Lifetime achievement

Quitman officer honored, retires after four-plus decades

Pat Swain was in the restaurant business before getting into law enforcement in the early 1970s. After a stint as a police officer at the Memphis airport, she joined the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office, where she retired 29 years later as an inspector. After she moved to Heber Springs, she soon joined the Quitman Police Department as a school resource officer. Police Chief Todd Henry said Swain has been one of the better officers he’s ever had and has made a lasting impact on the children in the district.
Pat Swain was in the restaurant business before getting into law enforcement in the early 1970s. After a stint as a police officer at the Memphis airport, she joined the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office, where she retired 29 years later as an inspector. After she moved to Heber Springs, she soon joined the Quitman Police Department as a school resource officer. Police Chief Todd Henry said Swain has been one of the better officers he’s ever had and has made a lasting impact on the children in the district.

Quitman Police Chief Todd Henry will never forget the day Pat Swain came to talk to him about working for the department.

“When she walked into my office, the day that I met her, she was in her late 50s and gray-headed already, and I was thinking, ‘Wow, really?’ She’s very tall and has a lot of charisma and a commanding personality, and she’s going to get your attention.”

Henry said hiring Swain as a school resource officer a decade ago was one of the best moves he ever made.

“She really revitalized that. Before it was over, she raised a generation of children here in this school — 10 years. She earned the respect of our small community in no time at all,” he said. “She helped me — I’d only been the chief of police for probably a year — all her expertise in administrative things was a godsend to me.”

Swain, 69, retired in September from the Quitman Police Department, about 42 years after she started her law enforcement career. Before she moved to Heber Springs in 2003 and tried — and failed — to enjoy retirement, she was a deputy for the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office in Memphis, Tennessee.

She said the biggest honor of her career came in October when she received a lifetime achievement award from her fellow officers after being secretly nominated by Henry.

At the Law Enforcement Officer, or LEO, Awards, founded by the 20th Judicial District Prosecutor’s Office, she was oblivious to the fact that her name was in the program as the winner of the Jim Wooley Lifetime Achievement Award. The honor is named for a Faulkner County Sheriff’s Office detective who died after an accident in the line of duty.

And because she doesn’t see well at far distances, Swain didn’t even notice that her grandson — a deputy with the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office — was onstage. He was standing with Henry, who was introducing the award recipient.

“I said, ‘That uniform looks familiar,’” she said. When Henry started introducing the recipient of the award, “I said, ‘Oh, God, he’s talking about me,’” Swain said, laughing. Then she walked right past her daughter, who lives in Tennessee, and realized her grandson was standing there to give her the award.

“I was just really in shock. It was probably one of the nicest things that ever happened to me. It probably is the height of my career,” she said.

Henry said it’s a career worthy of accolades. In 2010, Swain received the first Kool-Aid School Resource Officer of the Year award given at the annual Safe Schools Association conference, and he nominated her for that award, too.

She came to work for the Quitman Police Department in 2005, and she started the Paws for Laws and Learning Program in the Quitman School District with her dog, Daisy, a Labrador retriever. Swain paid for Daisy and her training as a therapy dog with her own money.

“About two years after I started there, I decided to start a program with a dog — use the dog in teaching the kids things I wanted them to remember,” she said, including avoiding drugs and being aware of stranger danger. She bought Daisy in Indiana.

“She’s a sweetheart; she loved the kids, and kids loved her,” Swain said.

Swain has a big heart, Henry said.

“She became so embroiled in all these children and all their needs; she honestly cared about them,” Henry said. “I don’t know how many times she sat in my office and cried over those kids. And she’s a tough woman.”

He said sometimes he’d close the blinds, shut the door, and she would let her guard down.

“She would go buy shoes and coats for those kids or take their clothes home and wash them,” he said. “If kids needed extra money, she’d let them come weed her flower beds.”

Swain said she wanted no part of being a school resource officer at first, but she agreed to try it when she was recommended by former Quitman Mayor Lance Reynolds, whom she’d come to know.

“It was probably one of the most rewarding experiences I had in law enforcement,” Swain said. “Kids are so needy. It’s a rural area, and you’d just look at the kids when they walked in the front door, and you’d think, ‘Jeez, I wonder if Mom gave the kids breakfast this

morning or combed their hair.’”

Swain said she was there to make sure the students and staff were safe and to make sure laws were followed.

The Nashville, Tennessee, native started serving food before she started serving warrants. Her family moved to Memphis when she was a sophomore in high school.

She went from being a waitress to owning three restaurants “a hundred years ago,” she said, including a steakhouse in Memphis.

She spent 13 years in the restaurant business, but it occurred to her one day that she was working her fingers to the bone, and for what?

“Everybody’s playing while I’m working. There’s no retirement plan, no sick leave,” she said.

The switch to law enforcement wasn’t a logical leap, but it suited her.

“I was always fascinated with officers. I’m nosy; I always want to know what’s going on,” she said.

Her first job in law enforcement was in the early 1970s as a police officer at Memphis International Airport.

“It was fun. I mean, I’d stand at the escalator and watch all these people coming and going; you can see anything at the airport,” she said. “We didn’t have the problems we have now.”

In 1975, she started working for the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office at the jail, where employees always started, she said.

Swain said that as one of the few females in law enforcement at that time, she was not embraced by her fellow officers in the beginning.

“It was hard. I was one of the first women. It was very difficult. When you got out of the academy, it was a struggle … not many women in law enforcement at all, and they resented it,” she said of many of her male counterparts at the time.

It didn’t take long for Swain to earn their respect, and she was promoted to sergeant.

“I was promoted after my second year — that’s usually unheard of — I guess because I was a hard worker, and I was just interested in everything. I knew I had to make my own thunder to get anywhere. … You can’t have thin skin. All the rank treated me very good. The guys had to learn that I wasn’t there for a weekend job. I never said, ‘Hey, I’m a woman.’ I’m an officer, and that’s the way it should be with all officers.”

She met her husband, Richard Swain, at the sheriff’s office, where he was a deputy. They worked together occasionally, but they never supervised each other.

“We never competed with each other; we supported each other in everything we did,” she said. Shortly after they were married, he went into the narcotics unit and was on the interstate drug-interdiction team in Memphis. “It was unbelievably successful,” she said.

Some of the bigger cases she was involved in occurred when she worked at the jail “because we had jailers selling drugs,” she said.

“Probably one of the biggest cases I handled, or more prevalent, … was working a case where a stepfather had molested his daughter for years, and that was a tough case and a very involved case, and it took several months,” Swain said. “I took it to the U.S. Attorney’s Office; they prosecuted and won.”

She also recalled that when Memphis police officers went on strike in the late 1970s, the sheriff’s office had to take on more responsibilities for two or three weeks.

“I rode in a three-man tactical unit; we worked 12 on and 12 off,” she said. “We had to cover the entire city and county. We were tired, I’ll tell you that.”

She was also involved in a “very bad riot in the jail,” where inmates were trying to take over. Her daughter, Dana Howeth, was a sheriff’s office dispatcher there at the time.

“They literally were trying to take over the entire jail, and if we hadn’t reacted when we did, they would have,” she said. “I wasn’t afraid, but I was very leery of it. I wasn’t up on the floor. I was out and about different places. It was strategic.”

The riot lasted 27 hours, and there was a lot of property damage and “body damage,” she said, but no deaths. “They completely tore up a lot of the jail.”

Swain said police-academy training is necessary, but it’s on the job that officers learn.

“You learn it as you go. You can take a person and put them in the academy and talk to them till you fall dead, but until you work it, you don’t have a clue,” she said. “Doing the job is the trainer, and being around all those officers.”

In 1982, Swain was handpicked to attend the FBI Training Academy for several weeks in Quantico, Virginia.

“It’s a real honor to be picked to go there,” she said. By that time, she was an administrator, a lieutenant, and worked in internal affairs. She and her chief started the internal affairs division. Swain retired as an inspector, just below a chief.

“I wrote the rules and regulations for the entire department, policy and procedures for discipline.”

She testified in state and federal court, in civil-service hearings, presented cases.

“I was exposed to a lot of things in my career,” she said.

Swain said she and her husband had visited Heber Springs often, and that’s where they

decided to retire. The pull of law enforcement was too strong for them to sit idly by, though.

Swain said working for Henry was a huge plus.

“He was always good to say, ‘Pat, I really appreciate you.’ That’s better than a raise,” she said.

Her husband was elected Cleburne County sheriff and took office Jan. 1, but he died Jan. 25.

“He’d been fighting cancer for 22 years and had no problems,” Swain said. She attributes his death to the “unbelievable stress” of the campaign, and his death was a big blow to her.

The couple had been married for 33 years.

“We had a great marriage. I mean, we enjoyed each other’s company because we could talk to each other about what we do every day,” she said.

Henry said Cleburne County was lucky to have had the Swains, whom he called “fine, fine people,” for the time it did.

Swain and her beloved Daisy are moving back to Tennessee to be closer to family.

Henry said he hates to see Swain go, but he understands.

“We’re dear, dear friends and probably will be until we die,” Henry said. “She certainly gave us her heart and soul for 10 years, and we gained from it — our whole community did.”

Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.

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