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Community Corner

Tech-Savvy Retired Cop to Remain in Laguna Beach

Mike Hall served Laguna Beach for 31 years.

His black hair and careful but nearly unlined face do not immediately mark him as a retiree.

From his final posting as a captain heading up patrols to the earlier times he recalls when Judge Debra Carillo was a meter maid going to night school, his 31-year career will have seemed meteor–fast to any onlookers wondering when they, too, can leave the office.

Mike Hall is retired, though—the latest Laguna officer to leave full-time work. “As a teenager in Boise, Idaho,” he recalls, “I think back that the cop shows that were on TV were interesting…seeing the cops driving around town... wondering what do those guys do?”

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Born in 1961, as a high-schooler, Hall called the Boise Police Station and asked if they had any jobs for teenagers. They told him to come down to a meeting for the Police Explorer Program, one of the Boy Scout career exploration channels, where they taught Hall first aid and CPR and sent him out for a few ride-alongs.

“I thought ‘This is really great,’” Hall says, before the family moved to Laguna Beach a few months later and he repeated the process in his new hometown.

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Early on, Hall recalled, most people he knew cast him as someone who was going to be a cop. “You can see me in my yearbook pictures,” he says, “handcuffing someone as part of a training exercise.”

Saddleback College offered a “...police reserve academy, which was Tuesday night, Thursday night, and all day Saturday,” Hall says, which he attended while a senior in high school.  “They ran it like a real academy. You would go down there in your uniform and they would scream and yell at you while you did push-ups.”

The academy commander really focused on Hall, because they had this high school kid like they’d never seen before, Hall says. “He called me and said, ‘You’re never going to make it.’ But I knew I was a cop. I was just a cop, and that was that."

Hall graduated from that academy a week or so after graduating high school, which he says was uncommon.

Currently, Hall is a limited part-time Laguna Beach Police Department employee and helps with pending projects, one of them being an update of the 911 emergency project paid for with state funds. He has done this before, along with some other interesting projects over the years.

“Coincidentally, I did the last [911 update] in support services as a lieutenant, so I will pretty much repeat the same thing with the latest and greatest … I did have some interesting projects over the years.”

A perfectionist, Hall made sure he got those projects right, with whatever it took, though he doesn’t describe himself as a “propeller head” type.

“And if I wasn’t the smartest in the technology field, I would seek out those on our staff who were, some guys who are really tech-savvy, and would get us all together working on things.”

It can be argued, though, that Hall’s personal tech credentials have risen to a fairly high standard, since the passion he pursues beyond police work regularly demands use of some of the most sophisticated technological systems in the world and his life depends on those systems.

Take the airplane he flies, a six-seat, low-wing Piper Dakota, one of the sleeker models in its class. Flying back and forth to favorite destinations like Lake Havasu with his wife, Leah, and kids, means he manages several complex tasks at once.

On the force, that precise and clear type of mindset and high-level functioning appeals to many more than Hall. Police Chief Paul Workman says that, “At one time, about 10 percent of the officers on the force were pilots.”

Precise radio jargon, machinery and data handling, navigation, instruments, danger management—all are techniques shared by police work and flying, and seem to appeal to a personality that enjoys challenges.

Technology in the police business has changed dramatically, Hall says, and will likely change even more. “Police cars now have cameras that record everything.” The officers themselves, Hall believes, will have cameras on their shirt-fronts before long.

With multiple tech tasks being asked of today’s officers, a wider interest in police work as a career may develop for today’s youngsters who’ve been bred into pervasive high-tech.

“We go out (to schools) and advertise it,” Hall says, “and there might be some quiet little kid in the back row that had an interest in being a cop but really has no idea how to get there.”

Hall understands that not all kids interested in law enforcement careers will do what he has done, but for himself, he acknowledges that the mentoring and encouragement he received as a youth served him well and blazed him into a happy, relatively young retirement.

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