Butler County's newest deputy has had many jobs with the department

When Austin Dunlap recently became Butler County’s newest road deputy, he already knew his way around the department, having mopped its floors and previously worked as a dispatcher and jailer.

“I wanted to be a police officer my whole life,” said Dunlap, who has “always had a respect” for those in law enforcement.

Growing up with that respect “just kind of made me want” to become one, said Dunlap, who recently saw that dream become a reality.

Dunlap said it was while working at the federal halfway house at Neelyville that he decided to try to get into law enforcement in 2017.

“I applied for dispatch, but I was really wanting to be able to work in the jail (but) they didn’t have a jail spot open” at that time, Dunlap said.

After being hired as a communications officer (dispatcher) in April 2017, “I worked there for about six months, then they moved me to maintenance,” said Dunlap, who admitted dispatch was not his forte.

While in maintenance, “he was working on patrol cars, doing day-to-day stuff around here,” said Lt. Brian Evans.

Day-to-day duties, Dunlap said, included taking out trash and mopping the kitchen floors.

Dunlap said he had worked in maintenance for about three months when David Light, chief of corrections, told him there were two open positions in the jail.

Light, Dunlap said, encouraged him to talk to Butler County Sheriff Mark Dobbs about transferring to corrections.

At that time, Dunlap said, he had about two months left in the Missouri Sheriffs’ Association Law Enforcement Academy he was attending. Dunlap had began the nine-month academy in August 2017.

“One of the things Dave Light talked to me about, he said, he could possibly work around my academy schedule, so that’s why I went to talk to the sheriff about applying for corrections,” Dunlap said.

The day after Dunlap spoke with Dobbs, he said, Chief Deputy Wes Popp contacted him and told him he would be starting in the jail the next week.

The May 2018 academy graduate said he worked in the jail for more than a year while he also “put in a whole bunch of time as a reserve” before he applied to be a full-time road deputy.

As a corrections officers, Dunlap said, he had either three or four days off each week.

“At least two or three of those days, I would come down and ride” with another deputy, Dunlap said. “About six months ago, I started riding hard.”

“Anybody will tell you … he literally, almost every day he wasn’t in the jail, he was here,” Evans said.

As a reserve, “when we called him … for whatever it would be (such as to) work as a bailiff, if we needed (him) to sit with an inmate at the hospital or take one to the doctor, whatever it was … he would come,” Evans said. “For me, that’s part of the hiring process.

“How willing you are to put the time in, put in the work and not expect a job right out of the academy.”

Being hired and fulfilling his dream of working in law enforcement “feels really good,” Dunlap said. “I’m pretty happy about it.”

At this time, Dunlap said, he is working to “get off FTO,” riding with a field-training officer.

“He is going to be a little longer” with his FTO because “we actually have him working our lake contract now on the weekends,” Evans explained.

Dunlap, he said, works two to three days each week “with us here and then two to three days working the lake contract. He’s on his own there, driving a car” as he patrols the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers property at Wappapello Lake.

Dunlap said he hopes to slow down a little bit from the pace he had been working the last two months.

“I’ve been working pretty hard on it,” he said. “Now that I’ve met that goal … putting the badge on every morning, it’s definitely been nice.”

As for the future, Dunlap said, he hopes to work his way up corporal, sergeant and maybe one day an investigator.

“I’ll see where my career takes me,” he said.