“My family moved us up here from Southern California for my dad’s employment when my sister and I were both in high school.”
FAMILY: “I have two dogs, a sister, [my] two parents. I am a great uncle to two kids. My sister’s kids are great, they live out of state. But at home, it’s just me and my two dogs.”
PLACE OF BIRTH: Long Beach, California
OCCUPATION: Wood is a police service officer who serves as the social media coordinator for the City of Clovis and Clovis Police Department.
ROAD TO WORKING IN LAW ENFORCEMENT: “I’ve always wanted to be in law enforcement somehow. I know it sounds cliché, but I really like helping people and making them better. [Working for a] police department, you get to see [people] at their worst and hopefully you can help them out. [Working in law enforcement] is the only thing I ever wanted to do since I was a little kid. I joined the Police Explorers here [at Clovis Police Department] when I was a junior in high school and never looked back. I worked in almost every division which is really good because I like wearing a lot of hats and just staying busy.”
ROAD TO WORKING AS A SOCIAL MEDIA COORDINATOR: “I got to [working in] social media because of my assignment in detectives where we were handling cases and getting in good footage of surveillance images of stores or homes. We would email it out to all of the department personnel to do our best to identify who the person on the other side of the TV monitor was, but most of the cases were suspended because we didn’t know. It wasn’t breaking news so we figured that the news wouldn’t cover it. So we started our Facebook page in 2012 on [Clovis] Rodeo weekend, and [asking the public’s help in identifying these people] was one of our main goals. But we didn’t just want to do that, we wanted it to be more positive so we provide ‘Tips of the Day,’ we have our ‘Wanted Wednesdays’ now and just highlight Clovis as a whole.”
FIRST JOB: “I was a receptionist for a mortgage lending company. That’s the only job I ever had before working here, because I started here before I was 19.”
FAVORITE FOOD: “Probably Mexican food. [The Central Valley] is a good area for Mexican food, there’s a lot of good restaurants.”
FAVORITE MOVIE: “‘The Rock.’ It’s a good mix of action, suspense and drama.”
FAVORITE BOOK/AUTHOR: “John Grisham. He is an author that writes the older movies like ‘The Pelican Brief.’ He has written a lot of books that turn into movies, like ‘The Firm.’ [They’re] mainly about crime and suspense.”
HOBBIES/LEISURELY PURSUITS: “The Valley has so much great stuff within less than an hour’s drive. Even after work I’ll take the dogs to Woodward Park or San Joaquin River, Lost Lake, Millerton [Lake]. I just like taking day trips around the Valley, exploring and letting the dogs run and smell. It’s great.”
INTERESTING FACTS: “I am Eagle Scout [the highest achievement or rank attainable in the Boy Scouting program of the Boy Scouts of America.] It’s really cool. The motto is ‘once an eagle always an eagle.’ I have an eagle tattoo, it’s really neat.”
A DAY AT THE OFFICE: “For a police department, in general, there is not a typical day. I guess the typical day would be: you have a list of things of priorities or things you need to get done and very rarely does that happen because of something in the field that happens which requires my assistance. I’m not the public information officer, but I do assist [the CPD public information officer] in all the media contacts. When something like that happens, everything else stops for the most part and then it continues afterward. It’s just [about] expecting the unexpected. You have a list of goals and sometimes you get them done and most of the time you don’t, and that’s OK.”
FAVORITE THING ABOUT WORKING FOR THE CITY/CPD: “Our residents, overwhelmingly, are very supportive for the most part. I like the communication between us and the residents, it’s really nice to interact and engage with them [on social media]. We tell [our social media audience] that [social media] is not a newspaper, we are not just pushing out information. We’re actually communicating and engaging with people. It’s really cool, I like it a lot.”
FAVORITE THING ABOUT CLOVIS: “Great people. People walking on the sidewalk actually say ‘hi’ back to you. You go to other more populated areas or just other cities in general and you hold the door open for someone and you don’t get a ‘thank you.’ Or you’re walking down the street, you wave and don’t get a wave back a lot of the time. Rarely does that happen in Clovis.”