Training Veteran Takes Over SAPD's Lake Division

In the late ‘90s, Barry Wike was going through the police academy at a time where the emphasis was put on family violence. The crime climate was different back then, he said, as lawmakers pushed for family violence laws and reform and officers battled the age-old notion that assault on a spouse was not really assault.

After two years on patrol and two years as a detective, Wike found himself back at the academy around 2002, this time working in the department’s armory and teaching firearm and use of force classes.

“You’re a teacher,” he said of the job. “That was one of the reasons I wanted to go there. I wanted to have a part in making our officers because I had an idea of what a San Angelo police officer should be. I had a lot of influence on what they turned into. Our hiring process goes out and tries to get the pick of the litter of society who’s interested in law enforcement and then we kind of fine tune them and train them to be who we want them to be.”

A stream of rookies have gone through the academy over the years, many taught by Wike, whose perspective on teaching was a mix of past experience and continual efforts to keep his knowledge fresh by participating in traffic enforcement programs and returns to patrol.

“In 2005 I requested to go back to patrol because I’ve said I like to influence the department and make officers, but to me, the best teacher is not the one who has done it and stopped doing it and this is a retirement job, but it’s one who is doing it and can pass on the information,” he said.

Wike said his intentions were twofold in returning to patrol: he was looking to promote up to sergeant at the time, but also wanted to keep in touch with what it’s like to work on patrol.

“I did not want to—because everybody that promotes goes to patrol…and I didn’t want to go to patrol as a brand-new supervisor having not been on patrol for years,” Wike explained.

In early 2005, Wike requested to return to the streets and was transferred, and by October he promoted to sergeant as a patrol supervisor. By late 2006 he returned to training, where he took over a supervisory position. After a couple of lieutenants retired, Wike became the acting Training Coordinator, overseeing all of the training and administrative work, which ultimately became his position at the end of 2012, until his recent transfer to the Lake Division.

“I’ve really been waiting for a position to open that I would like to go to,” he said. “Before, when I went back to patrol it was a career advancement. In the future, if I ever become a lieutenant, well I think I need to be a supervisor in an investigative division or a specialized division.”

Although he was in a supervisory position in training, a specialized division, Wike said the job was mostly administrative, whereas he was seeking to become more involved in real police work. When the lake division opened, he saw another opportunity to “make his hobby his job” and asked to be transferred.

“That’s what I do in my own time,” he said. “Not that being in the lake is going out and playing around, but it is being outdoors. It’s going on the boat, driving around at the lake and being around hunters and people that live outdoors and trying to make the place that they go to play a better place to be.”

Wike said he would have liked to have gone into the Criminal Investigations Division or Narcotics, but those positions are hard to get and rarely open up. When the Lake Supervisor retired, Wike said, he expressed his interest. He’d worked out at the lake on occasion to assist and had experience and training in the division.

The San Angelo Police Department has a few specialized courses for officers that work the lake division, including a non-mandatory boat operations course developed by one of their officers that teaches boating basics like backing a trailer and operating the boat.

Another course, which is mandated for all members of the lake division, is the Marine Safety Enforcement Officer course, which licenses officers to enforce federal laws on bodies of water.

“There are rules that govern operations of boats on the water and there’s certain safety equipment…that MSEO class allows us to enforce those rules,” Wike explained. “Texas doesn’t have a separate set of rules like they do in the Transportation Code for cars…we don’t have a boat section. That falls under the federal rules.”

Aside from the additional training on the water and the inclusion of the federal laws, the type and tempo of the law enforcement in San Angelo’s Sector 4 varies from the other three patrol sectors vastly.

“The lake division covers what we call Sector 4, and that’s pretty much the Lake Nasworthy area and Twin Buttes,” Wike said. “The housing areas in the lake, the parks and the lake itself, right now in the wintertime, are very quiet. There are some people that are using the parks right now, but there aren’t many…When I helped out there it was because they needed help (like on holidays). It’s so congested out there…but we don’t have to handle the number of calls that the officers in the city handle.”

With low-density housing and zero bars in the area, the lake is relatively quiet in the colder months, while loud music, alcohol-related offenses, open fires and permits are things that lake officers deal more with when activity picks up.

“There’s a lot of recreational areas out there, a lot of places for people to enjoy themselves, but then there are a lot of areas for mischief too.”

Sgt. Wike was born and raised in San Angelo, and after graduating Lake View High School in 1988, went off to the marines, where he spent the next six years. After leaving the Marine Corps, he returned back home, set on finding the camaraderie he’d experienced while in the service.

He said he’d never really considered it a sacrifice, responding instead with “somebody’s got to do it” when asked why he’d joined.

“I’d served the country, so I guess that life of service or whatever, would make my city better,” Wike said. “I’d like to do my part and help the people who won’t do it have a nice place to live, a nice place to raise their families.”

Having spent much of his career in the training division, Wike said he doesn’t necessarily have a “career case” that he looks back on and knows he made the right decision to go into law enforcement back in 1997, but rather looks to the officers he’s trained and their successes with pride.

“I read the EOS’ (end of shift reports) and I think, ‘I knew he’d do good,’” Wike said. “The biggest thing out of all of them—not just the cases that they’ve made or the cases that they’re working—but the survival. That they go into the instances and they performed at the level that we expect them to perform and I say I had part in training them. That for me is the biggest reward.”

On Feb. 1, Wike started as a supervisor out at the lake. He doesn’t know yet what the future holds, but doesn’t think he’ll end up in training again, preferring to remain active in a variety of departments and broaden his experience as a whole.

“One of the many reasons I chose the San Angelo Police Department as a place to work is I don’t have to do the same thing an entire career,” he said. “I get to move around and do many things. I hired on here to be a police officer and I think I’ve spent my time teaching other people to be police officers, and I want to go back to being a police officer…If I ever look for a position in the department and I say, ‘that’s a good retirement job,’ then that’s not being a cop there. I don’t want a retirement job.”