NBPD Spotlight – S2, E2: “That is the best part of this job, honestly, that’s what I love about this job.”

Hi my name is Officer Andy Soares, I’m 32 years old, I’m from the City of New Bedford born and raised, and I’ve been a police officer with the New Bedford Police Department for about a year and a half now.

Growing up, I loved superheroes, as nerdy as it sounds. I grew up like, such a huge nerd. I just loved the idea of having like, a right sense of justice, like a sense of morality, doing the right things, helping people, protecting people, just putting yourself on the line to make sure that somebody else can get home safe – that’s why I became a police officer.

Before I started with the NBPD, I was a mailman – I worked out in the MetroWest area of Boston. Even though this was, like, always the end game, this is where I wanted to work; it took a while to get the ball rolling. You know, taking the civil service test, and getting myself physically ready for the job, but I always loved being a mailman, like, that was a great job too.

Growing up, my mom had bad experiences with police, and she had a bad perception of them. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel safe or anything like that; she just had those bad experiences, and it kind of formed how she viewed us. So, it was tough when I started putting on the uniform and getting through the academy and started working for her to kind of get through her own, you know, view of police, feelings of police. Now it’s great, I’ll visit her at work in uniform.

I love that New Bedford is such a diverse city, like theirs so many different cultures to experience, different foods to try, different people to talk to. I always say everybody is kind of their own novel. And in a city like this, where everybody comes from different parts of the world or grew up in different cultures and different upbringings like, just talking to somebody for 30 minutes to an hour, and asking the right questions, you can learn so much from them.

I work in the station in the south end, the public safety building, and I think we have a great group of guys. A lot of us are younger, but I think it’s good because we bounce off each other, we learn from each other. The best thing about my relief is that it’s just a bunch of guys who actually genuinely care for each other and look out for each other.

I would say you have to want this job for what it is; you can’t want it for anything else. Like, you need to have people’s best interests at heart when you take this job. You have to do it, in my opinion, to help people.

What I love about this job is figuring things out. I love when you show up to a call, and theirs like little puzzle pieces as to what happened. And it’s not until you start gathering statements, start looking at your surroundings, start running plates, start running IDs, start looking at camera footage – it isn’t until you start doing all those little things and start gathering all the little puzzle pieces and putting it all together and finally figuring it out. Like, I feel so proud when I go home and I’m so amped up, excited when I’m like, “I figured something out today. I knew how this call went. I knew right from the start, right from the end, who did what, how they did it, why they did it, when they did it.” That is the best part of this job, honestly, that is what I love about this job, is figuring these things out.”