After retiring in January from the Dallas Police Department, where she had worked since 2005, Raquel Oliver relocated to Sedona and was sworn in as a Sedona Police Department lieutenant on Monday, July 8.
“I grew up in … Duncanville, which is just a city outside of Dallas. I went to undergrad and grad school in Abilene,” Oliver said. “I have three kids. Have a set of twins that are 26 and a 30-year-old. They all still live in Texas. I moved here by myself.”
“My first job was in corporate wellness,” Oliver said. “I changed over to policing just one day. I was sitting in my office [around 2003], and I said, ‘I want to be a police officer,’ so I don’t have this grand story about helping people. That’s just what I do, and what I was already doing.”
“I applied, quit my [corporate] job like that day,” Oliver said. “I gave them two weeks’ notice before I even had another job, and then I got on with the Dallas Police Department. When I got there, I got to do a lot of fitness and wellness. I taught at the Dallas Police Academy. I was in their wellness unit, I was in recruiting, I was in personnel. So all of the things that I love the most, I’m starting to get to do while I’m here.”
While in Abilene, Texas, Oliver earned a bachelor’s degree in exercise science from McMurry University and a graduate degree in sports and recreation management from Hardin Simmons University.
Whenever she decides to retire again, Oliver said, she wants to stay in the fitness and wellness industry.
“One thing that’s good about recruiting is letting people know it doesn’t matter what you study, you can still be a police officer,” Oliver said. “And I think it’s nice that everybody doesn’t have to be a criminal justice to be a great officer. But that background does help me, because [Sedona Police Chief Stephanie Foley] has asked me to start the wellness unit, and we’ve gotten that started, and a recruiting unit. We’ve already been to a couple of events.”
Oliver is working to establish a peer support program for the Sedona Police Department and other first responder agencies in the area.
“Because we’re so small, I think it’s better that if we need a peer, that we can call outside of the agency,” Oliver said. “So right now, we’re working on working together with other agencies that already have peer support for officers or dispatch or fire, whatever we’re working together with them, so we can build a peer support network.”
Oliver is one of several recent SPD hires; she noted that three additional officers are currently going through the police academy, which will make the department fully staffed with 30 officers.
“Dispatch, I think, still has a couple of spots open, and we’re getting that victim advocacy spot and I’m really excited about that,” Oliver said.
Oliver said that the few calls the department gets compared to Dallas has been the biggest adjustment she has had to make.
“My friends were like, ‘Oh, you’re not going to like it. It’s too small. You’re going to get bored, and there’s nobody [that] looks like you,’” Oliver said. “I was like, that was my life, my high school and my college. It wasn’t diverse back then … So I thought that I could bring that to a community, because I am different. I’m different not only just in my outward appearance, but I’m very lively, and I talk a lot, and I sing through the halls. They’re not used to that. They never had anybody come through, walk in the door singing.”
Oliver said her repertoire depends on what she plays on her commute to work, but it usually consists of contemporary Christian songs.
“I can’t sing, by the way, so that part matters,” Oliver laughed. “But I knew when I did that [in the SPD office], I knew that I was comfortable, and this was a place I could see myself for a little while.”
Olvier also said she has had difficulty finding friends and a church group in Sedona and coping with the separation from her family, whom she has been flying back to Dallas monthly to visit.
“It was a little tough [but] my mom stayed here with me the first couple months,” Oliver said. “She cooked dinner almost every day … So that was the biggest heart [break], when she left that first day I walked in my house” and there was no smell of food. “I think I cried about that for a week but now we’re doing good, we talk every day.”
Oliver did acknowledge that being a black cop can be a challenge.
“I know in this field my people generally aren’t a fan of police,” Oliver said. “So you have a female in a male-dominated job that’s also a woman of color, it just hit you in all different ways. I can tell that I’m treated differently sometimes. I just look over it because it’s happened for so long. I could tell things were different when I was in high school and junior high and even college, but I could tell there was far more people that loved me and just didn’t care … I know that I’m treated differently sometimes because of it, but I realize it’s their issue, so that makes it a lot easier for me to just be me and sing and do what I do.”
