InTucker Magazine

On the Beat with Lt. Schoeppner – September 2019

Lt. D.G. Schoeppner is Tucker’s liaison to the DeKalb County Police Department and can be followed at facebook.com/dgschoeppner or emailed at dgschoeppner@dekalbcountyga.gov.

Usually as police officers, most of the good that we do results in us either giving a citation or arresting offenders for their crimes. More often than not, the result of this is either jail, fine, or some sort of community service. Almost as frequently, we see the same offenders committing the same crimes again and again. It doesn’t take long for this cycle to make officers question whether they are doing any good or not. However, once in a while we get to see the positive results of us doing our job. Those few times are usually more than enough to make up for all of the others.

At our Coffee with a Cop gathering on August 14, our own Sgt. O.B. Parker got to experience one these occasions. For this month’s column I’m going to be sharing it with you all.

For those of you that aren’t familiar, Coffee with a Cop is a monthly event that we host at various businesses, usually restaurants. It’s a chance for the public to interact with their local police officers in their area; this way the citizens won’t think of police as a nameless person in a uniform and the police don’t see the citizens as faceless 911 callers. This particular event is when Sgt. Parker was approached by Mr. Carlos Allen.

August 14 wasn’t the first time Sgt. Parker had met Mr. Allen. They met once before, in 2017. The result of that encounter was Sgt. Parker arresting Mr. Allen. This time the meeting was a little less tense. Mr. Allen thanked Sgt. Parker for what he had done. He said that it was the wakeup call that he needed to turn his life around. Mr. Allen said that once he realized he was on the wrong path, he refocused on going to school and getting his degree. Two years later, Allen now has that degree from Georgia Piedmont College.

Sgt. Parker is a 24-year veteran of the DeKalb Police. He has been assigned to Tucker Precinct for nine of those years. Even though Sgt. Parker is an old-timer, he chases the bad guys just as much as the younger officers. He also has a reputation for being brutally honest when people are making bad life decisions. I’m sure it was this brutal honesty that made Mr. Allen see the error of his ways. That is what we call a win in my book.