Nathan is a Deputy Sheriff with the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office. He explains how his main duties of protecting the county’s people and properties shapes out over the course of a 12-hour shift and advises students to partake in a ride-along if interested in seeing police work first-hand.
Transcript
My name's Nate Holiday and I'm a deputy with the Greenville County Sheriff's Office. We protect life and property. We proactively enforce South Carolina laws through vehicle stops, pedestrian contacts and we extra patrol businesses, residential areas in order to prevent crime. I do a lot of driving, a lot of talking to people, deal with people at their worst. I'm a problem solver. A deputy will wear many hats. Sometimes we're counselors, sometimes we physically restrain people, sometimes we physically seize people. We deal with drugs a lot, we deal with guns, we deal with violence. Or we could deal with a simple civil disturbance. So every day is a new day, every call is a new call. It could be a plethora of different things that we come in contact with. The other day I was driving in between calls and I had a gentleman that pulled out in front of an 18 wheeler in the lane beside me, and I was in the left lane and he basically pulled out in front of both of us, almost caused a wreck. So I stopped him for the improper turn. I approached the vehicle. He's showing me extreme signs of nervousness beyond that of the innocent motoring public and also his vehicle smells like marijuana. So in the state of South Carolina that'll give us probable cause to search. So before we dove into that, I saw some evidence that there would be a firearm in the vehicle and asked him, "Hey man, how many guns are in this car?" And he admitted to the presence of one firearm, said it was underneath his seat, said he did not have the proper documentation to carry that firearm in that manner. So we got some backup rolling. But I was able to take him into custody by myself, and he was charged with unlawful carry and he's now a documented gang member because of my traffic stop. I guess one of our divisions is civil process. So something that you don't think of when you watch "Cops." They don't show the deputies going out and telling people, Hey, you're now on trespass at X business or whatever. Or Hey, here's some family court paperwork that you need to be served in order to fully understand the process that you're going through within the justice system. So I would say civil processes is something that not a lot of folks know about. A lot of folks know about, like traffic enforcement or we go to a domestic violence call or an active shooter call, but there's a lot of just mundane, routine stuff that happens. It's mixed in with the action stuff that you see on TV.
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