Ebonie Ferguson

I attribute my success to a good upbringing and being able to be a part of a law enforcement community where our intentions are to go out and serve the public as best we can to ensure that people are safe. Having a good team and a supportive environment has been crucial. The willpower to go out and make a change, to have a positive impact on somebody's life every day is my goal. It's about more than just receiving a paycheck or carrying a title or wearing a badge - there has to be a bigger purpose in this career field, especially in this current climate.

The best career advice I ever received was to follow your dream. So many folks go for a particular position or job because of what money they're going to make, but if you have to work that job every day and you're not happy, that changes everything. Being able to have something outside of just a paycheck, a purpose and a reason for why you invest your time, is so important because your time is your greatest commodity. Once it's gone, that's it. You can be the richest person in the world, but when it's time for you to go home, that's it. There's no more buying 5 more minutes or no more buying an hour of that time back. I think it is so important to get everything you can out of each workday, because in this country, we're afforded so many opportunities. You have third world countries where people are not allowed to work and they may not ever have a say or any control over the amount of resources they have access to. But here in America, we have access to those resources unlimitedly, and sometimes I don't think that people really value what they have received. You can work more than one job if you want to live in a better neighborhood, or you can go to school and get an education and then move up in your job if you want to buy a nicer car or generate generational wealth for your children. The skies are the limit. We're not limited here. We have so much freedom, but we take it so for granted.

If I had to give any advice to any of the women entering into law enforcement or who have an interest in joining law enforcement, I would encourage them to go for it, to not give up. They need to know that they have a place to be there, even though it's a male-dominated profession, and to know that they are supported, they are needed, and they do make a difference.

Some of the biggest challenges we have is just being able to communicate what is and not what people think. Sometimes perception or perspective can get in the way of reality - how things really are versus what people think they saw, or think they heard, or think they know, can have a major impact on the outcome of any situation. One of the challenges is that we don't have enough cops nowadays. The profession, due to attrition, has seen a lot of officers retire from the job, and it costs a lot of money and time to reinvest in personnel. You have to train those officers, send them to the academy, outfit them with all the equipment, knowledge, training and skills they need to confidently handle this job. It takes approximately a year to get a new officer, whether they're a lateral from another department or coming straight from the academy. They have to do FTO training which takes 240 hours, and they have to pass the academy. As for opportunities, there's a great number of opportunities in this career field. They're plentiful, but they're also very competitive. You can join as long as you have a clean bill of health and can show that you're responsible and mentally fit, and you can pass the physical restraints. It's open to both men and women. Depending on the size and the agency you choose to join, there could be a lot of opportunities for growth because people do retire after a set amount of time. If you continue to work throughout your career really hard and push yourself, apply yourself, attend training and show that you are optimistic and ambitious about taking advantage of opportunities, you can move up. There's no limit. You can go from starting at the bottom and ending up being the chief of the department one day if you should so wish. You can veer off and go into certain sections of police work. You don't have to just do general police work. You can be an investigator, work in a crime lab, work as a technician, be a canine officer or K-9 handler. There are a lot of different opportunities within law enforcement to contribute. You get an opportunity to work with the general public, and in my department, we are responsible for the governor of Maryland and securing the state capitol. That brings a great number of opportunities because you get to see how decisions are made behind the scenes before they make it on TV. You get an opportunity to visit how the General Assembly makes laws, the process that bills go through to become a law in the state of Maryland. You meet some wonderful people. You get to work with other first responders, firemen and EMS staff, sometimes with air pilots, in different environments, so it's not just the everyday rigorous being on a regular beat. It comes with a lot of ambitious opportunities.

In my work and personal life, the values that are most important to me are, first of all, honesty, because in this career field, your whole career is really based on trust. You have to be able to trust that the person that's backing you up, or the person that you're receiving information from for intel, or the person that you're training on a topic, or that you're learning from doing training, is trustful. If not, if you have doubt, that's how officers lose their life in the line of duty every day. Second of all, great work ethic is important, because oftentimes, if you can be a great leader, you could be a great follower, but if you don't have work ethic, you're not going to be motivated when you have nothing else to rely on. I'll give you an example: if an officer gets hurt in the field, what keeps them going so they don't give up? It has to be more than just a passion. It has to be something else. You have to know that other people are dependent on you, and you also need to be able to feel like you can also be depended upon. Not everybody carries that same work ethic. There has to be a bigger purpose other than just receiving a pay, or carrying a title, or wearing a badge. It has to be more than that in this career field, especially in this current climate.