Day in the Life: James Paup

GREENFIELD — The engine revs under the hood as James Paup drives his truck down the road to pull over a speeding vehicle in rural Adair County. The sun shines, and he talks with the driver. After several minutes of conversation, Paup prints a warning from the computer in his truck, gives the paper to the driver and takes off.

Paup, the son of Lori and Alan Paup, formerly of Creston, has been a sheriff’s deputy in Adair County for three and a-half years.

“I just didn’t feel I was doing enough,” Paup said. “I felt like I needed to still contribute to, if not the entire nation, then at least a local community, and I thought law enforcement was one way I could do that.”

Paup, 29, formerly of Creston, went into the United States Marines immediately after graduating from Creston High School. He was in the Marines for four years, where he was stationed in Hawaii and deployed twice. When he left the military, he worked in the information technology field for a time.

Soon, Paup attended law enforcement academy and applied to a position with Adair County Sheriff’s Office. Several weeks later, he received a letter stating the sheriff’s office went with another candidate. However, three days later, Paup received a call back to set up an interview with the sheriff’s office, and he has been there ever since.

Day to day

“We are considered officers of the court,” Paup said. “That could mean anything: prisoner transports to get to court proceedings, or it can be civil papers, which is probably the not-so-glamorous aspect of our job.”

Paup, who lives in Adair, and his fellow sheriff’s deputies enforce laws within Adair County, which includes the small communities such as Fontanelle, Orient and Bridgewater. As an officer of the court, he has to serve paperwork, like divorce petitions, patrol roads, file paperwork and book those who are charged.

“It all varies, really. It’s not like in the movies or even some news articles that you read where we have quotas. We don’t have arrest quotas or ticket quotas,” Paup said. “If I want to be out and be proactive and enforce the traffic laws, I can do that. If there’s a day maybe I don’t necessarily want to do that, as long as I get the day-to-day operation stuff done, he’s (Sheriff Jeff Vandewater) fine with that as well.”

The job varies in calls, as well. Paup said they can get a variety of calls varying in degrees of seriousness.

“We can get anything from a dog biting somebody to, just the other week, we had a pretty bad domestic violence issue we went to,” Paup said. “It just varies from one extreme to another.”

The same goes to the number of calls. There is no set amount of emergency calls the sheriff’s office receives each day. Some days there can be calls on top of each other, and other days officers don’t have any calls to respond to.

Pros and cons

Despite national media, Paup enjoys what he does, and enjoys doing it well. He said the best part of his job is knowing he made a difference.

“I’d probably say, knowing I made a difference (is the best part),” Paup said. “I know, if I do my job, I sleep well at night.”

However, on the other hand, there are moments when the job of a sheriff’s deputy isn’t inspiring.

“It kind of sucks when you have to arrest a kid’s parent in front of them because that kid thinks the world of their father or their mother, and they may not necessarily know the difference between right and wrong at that state in their life,” Paup said. “They see me or any other officer come in and put handcuffs on their father or mother and take them away, and they in turn think we’re bad.”

But, despite that, Paup, who is married with a child, keeps going.

“I can look at my family and it gives me a reason to keep doing it everyday,” Paup said. “I see the troubled kids out there, and then the adults that continue to make a wrong decision on a day-to-day basis, and you know, sometimes I wonder what makes them do that? And so, what I’m getting at is, ... if I’m taking the violent criminals or the drunk drivers off the street, that’s good for me.”