother about why you shouldn’t shoplift and how it can affect you for the rest of your life and all these things. But he never shoplifted again. They sent one officer over and that was pretty much the end of it.… There’s not an awful lot that goes on in Cary, NC, so we just didn’t see the police out. Cary kind of shuts down at 9 pm. You had an appreciation of where you shouldn’t speed in town and that was about it. I will say this — my mom worked as an ESL teacher in Florida.… The school she taught in was pretty rough, and so she had a great relationship with the school resource officers. And I always remember her speaking very highly of those resource officers. I don’t think that was a direct impact necessarily on my decision to become a police officer….

Q: How has your time with Asheville Police Department changed your perspective?

Cobeo: I would say first that police work is very hard. It’s a lot harder than I think it’s portrayed in television. I watch a lot less cop shows now than I used to growing up. You can only watch so much TV before you cringe at all the times people’s fingers are on the trigger, that kind of thing. So I watch a lot less cop shows now than I used to. But cop work’s really hard. I didn’t realize how hard training was to become a police officer. Academy requires – and every year it increases (but) when I went through police academy we were required to do over 600 hours of training, so basically a semester’s worth of school to even qualify at the state level to hold the office of police officer. And then APD does a whole bunch of training on top of that. They have a four-month field training program where you work with different officers for each phase. Each phase is roughly 160 hours. Usually it’s a little bit more than that. And so you do training in that regard and then on top of that you’ve got, you know, yearly in-service training; we have to qualify on firearms every year; there are certain state-mandated training topics we’re required to cover every year. Every law enforcement office picks their own topics to complete the 24 hours. And that’s just baseline to keep your certification. And on top of that there’s all sorts of other training that you can sign on for, all sorts of training that they send you to. I tell people all the time, I enjoyed being a criminal justice major, but being an English major is probably the most beneficial thing I could have done for myself before coming into this profession because all I did was analyze literature for three years while I was in school. So that sort of analytical writing and thinking, critical thinking development, has helped me as a police officer way more than my criminal justice degree.

I did intern for one police department and I worked for my school’s police department (as) a student patrol officer and was a glorified door locker. And then working out here, it gives you an appreciation for every city has their different challenges. One of the things that’s different (from Asheville) in Greenville, North Carolina, is the gang problem is much more spread out through the city. And while we have gang problems in Asheville, we have more localized hot spots. And so it manifests differently. Crime is crime but it manifests differently between the different cities and that affects how training is handled in individual cities. I would never think — I could not go to even Henderson County and be a police officer down there without having to go through their training program — you know, how they enforce the law in their city pertinent to the needs of their community. So that’s one thing: a cop isn’t a cop isn’t a cop. You get the baseline stuff all the way across the board but you really want to police in the city or the county that you work in.

Q: What do you feel is your responsibility to the community as a member of the police?

Cobeo: I think I have a big responsibility to, well, first off to keep the community safe. And at the end of the day, I think a lot of people — you know we talk about the thin blue line. People who want to hurt people or people who want to stay safe. There are times when you really get to appreciate that in a very physical sense; you’re in the situation and you’re literally are holding somebody back from hurting someone else. So I think primarily that’s part of the risk that we adopt coming into the profession, is understanding that you will have to physically put yourself in between danger and other people. Good examples of that are the recent, unfortunate school shootings that we see across the country, where law enforcement officers — we’re trained now, we hear that there’s shots fired and we show up and there’s shots being fired, our directive now is to not wait. You go in, you identify the threat, you neutralize the threat. So I would say that’s my first responsibility to the community, is to have an appreciation for the fact that my physical safety may be put at risk to keep somebody else safe. And then aside from that, to make sure I really have an understanding — to have a wide knowledge base of what I can and cannot do. There’s a lot of state laws that govern the role of law enforcement, and we have department policies that make those laws even more specific in how they apply to our city police department. So I have the responsibility to have that knowledge and to know and be confident in my ability to act within the law and within policy while enforcing the law and keeping people safe.

And it kind of goes back to your previous question. It’s a balancing act. You gain an appreciation for the fact that life is filled with a lot more gray areas than I think that I was raised to believe. You know you’re kind of raised to believe that everything’s kind of black and white or right and wrong, and while I think foundationally and morally and ethically that’s true, you gain appreciation for people’s life experience when you deal with them and why they’re doing the things they doing — what might be causing that. So I think me as a police officer, any police officer has a responsibility to know the law, to know the policies that apply to them as cops in Asheville, and to really act within those parameters. I tell people all the time, you can do whatever you want in this profession. If you’re interested in going out and getting drugs off the street, you can do that. If you want to get drunk drivers all night long, you can do that. If you want to be a school resource officer, you can do all those things and you can get as much out of your career as you want, but you have to know the rules and you have to play by the rules.

Q: Are there some of those state laws that you can think of that people just aren’t aware of?

Cobeo: I think there are state laws that people aren’t aware of how specific they are. I think we have a general understanding of — I’m trying to think of one specifically — weaving in the roadway. You know you’re not supposed to weave; you know you’re supposed to drive in a straight line. The law doesn’t say “weaving.” That word is not what’s illegal, it’s failure to maintain lane control. And that can be going left of center, so you cross the double yellow line suddenly you’re going left of center — that’s a different charge, versus you made a really wide right turn, you came into oncoming traffic and then cut back. That’s failure to maintain lane control. So when you talk about it, you know they were weaving in their lane, there’s a lot of specific things that are at play there.

Domestic violence is another one. I think the laws in North Carolina do a great job to trying to protect victims. Sometimes people don’t understand (that) domestic violence crime is something we do not have discretion in. Most misdemeanor crimes we have discretion in. I can pull a car over for speeding; I don’t have to write that car a ticket. But if I show up at a domestic violence scene and there is somebody who has obviously been assaulted by somebody else still on scene, or we have evidence to tell us who did the assaulting, the law tells us we “shall” arrest. I don’t get a choice in situations like that, and I think people on the receiving end of that end up very upset, understandably. Nobody likes to go to jail. But those are things that people don’t necessarily understand. And sometimes I’d rather have the law the way it is than otherwise. Because you have some people who, because they’re caught in a cycle of victimization, aren’t willing to ask for help. And so that puts us in a position where even if you’re not able to ask for help for the night, or for the next how many hours we’ll be able to keep you safe, keep you from getting assaulted again, the law’s very specific. It takes time to really learn and appreciate it, and apply it correctly.

Q: I want to ask you a weird question. Maybe not too weird, because you’re an English major. Do you read a whole lot about policing and current trends in policing, and is there anything that you recommend to people to read?

Cobeo: Most of what I focus on now — I’m also working on my master’s in technical and professional communication. So a lot of my free time is absorbed by doing all my classes — online, which I hate by the way. I’m almost done; after this semester I’ve got a semester-and-a-half left and I’ll be finished with it and that’ll be great and glorious. I miss the academic sitting in class, talking — I miss that. So I don’t have a whole lot of free time, but a lot of what I have been doing — part of it was I had the freedom to select the topic in one of my courses last semester, speaking about after-school shooting. They’ve actually done a lot of research, you know — empirical, peer-reviewed research — to talk about current trends in law enforcement; how to train police and sort of the future of that training. And one of the big things that they’re talking about, law enforcement is exactly where they need to be as far as how we respond to an active-shoot situation, which is find the threat, neutralize the threat, and then what we’re transitioning to now is — and hopefully they start including educators in this part of it -— the campaign is called “Stop the Bleeding.” We’re getting past “OK, the school shooting happened,” we’re getting into how can we save more lives. Because you have some people that it just takes EMS a while to get to them. So they’re starting to transition more into keeping tourniquets in the classroom, keeping first aid supplies in the classroom.

And it’s unfortunate — I wish this wasn’t a problem. I think part of it is that from my perspective as a police officer is we can’t know what people are thinking and when they’re going to do something to hurt other people. We have to respond the best we can. That’s why we train. That’s why we spend so much time in the classroom, at the range, and all those other things. It’s not because we want to hurt people; it’s because, God forbid the situation should ever arise where we do have to pull our firearm and pull that trigger to preserve life, that we’re accurate — that we are applying tactics in such a way that keep people safe, keep us safe and end the situation more quickly. And so the transition now, a lot of the research is showing that we can reduce numbers by teaching hemorrhage control, so right now I’ve got my tourniquet in my pocket. We try to keep tourniquets now on us. Three-and-a-half years ago, we weren’t issued tourniquets. If people had tourniquets it was because they purchased their own. They transitioned into OK, we need to train our officers to use a tourniquet. Because if they get shot, God forbid, they can render aid to themselves and potentially save their own life — and get back in the fight if they have to. Or know how to save each other’s lives. So those are ways we’re sort of changing how we’re doing and kind of integrating community involvement into what we do as police officers. It’s one of those things where you have to balance. OK, my job is safety and security — I don’t have time, because other people are getting hurt I may not have time to stop and render aid. So now bringing educators, bringing business owners into that conversation — we pray to God that this never happens, but if it does we want to be ready so that we can stop all preventable deaths, essentially.

So I spend a lot of time researching that. Our command staff and our supervisors are very communicative with us. We get a lot of articles sent to our in-boxes, videos sent to us. I have a sergeant who’s pretty engaged in our training; I’ve actually been pretty fortunate with my supervisors and all of them have been pretty active in having these conversations of look, this is what’s happening nationally. How does this apply to us here today in Asheville – to our jobs? We’ll watch YouTube videos, and it’s not necessarily to Monday-morning quarterback, it’s to learn from situations that other officers find themselves in. It’s not to criticize, because in that situation you don’t know what’s going through somebody’s head because there’s the unintentional, involuntary physical response to stress. So you have to combat that with your brain, essentially, and figure out how you’re going to respond. I’ve had a lot of really great supervisors who take the time to talk about high-stress situations, to talk about how that would apply in Asheville, to talk about how that fits in with what our policy says about certain things. So that’s pretty good.

Q: What are you going to do with your master’s. Are you going to stay in, do you think?

A: Stay in law enforcement? Absolutely. I don’t know what else I would do with my time, honestly. One of the things I did know when I was getting to the end of my college experience is that sitting at a desk was not for me, and so this job — I mean yes, it’s Asheville; Asheville’s really not that big of a city, but you never know what you’re going to get when you go into work. And so that’s part of the danger but also part of the fun, I think. Part of why you choose to get into the field. Yes, it’s a lot of paperwork. Yes, it’s a lot of writing. But every day’s different.

And so I would like to eventually, when I’m no longer as young and able-bodied, to transition into teaching. I’d love to teach freshman comp courses, like English comp at a local community college would make me happy. But as far as also teaching and training police officers in the future, I’m doing that now. Part of my work is FTO, field training officer now, and so I get a little bit of that. So I’d love to do that eventually, and also get into curriculum writing I think would be a lot of fun. And something I discovered for the first time this semester was grant writing and grant proposal writing. I was like this is awesome, this is kind of cool. And that’s one thing, I’m sure unless you were to look into it, that an average member of the community may not understand. Because a lot of our specialty units in Asheville are grant-funded. They’re not a hundred percent city-funded. I think Housing is a good example; Housing’s like half and half city-funded but also I believe there’s a grant in place — I don’t know if it’s a federal or state — that puts us working with the Asheville Housing Authority. Our DWI Task Force is a grant-funded team. I believe that grant comes from the state. And so there are things that are on my radar that hadn’t been a concept before this semester. That’s stuff that I would like to do long-term … eventually get into hiring and recruitment later down the road.

Q: What do you see as the role of the community in the success of the Asheville Police Department?

Cobeo: I think the role of the community should be to a certain extent to let the police do their work when they’re working. One of the things that is very stressful when you’re dealing with a situation — this actually happened up Charlotte Street maybe a year ago —I pulled a car over for speeding. He was going 55 in a 25 so he was going 30 miles over the speed limit up here on Charlotte Street. And I pulled him over and I was in the middle of having a conversation with him about why was he speeding, where was he going, did he know what the speed limit was, that kind of thing. And a community member who I believe was concerned — I don’t believe he had any ill intent or anything like that — came up to the traffic stop, and also was a little bit too close for me to feel safe in what I was doing without knowing why he was there. I think you would find that most police officers are pretty approachable when they’re not in the middle of responding to something. Another example of this — fortunately, I’ll start by saying the call was unfounded, it was not a shots fired situation. Somebody heard what they thought was shots. It was at the Asheville Mall on South Tunnel Road. And so a call came in, “Shots fired, Asheville Mall.” We went hauling out there; we’ve got probably 10 police officers out there; we’ve got our rifles out because we still don’t know there’s no gun in play at this point. And people were stopping us as we were coming out of the mall asking us what’s going on. And it’s one of those things where I’m like, I’m happy to have this conversation with you but not right now.

And it’s a similar relationship to how we work with our supervisors on scene, where you have a rapidly developing scene that’s not the time to stop and ask, “Hey, Sarge, why did you ask me to do this?” If sergeant says do this, do it now. We snap to. We don’t ask the sergeant “Well, why?” — especially in a rapidly evolving scene like that. You have to trust the chain of command at that point. You have to trust the leadership, trust their experience, things like that, to point you in the way you should go. And I’ve never had a supervisor who had an issue with me coming to them after the fact and saying hey, I want to understand for my knowledge, because eventually I want your job one day. I want to understand why you do things the way you do them. Can you tell me why this went this way? And my supervisors, they all have a lot more experience than I do, they’ve all had their jobs a lot longer than I have, they see the job differently than I do. And so they’ve always been really good about sharing that information with me. And I understand — I still get that gut-dropping sensation when I blue lights behind me if they try and pull me over or not. I totally understand that feeling.… And it’s hard to say because I don’t necessarily know what community members think all the time, but that would basically be what I would say. I would say most officers in Asheville, I would think I’ve worked here long enough, I enjoy everyone I work with. I work with some really awesome people. And they’re not the sort of people who are going to try to infringe on your First Amendment rights, they’re not going to be “Stop recording.” It’s a lot of, “Please back up.” Because when people start sort of encroaching on what you’re doing now you’re concerned with your situation, your attention’s divided with whatever potentially evolving situation is going on over here. So that would be one thing. And I say this — it wasn’t that long ago I wasn’t a police officer. There was just a lot I didn’t understand about what they do and how they do it.

Another vignette, because I tend to go on, when I was in college — it was actually after my 25th birthday — I woke up to the sounds of what sounded like a police standoff in my neighborhood. I was thinking to myself, what in God’s name is going on? I go out to the front window and I see the Greenville Police Department has surrounded this house, there are spotlights from the cars on this house, there’s a police officer on the PA system giving commands for the people inside to come out with their hands up. And I’m looking around and I’m seeing an inner perimeter of people dealing with the house, I see a wide perimeter of officers who have rifles, and at that moment I’m like you know, I’m just going to stay inside my apartment right now because I don’t need to get involved with whatever’s going on. And I didn’t get involved. I did find out later that what had happened was one of the residents in that apartment had pointed a gun at a taxi cab driver. After the cab driver dropped him off he refused to pay and he presented a weapon to him. And so that’s not good; that’s illegal. And that’s why the police were there. There are people who in that situation would have left their apartments and gone out to the nearest cop they saw and say, “Hey, what’s going on?” And in that particular situation the officers need to be focused because they’re potentially dealing with somebody with a firearm in that house. That’s a good example. If people have questions after a situation is going on, you grab an officer and say hey what happened out here. Most folks are willing to talk. But that’s something I have an issue with — not while they’re in the middle.

Q: Are there particular steps that you would encourage APD and/or the public to take that might improve in Asheville?

Cobeo: I don’t know about particular steps. I can say that I’m really proud of the department, especially our chief right now. She, I think, has tried really hard to sort of mend some of the issues with the community that have been in place since before I came to this community. And she can only do the best with what she has when she gets here, you know. She’s a big proponent for training. She is a big proponent for helping us try to be the best that we can be, and that means encouraging more money for training and things like that. And I’m not saying there’s not work to be done, but I think at the end of the day — it goes both ways — just remember that it’s people dealing with people. That’s part of “Why are you here in the first place?” “Why you having this conversation?” Ultimately I’m an imperfect person; I make mistakes every single day. I try to make sure the mistakes I make don’t negatively impact somebody else. It goes back to that whole training thing, you know — you don’t want to infringe on somebody’s rights. But I know that I’m not perfect; I’m not the best person I can be every single day. And neither is everybody in the community.

And I think, you know when you were talking about that omnibus, people sort of talk about the police — I’ve been on the receiving end of those conversations with people that I grew up with, people that I love very much. Suddenly they’re talking about well the police should do this and the police should do that. My rebuttal to that was well, when I deal with the public, anytime that I work with the officers that I work with, we treat people with respect. We hold each other accountable. You see an officer saying something or getting hijacked, horse-collar ‘em, pull them back. We tell each other that all the time. It’s not worth a complaint or the potential damage to an officer’s reputation. If you see something, grab that officer, pull him aside. And it’s funny because you’ll tell people — people will say the police this and the police that and you’ll tell them well my experience is different from that. And they’ll say well I’m not talking about you specifically. You can’t have it both ways. As law enforcement officers we’re expected to treat each member of the community that we come in contact with as an individual, to deal with their specific problems, and to not hold their past against them. It’s actually illegal. You can’t just arrest somebody or pull somebody over because they have a record for something. We have to treat them based on how they’re behaving that specific day.

You’ll hear police officers talk about folks that we’re used to dealing with all the time, and you get to know ‘em. You’re out with over time and there’s some people you’ll deal with over time and you say when this person is sober, they’re the nicest person in the world, but when they’re impaired they always want to fight. And you just learn how to deal with people where they’re at when you come in contact with them. So I think it’s people working with people, trying to the best by people. I guarantee you nobody is a police officer, in this city or in any jurisdiction, because of the money or because of the fast cars or because of all the toys and anything like that. Because you adopt a high amount of responsibility and liability when you function in the world of the law enforcement officer. Because the rules that govern our conduct are very, very strict. And so I think that’s one thing to put out there, is that it’s not because of any perceived glamor. The job is not glamorous. You deal with all sorts of stuff. I tell my parents maybe five percent of what I do on a regular basis because the other 95 percent would scare the mess out of them and I don’t want to do that to them. They’re already worried; I don’t want to add tangible stories to things they’re already freaked out about. So yeah, it’s people dealing with people.

Q: One more. Do you have any personal observations or comments regarding the role of a police officer in today’s society.

Cobeo: I think, and it’s part of what I already said, part of being a police officer is being proactive and being open-minded. At the end of the day, everyone’s goal is to go home safely, to make sure that the people we deal with are treated with respect and safety. You know, that’s the big thing, and sometimes that means you’re going to have to put handcuffs on somebody, and sometimes that means you’re going to have to use force, and ultimately at the end of the day is to go home safely. And honestly, you have a personal responsibility to make sure that that happens. As far as personality types that end up as law enforcement officer, you can’t be a person that needs to be spoon-fed everything and be in this profession. You have to have some kind of wherewithal and self-awareness and also awareness of your community and coworkers.

So I would say as much as we have more training, that we have newer equipment, all those things — at the end of the day, personal responsibility to make sure that you and the team go home at the end of the day, at the end of the night, whatever shift you work or that kind of thing. And whatever that means. And that means being as trained up as you can be, being as familiar with the law as you can be, being really comfortable with tactics and strategy and things like that. I would say that that’s the biggest thing. It’s dangerous to be a police officer these days. I’m not saying it’s less dangerous for any member of the public. We’re reaching a point where people will call and make a false report to law enforcement and cops show up and people open fire on them out of nowhere. And as my parents always say, you know, things weren’t this bad 20 years ago, 30 years ago… Maybe. I don’t know. I wasn’t around. But understanding that we live in a world where people mean other people harm, it’s kind of on us to make sure that we are as ready for that as we can be, collectively as a group.