Officers sworn in, others awarded for life-saving efforts by Pocatello Police Department
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POCATELLO – Friends and family gathered to see a number of officers receive awards from their department for their life-saving efforts, and others officially join that department.
The Pocatello Police Department honored five of its officers with awards for actions they took in the field to rescue people in distress and danger, and swore in four new officers on Tuesday afternoon. Police Chief Roger Schei told the friends and family gathered in the audience how important they are to these new and existing officers.
“They couldn’t do it without your support at home. This is a very unpredictable job, and with shift work and lots of training and time away from their families, the Pocatello Police Department actually becomes part of their family. And it’s sometimes a stressful job, but it’s a very rewarding job,” said Schei.
The three new patrol officers joining the Pocatello Police Department were Jessy King, Dillon Katzenstein and Noah Bake. Joshua Perkins was also sworn in as a code enforcement officer for the department.
Schei read from each of the new officers’ biographies before their significant others came up to pin their new badges on their uniforms.
King was born in Arco and raised in a family of eight siblings, which gave him a “strong sense of teamwork, responsibility, and service.” A husband and father of three, King left his job of 11 years to “pursue his lifelong dream” of becoming a police officer.
Katzenstein was born and raised in Pocatello and continued his education at Idaho State University in 2019. In 2023, he started a law enforcement career at the Idaho Department of Correction “and now continues to serve the Pocatello Police Department.”
Bake, a husband and father to a son, was raised in the Pocatello area and graduated from ISU in 2021 with a Bachelor of Arts in sociology and a Bachelor of Science in psychology. At the same time, he worked at the District 6 Juvenile Detention Center. He took a job in security at Portneuf Medical Center in 2023.
Perkins, born in Pocatello, earned his second degree black belt in Taekwondo in 2006 and graduated from Highland High School in 2010, and then went on a religious mission to Taiwan from 2011 to 2013. Perkins and his wife married in 2014, and he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology with an emphasis in linguistics and cross-cultural communication. Most recently, Perkins worked as a custodian for the city of Pocatello before joining the police department.
After these officers had joined the force, Capt. Timothy Dillon read the text from five Life-Saving Awards, before giving them to the officers to recognize their service.
Officer Porter Johnson arrived at the Benton Street overpass in October 2024, where he saw a man on the train side of the fence preparing to jump. Johnson jumped onto the fence, reaching over the top of it and grabbed the man by his belt loop and pulled him towards the fence, holding him there with the help of a passing citizen.
After more officers arrived, the man agreed to come off the overpass and was transported to Portneuf Medical Center for evaluation.
Officer Tanner Mackay received an award for his actions last month, when he began to talk and listen to a man talk about his struggles with PTSD from military service, as the man held a knife to his own wrist. Despite the man telling Mackay to call the coroner, as he planned on ending his life, he continued to speak with him until the man threw the knife on the ground.
The text from the award states, “The male acknowledged that because of (Mackay’s) compassion and professionalism, he chose to drop the weapon.”
Sgt. Justin Buck was dispatched last month to the Benton Street overpass where he found a man threatening to jump off the bridge. Buck climbed over the fence and started conversing with the man before wrapping his arms around him to secure him to the bridge.
Buck continued to talk with the man for 45 minutes, calming him down. The situation was resolved when he coordinated with the Pocatello Fire Department to bring the man to safety.
While Officer Tyler Clemons couldn’t be in attendance at the Tuesday ceremony, he and Officer Arturo Martinez received awards for an incident they responded to together where a woman had consumed alcohol and antidepressants in an attempt to commit suicide. The officers, who had prior knowledge of her mental health issues, spoke with her, and she told them what medications she had taken and where the bottles were.
After the officers followed her ambulance to Portneuf Medical Center where she was placed on mental hold, “the female called the shift commander to give her appreciation to the officers for saving her life.”
At the close of the ceremony, Schei again emphasized the importance of the support from the officers’ friends and family.
“That’s just a small example of what some of our officers, dispatchers, records clerks and all of the support staff do on a daily basis,” Schei said. “They do some miraculous work and they couldn’t do it without the support of each and every person in this room.”