Rick Tinsley Forges Relationships With Community

When Rick Tinsley landed in San Angelo in 1995, he’d never heard of the place. Indeed, not many people who grew up in the northeast could identify Angelo on a map if asked, but coming from the D.C. area and having spent bits of his life living all over the world didn’t make San Angelo stand out.

Even though the town was small and the beaches of Florida—where he’d spent most of the previous 10 years—were far away, Tinsley knew when he arrived in San Angelo that he was he was here to stay.

“I have two daughters and they were in high school.” Tinsley said. “And I always told them that wherever we were when they got to high school age, then we would stay until they finished, because I didn’t want them moving around in high school.”

Indeed the Tinsleys had done a lot of moving before settling in to the west Texas landscape; Rick recalls time spent in Okinawa, Japan and another post in Egypt, both of which were one-year stretches.

“It was kind of interesting because it was a classified location,” Tinsley says of his Egypt tour. “[My wife] didn’t even know which country I was in…I couldn’t tell her what time of day it was, I couldn’t tell her the weather, the mission, none of that stuff.”

Rick and Mary Tinsley have been married since 1979, and his through a career as an Air Force Firefighter, the couple have seen a lot of different landscapes together, including a few apart.

With two daughters now grown and in different parts of Texas, San Angelo has become home to the SAPD Community Services Liaison Officer and his wife, even if the city brought about the start of something new.

“It was not my childhood dream [to become a police officer],” Tinsley says honestly, but it’s a job he’s come to love. “I grew up always wanting to be a firefighter, and I spent 22 years as a firefighter in the Air Force. So when I retired form the Air Force, I knew I was going to have start something new at the bottom, so I thought I’d start something brand new and became a police officer,” he said.

Tinsley had initially come to San Angelo to be a fire instructor, and following his retirement from the military, decided he no longer wanted to work on base. Fifteen years later, Tinsley’s still proud of his post, and has recently taken on the role of coordinating efforts with the public.

“A big initiative in policing right now is community policing, where we try to get the community involved in helping us. And it’s a nationwide initiative,” Tinsley says, then offers explanation. “If I drive down the street and people are doing criminal activity, they quit. But when you drive down the street, you’re not a threat. So you all, the public, can see more than we can see sometimes.”

In his post as Community Services Liaison Officer, Tinsley works to build fortified relationships with the public, and enhance the information flow between law enforcement and the community.

Some of the approaches used by Tinsley and the SAPD include dissemination of information via multi-media channels and social networking, and community events that are open to the public. Tinsley cites Facebook ‘Blue Watch’ groups and the recent Coffee With a Cup event held at Stango’s Coffee as examples of outreach.

Blue Watch, he says, are groups divided up to cover different sectors of the city and to provide more detailed and concentrated information about crime in those areas. The groups are private, and members have to complete an application and pass a mini background check in order to be added to the groups.

“It’s kind of intended to replace Neighborhood Watch,” Tinsley says. “People don’t have time to go to meetings anymore. If you go to Starbucks or Burger King or anywhere anymore, what do you see? You see people on their cell phones…so they can be checking their Blue Watch page, five, six times a day, but it’s more immediate, they don’t have to go to meetings.”

The idea behind the Blue Watch groups is to not only speed up the dissemination of information, but to make it available to a larger scope of people and to provide a channel of communication facilitated by the police department.

So far, Tinsley has been in this position since April and says that the position is good for him because it forces him to come out of his shell a bit more and talk to people. He describes himself as the quiet type, but nonetheless wanted to give the job a try.

“I just thought I’d give it a shot to see what the job was like,” he said. “I feel like a can make a bit of an impact on our connection with the public.”

Previously, Tinsley had served as a patrol officer, but has also worked in special ops and as a detective as well. His real passion, however, has been his work with the negotiation team, which he is still a part of.

“We don’t have many hostage situations, but I have negotiated several barricaded subjects and suicidal subjects and stuff like that,” Tinsley says. “You’re dealing one-on-one with a person in crisis and you absolutely are their link to the outside world. When you have a positive outcome it’s very rewarding to know that through your efforts and the efforts of the team…we have brought that person from the brink of suicide to get help.”

Tinsley says he has his share of stories from his time on the negotiating team that remind him he’s doing some good in the community, but there’s one story in particular that he’ll never forget.

“It happened several years ago where an individual, his life had kind of fallen apart that day. He barricaded himself in his house, and after several attempts to talk to one of our sergeants on the phone, he would refuse to talk to her so we were called out,” Tinsley says. “…I probably spoke to him for a little more than an hour, [before] he agreed to come out and let us take care of the situation.

“We make it a point to always go up and introduce ourselves whenever we negotiate a situation,” Tinsley continues, “so when I walked up there he says to me, ‘Hold out your hand,’ and I’m like, ‘oh, I don’t want to do this,’” he adds, indicating he had been a bit nervous at the time, “but he trusted me, so I had to trust him,” he said. “So I held out my hand and he spit a bullet into my hand and says. ‘This bullet was meant for me, and I want you to have it.’ That means a lot to me, it sits on my dresser at home to remind me that I am doing some good.”

Doing good in the community has been Tinsley’s ambition since he started working for the San Angelo Police Department 15 years ago. While he’s not sure what the future holds, Tinsely intends to stay with the PD until retirement, and is settling into his new social role as Community Services Liaison Officer.

For more information on Blue Watch groups, visit the San Angelo Police Department website or Facebook page. Applications and maps are available online and community events are hosted as time permits.