Say each street intersection out loud as you drive through. Don’t forget your fuel card. Use 20th Street instead of 8th Street. If you forget the the calls, just use plain English for now. 

Officer Bud May gave this advice, and more, to one of the newest additions to the Meridian Police Department, Royric Benamon, on Monday as Benamon drove through police District 3 in Meridian.

“I still got the first day jitters,” Benamon said, only a third of the way through his first shift. “I want to do everything right but no one’s going to do everything right. You’re nervous, anxious and ready to do something.”

Benamon, working his first day as a Meridian police officer, graduated from the Mississippi Law Enforcement Officers Training Academy on Wednesday. He’ll work with May, who has worked on and off with the Meridian Police Department and the Newton Police Department since 1998.

“I like to put them in the driver’s seat first off to see what they know, what they don’t know and how they react to things,” May said as Benamon left the Meridian Police Station on Sela Ward Parkway/ 22nd Avenue around 9 a.m. “I’m the assistant chief in Newton and I used to be a security training officer at the base so I’ve trained several hundred officers.”

May asked Benamon to identify the streets by name as they passed through, pointing out trouble spots, old calls and characters as they drove.

“The most important thing you need to know is, ‘Where am I at?’ ” May told Benamon. “That way, if you’re in trouble you can say where you are.”

Benamon, a lifelong resident of Meridian, said this would be one of his biggest challenges. 

“I’ve lived in Meridian all my life,” Benamon said. “So if you say, ‘Go to the McDonald’s near Highland Park then take a right and a left’ I know where I’m going. But I don’t know the names.”

May and Benamon will work together for the next three to six months, transitioning from the ‘Marine’ style at the academy to the mindset of a police officer.

“I’ve got to get out of the academy mindset,” Benamon told May. “I’m just too ready to go ‘hands on.’ “

Benamon said he learned a lot from the Academy and May quizzed him on the legal definitions of ‘arrest’ and ‘drinking and driving.’

“In the academy, they teach you to stay alive and have a long career,” Benamon said. “And if you graduate, you earned it because they don’t give anything to you.”

In District 3, which covers south of 20th Street and west of 29th Avenue, May and Benamon investigated a kitchen alarm activation, supervised travelers at the Meridian Regional Airport, located a man who had walked to his niece’s Meridian home from Carroll County, escorted money from a business to a bank and helped a man with a mental illness – all between 9 a.m. and noon.

Benamon and May spent nearly an hour with the man, who had recently run out of his medication. The man told officers that buckets filled with cement were “robots” and one of them had shot him in the neck. When officers asked about the droplets of blood on the porch, he said that was robot blood.

Benamon stepped back and assisted May, a Crisis Intervention Team-certified officer, as he talked to the man. Officers found a knife in the man’s pockets and asked if they could put it away before leaving it on a nearby shelf. May told the man to call him by his first name, Bud, and promised the man he would get help.

“We are not taking you to jail, I promise,” May said as he filled out the paperwork, instructed Benamon and called the Crisis Stabilization Unit in Newton. Four other officers came to the scene: three to assist and another officer on their first day.

The man briefly resisted before he allowed the officers to cuff him and drive him to Newton’s center, the only of its kind in the state.

“I felt like I did something wrong,” Benamon said to May following the incident. “There was a knife so when he jumped up I wanted to be hands on.”

“You were not wrong,” May assured Benamon. “These calls are more stressful than armed robberies… There’s no perfect action.”

May told Benamon to give the man space when he could because his visions clouded his judgment. 

“I think it’s eye opening,” May said back at the police station. “At the academy, it’s all about writing tickets and enforcing the law. It’s really more about solving people’s problems and helping them. These calls, it opens your eyes to what you’re really doing out there.”

Other new additions to the Meridian Police Department include: Daniel L. Starks, Benjamin A. Moore, Christin M. Peters, Max J. White, Timothy G. Dearman, Terry S. Boler, Zachary D. Joiner, Dominick A. Goucher and Christoper R. Fairchild.