The Man Behind the Uniform: Tony Dietz

Tony Dietz turned down the quiet residential street just before midnight on Feb. 28, cruising the block and scanning for things out of place. He doesn’t follow a particular pattern when he works nights in north San Angelo, preferring to patrol his sector based on instinct and demand.

Approaching the 2500 block of Blum St., Dietz saw a couple that caught his eye. As he slowed to take a better look, the pair diverted their eyes and turned to a house, began rapping on the door of an unknown stranger.

“I was just driving and I said, ‘that’s them,’” Dietz said, recalling the night he located 15-year-old endangered runaway Patricia Morgan and 37-year-old Matthew Skelton. “They were walking up to a random door trying to knock on the door and avoid me.”

Morgan had been missing for three days when Dietz found her, and the police department had issued several communitywide alerts seeking information, listing Skelton as a man wanted for online solicitation of a minor who may be in her company.

Looking back at the night he located the two, Dietz said this incident was a defining moment in his career as a police officer, not only for catching Skelton, but for saving the girl half his age who had somehow become involved with him.

“When I found him, it was like ‘wow,’” Dietz said. “That was better than any drug arrest, better than anything else, when you can prevent stuff like that. Even though she’s probably making that decision to have relations with him, it’s getting her out of that situation that she doesn’t need to be in at that time.  I felt like I had saved her. Again, she’s probably making the conscious decision to have relations with this guy, but there’s no telling what kind of environment she was put in, whether it’s drugs, or whatever else was going around. I just felt like I rescued her from that. If he’s with a 15-year-old, what’s to say he’s not going to go after younger, predator style.”

Tony Dietz joined the San Angelo Police Department in June of 2012 and has spent the past two years of his career on patrol, mostly in north San Angelo’s Sector 1. Having spent eight years of his childhood growing up in Hawaii, west Texas was initially a culture shock to the 29-year-old, but even though his family has since moved away, Dietz is happy to remain in San Angelo.

“I moved here in ’97,” he explained. “My dad was in the Air Force. I moved to Lubbock in ’05 to go to school. I was eventually going to make my way to Tech, but my focus wasn’t there. I studied some audio engineering at South Plains in Levelland. I was two classes shy of my certificate.”

Originally, Dietz had ambitions of becoming a live sound engineer and working concerts and festivals. He grew up listening to music and always had a passion for it, and Lubbock has a vibrant music scene, he said, but certain aspects of the job ultimately led him another direction.

“I’ve always wanted to serve,” he said. “I think I got it from my dad being in the Air Force. I wrote a letter asking to join the Air Force, but never got a response. Because of my diabetes I can’t join the Air Force, so my next opportunity to serve was the police department. There’s no benefits [in audio engineering]. It’s few and far between to find [a job] with benefits and I’m diabetic so I need healthcare, so I didn’t go into that field.”

With two classes remaining for his audio engineering certificate, Dietz moved backed to San Angelo in 2007 and applied at the Police Department. Like most officers, he said he chose to apply because he wanted to help people. Since starting, he said, things are indeed a bit different than he anticipated, but nonetheless the job is where he wants to be.

“It was really eye opening for San Angelo, because a lot of times when people move here they say, ‘Well, it’s just San Angelo. There’s nothing going on here,’” he said. “There’s a whole lot more that goes on here than people realize.”

In Sector 1, which encompasses pretty much everything north of Houston Harte, Dietz encounters a healthy mix of the local social strata, ranging from the very poor to the very rich. The dynamic and flexibility required to work with and relate to individuals in his sector is what interests him, he said, as well as knowing that he’s helping even if the help isn’t always necessarily wanted.  

“I’m a person just like anyone else,” he said. “I’ve had life experiences, so that has helped me when dealing with other people because I’m able to relate to them. I still have a job to do, still have laws to enforce. Ultimately, if the help that a person needs is going to jail at that time, then that’s the help that they get. I’ve seen people who are addicted to drugs—some of them have been able to free themselves of that and then others, they don’t want help. That’s their go-to. It’s kind of sad.”

With the drug problem in the city and nation compounding, Dietz says a lot of the work he does on patrol circulates around narcotics and the auxiliary crimes associated with them.

“I like to work drug interdiction, really, because a lot of other crimes stem from drugs,” he said. “A lot of property crimes, thefts, stuff like that, people are going out trying to steal other people’s property so that they can go sell it. If they sell it to a guy who buys stolen property and he fences it off or if they go to a pawnshop, I think [drugs] are a driving factor behind that.”

At the moment, Dietz is on patrol but would ultimately like to move into the Special Operations Section (SOS), an intelligence division that aids external agencies and internal divisions by gathering information and executing operations to deter crime and apprehend criminals.

His strongest suit is his integrity, he says, and he wants the public to know that behind the uniform he’s just a man like anyone else.

“Most people, the only interaction they have with us is a negative one because they may be on the other side of things,” he said. “Yeah, there’s bad apples, but we’re all approachable. We’re all people. We just do a different job.”