Editor
Gary Roush spent 25 of his 32 years as a patrol officer with the Miami Township Police Department, where he retired from on June 1.
Roush, 54, started with Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office in Cincinnati Workhouse in 1983, a year after he married his wife, Melissa. He was intending on staying in the military, but after learning of the job opening from his father, he decided to apply for the Hamilton County job instead.
Before his job in Hamilton County, Roush was a security policeman in the Air Force. He spent time overseas during the Cold War.
He was hired in Miami Township in 1990. Roush enjoyed the smaller feel of the township and the diversified community, he said.
“I was looking for a place to stay and I found it,” Roush said.
During this time with Miami Township, Roush worked in many capacities, including as liaison officer between the community and the department. He was one of three liaisons that each took a geographic area and worked on the problems there.
“I kind of made a career of telling people what they needed to hear versus what they wanted to hear,” Roush said.
He also was the department’s firearms instructor for 15 years, he instituted a riffle program so officers would have a riffle in every car and he was involved in funeral escorts when residents died during military duty.
Over the years, one of the biggest changes Roush has seen has been communities growing distrust of police officers, Roush said.
Roush is concerned about the future of average patrol officers. He feels that body cameras are not a good idea because officers will be under constant scrutiny and forced to become almost robots. This may cause a higher burnout rate, Roush said.
In his job, Roush did a lot of things that became routine but that gave him a chance to have an impact on people’s lives. He arrested a boy once for drunk driving and the boy came and found him later and thanked him, Roush said.
Roush is also proud of his work as a training officer and the impact he had on the officers he was in charge of, he said. He would consider it a personal failure if they didn’t make it as officers, he said.
His biggest success was solving and recovering nearly all of the property stolen from a string of 12 burglaries.
The biggest struggle Roush had as a police officer was that 95 percent of his time on the job was full of boredom and 5 percent was full of high stress.
He has been injured 12 times in his career. He broke five bones and has seven other scars, Roush said.
Roush saw another police officer killed for the first time before he was even an officer. He was a high school student training to be a cop at Scarlet Oaks. Roush was riding with an officer in Cincinnati when they responded to a scene.
An officer with a student like Roush riding along had done a traffic stop on July 14, 1978 when a man killed the officer and wounded the student, Roush said.
However, the murder that impacted Roush the most was when he was 22-years-old. A friend and another police officer, Phillip Pence, was stabbed to death in front of Roush. He carried the death order for Pence’s killer around for almost 20 years until Pence’s killer was put to death.
Roush always wanted to be a cop because his father and uncle were cops and because of the tv shows he watched as a child. His sons, Zach, 31, and Brad, 27, are not police officers.
He has saved drawings from children, awards, articles and other mementos from his career.
Now that he is retired, Roush cannot disconnect from police work completely. He is considering working part time, maybe in a mentoring position, because he feels mentors are very important, or maybe in a teaching capacity.
Overall, Roush is happy he spent his career as a police officer. He hopes the good impact he has had outweighs any bad impact.