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Flecks of gray are beginning to take over the sides of Tim Troyer’s neatly cut and finely parted hair.
The brown police uniform he regularly dons is pristine, ironed, tucked and proper, allowing him to blend with the other Steuben County sheriff’s deputies walking the department’s Angola headquarters or patrolling the streets.
But it wasn’t always like this.
There have been times over the years when Troyer’s hair was long. A full-on beard sometimes dominated his chin as he drove a motorcycle and wore jeans and Harley-Davidson or Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirts.
He was a living, breathing fictional persona, a creation who couldn’t walk into a coffee shop, couldn’t take his wife or kids around town and whose youngest child never knew what he did for a living until last Christmas.
“To do things, my family and I would drive two hours away,” said Troyer, who spent more than seven of his 23 years with the Steuben County Sheriff’s Department as an undercover officer. “The character I had molded wouldn’t show up at a coffee shop.”
Local county and city police departments use undercover officers in various capacities and for various amounts of time, from one-day prostitution stings and simple drug buys to long-term assignments that involve the infiltration of groups responsible for dealing narcotics.
The work, some in law enforcement say, is more dangerous than even five or 10 years ago. Crack cocaine changed the drug culture in cities, but even drugs found in rural areas are becoming more of an organized enterprise.
The possibility that narcotics in these areas are being shipped in from Mexico and connected to gangs is increasing. In turn, drug dealers are more heavily armed and are not afraid to turn a gun on a police officer, especially one who has infiltrated their operation.
It’s more important than ever for an undercover officer – who has more freedom on the job than his colleagues – not to break character, to remember who he is and who he is supposed to be, according to those who have done the job.
Today, Troyer says he can spot police officers out of uniform in an instant.
Simple things give them away. Someone might talk to his or her kids in a certain tone. The way they tuck in their shirt or even the shoes they wear might tip him off. To go undercover, you have to strip all that away and everything you learned at police academy, Troyer said.
“It takes about a year to strip that,” he said. “In the academy, you’re taught to say ‘ma’am,’ ‘sir,’ and ‘thank you.’ You’re taught to take charge. You have to strip all police mannerisms you’re taught.”
For some officers, that might mean letting minor crimes go when they’re undercover. If they see someone speeding, they have to let it slide.
Chief Deputy Doug Harp of the Noble County Sheriff’s Department worked undercover for about three years in the late-1990s. He said about half of the officers who try undercover work in his department do extremely well, while the others have trouble letting go of being in uniform.
“You have to get out of the mind-set of being a uniformed officer,” Harp said. “You see a traffic violation or something like that, crimes in progress, even if they are not major ones, they can be difficult to let go. And it can be a hard, hard adjustment.”
They’re also entrusted with immense freedom on how to do their job, a job that constantly puts them in a criminal environment, away from order and in positions that can cause problems.
“You have to wake up and know this is my mission and this is what I’m supposed to do,” Harp said. “Unfortunately, with that freedom, some people get themselves in trouble.”
As officers strip away their mannerisms, they try as much as possible to change their appearance. Some male officers dealing in the drug trade – especially methamphetamines or marijuana – will grow beards, maybe dress more slovenly or keep their hair long.
“I’ve run into some people from high school that saw me when I looked my worst,” an officer with the Allen County Sheriff’s Department said. “It’s amazing growing your hair long or letting your facial hair go. When you start looking like that, you go to church on Sunday and you get some looks.”
The Journal Gazette is not naming the officer because he still works undercover.
Still, with drugs spreading to every part of society, the need to completely overhaul someone’s appearance might not be as necessary, said one undercover Indiana State Police officer who came to the job relatively recently. Even some middle-class people buy drugs on their way home from work nowadays, he said.
“You don’t have to look like you just came out of an alley trash can,” said the officer, who is working for the FBI’s Safe Streets Task Force in Fort Wayne. “You can look any way you want to look to buy dope today. It’s basically reached out to all facets of life.”
The Vice and Narcotics Division of the Fort Wayne Police Department has changed drastically since current police Chief Rusty York was an undercover officer in the early 1980s.
Once small, the unit has grown considerably, though York won’t give a figure of how many officers work in the division. In the ’80s, an ounce of cocaine was a big deal, a “big rip,” as York called it. Now, it’s common that police turn up kilos or dozens of pounds of marijuana.
York said back then turnover was much higher. He worked as a narcotics officer for about a year. Now, a position in the narcotics division is hand-picked by those in command and lasts for a maximum of eight years.
The goal for each officer is to get the highest level of drug supply they can, York said.
It’s also become a riskier job.
“Back when I did narcotics work, it was kind of the assumption that people had weapons, but they were not for use against police,” York said. “They were used to protect themselves. Now it’s more violent.”
That violence, once prominent only in inner-city areas, has spilled out into more rural areas, according to undercover officers.
When Harp worked undercover, Noble County was just beginning to see a rise in methamphetamines. Most of the undercover work being done was simple hand-to-hand buys. Police were buying a lot of product but not seeing a lot of meth labs, Harp said.
Northeast Indiana police began reaching higher on the drug chain, trying to make bigger arrests as those labs became more prominent.
“You’re dealing with those types of people and they have symptomatic issues related to the drugs, like paranoia,” Harp said. “It kind of changes the scope of investigations, dealing with meth labs compared to hand-to-hand buys. I think it creates a lot of danger.”
Methamphetamines and other narcotics coming from Mexico have also shifted the drug culture in rural areas, said one veteran undercover officer with the Indiana State Police.
In the past, a drug dealer might sell only to friends or a select few, the officer said. With the economy bad, drug dealing has become more of a business, even in rural areas. What used to be simple drug deals between friends might now be run by gangs.
People affiliated with the drug trade will now go to much more extreme lengths to protect their business. They have no hesitation in killing police, especially an undercover officer.
“You’re constantly walking into a situation where a guy with a shotgun might be waiting for you on the other side of a door,” Troyer said.
“I always tell my friends, ‘It’s not like a movie,’ ” the undercover Allen County sheriff’s officer says.
The veteran undercover officer with the state police remembered a time where there was more camaraderie among officers in vice operations. It was a time when people would go out and celebrate after a big bust.
Now, officers go their own way immediately after an operation. Also, save for the few in an officer’s own small circle, the trust is gone, he said.
“You have no openness with people on the outside,” he said. “You just don’t trust anybody. You go home, walk in to your girlfriend, wife or significant other, and you’re lying right off the bat. You don’t want to tell them or you can’t tell them. It’s a pretty funny place to be.”
Plus, the officer said, there is at times animosity from uniformed officers in one’s own department. Usually it is a misconception of the job, he said, something that might look much more glamorous than it really is, according to the officer.
“You get the Miami Vice syndrome,” the officer said. “Guys on the road see us with a cup of coffee walking around the office. We’re allowed to wear blue jeans, grow a beard and make our own schedule. What they don’t know is that we just turned around a 26-hour investigation.”
Still, those who have done it, often miss it, and those who still do it wouldn’t give up their experience for any other assignment.
Harp left because of a promotion. Troyer will turn 45 this month and is now running for Steuben County sheriff, feeling it’s time to do something else in his career. Neither is worried about coming out as a former officer and both said it was one of the most rewarding experiences of their lives.
It made them feel like they were making a major difference by building cases against people harming their communities, they said.
The veteran officer with the state police, though, said when you do it as long as he has you go through different perspectives. He still likes watching his fellow officers as they go through different phases of the career if they stick with it long enough, and usually they all are glad they chose to go undercover.
“You’ll get the young guys who want to run and gun, then you’ll get the guys in the middle who’ve done this for five or 10 years who question why they’re doing what they’re doing, why they’re getting paid to lie and deceive people,” the officer said. “Then you get the guy who’s been around awhile, and you can look back on the whole picture and say, ‘It’s worth it.’ ”
