FBI Agent Speaks To Pierceton Police Cadets
April 12, 2021 at 1:04 a.m.
By Amanda Bridgman-
The cadet program was started by Pierceton Town Marshal Tim Sammons in January 2020.
“Other departments have cadet programs, so we tried to shadow what other agencies were already doing,” Sammons said. “We’re not so much trying to recruit students for the Pierceton Police Department, we’re trying to allow these students to see what city police do, what county police do, what state police and what federal law enforcement do.”
The county’s only cadet program has 12 students, males and females, 16– and 17- years-old, who attend Whitko, Warsaw, Wawasee, Tippecanoe Valley and North Manchester high schools.
The students are Alivia Marks, who is home schooled in North Manchester; Mercy Alvarez and Ashley Miller, who attend Wawasee High School; Leona Sellers, Cameron Charles and Brennan Cox, students at Warsaw High School; Cameron Sapp, Ira Lewis and Meghan Leppek and Noah Dickerson of Whitko High School; and Tahya Lybarger and Christopher Bake of Tippecanoe Valley High School.
To be accepted into the program, each cadet had to fill out a seven-page application, has a GPA of 2.8 or higher, passed a background check, attended an interview and was approved by their building principal.
“This program is not for troubled youth,” Sammons said. “It is for the student who is interested in law enforcement and the different aspects associated with law enforcement.”
The 12-month program is free to the student, who attends a meeting from 6 to 7:30 p.m. the fourth Sunday of the month at the Pierceton Police Department and earns a certificate of completion and a letter of recommendation.
Sammons is the class moderator, PPD Officer Ryan Piper is the police adviser for the male cadets, and PPD Officer Ashley Jones is the police adviser for the female cadets.
Each month has a new topic. Some past topics and presenters, who volunteer their time, have been the Kosciusko County Sheriff’s Office K9 unit, Warsaw Police Department’s K9 unit, KCSO accident reconstruction team, Lutheran EMS, Pierceton Fire Department and the Indiana State Police CSI team.
The monthly meeting begins with some curriculum about the history of that month’s topic, then goes into an hour of presentation.
April’s topic was the FBI. FBI Special Agent Billy Little spoke to the class Sunday evening. Little is a resident agent assigned to the Fort Wayne field office.
Little explained to the students what kind of education is required, training they have to complete, salaries to expect and different jobs offered in the Bureau.
The FBI focuses on intelligence, counterintelligence, criminal, cyber and counterterrorism in the United States.
Little said the FBI has about 35,000 employees and about half of those individuals are agents.
“Agents cannot get the job done without the help of all of the supporting people (who do the other part of the 35,000 employed) including intel analysts,” Little said. “These are people who spend a lot of time just doing the research and crunching numbers and looking at spreadsheets ... and then the agent can go out and do the job, do the surveillance and make the arrest.”
He also spoke about the FBI’s laboratory – the biggest lab in the world, he said.
Little, who has a wife and seven kids, joined the FBI in 2017 after retiring from 20 years as a bomb technician in the Navy.
Little joined the Navy in 1996 at the age of 21, after he spent a few years at college and wasn’t doing that well. He told the class when he was able to get his bachelor’s degree online while in the Navy, something that is required to join the FBI.
Little encouraged students who want to join the FBI to get a bachelor’s degree in anything subject to meet that requirement then work in a field such as law enforcement or accounting and do their best at mastering that to become an expert. It’s the experience that’s valuable to the FBI, he said, not the education.
“Dont’ get too hung up on the degree,” he said. “What the FBI wants is a four year degree, that’s it. Check that box. What they really want is what kind of experience and training do you have. So I checked the box for the degree, but it didn’t really mean anything, it just checked that box. They wanted the 20 years experience in bomb tech.”
Little has been a bomb tech with the FBI since 2019. He talked about his work with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF).
“We are watching for domestic terrorism, which would be like your KKK or some of your Antifa that are committing violent crimes, different racially motivated extremist, these types of people,” he said. “Then there’s also international terrorism, which would be like Al-Qaeda or ISIS or people like that where their roots come from overseas. In this part of Indiana, northeast especially around Fort Wayne and Kendallville, we have a huge population who have migrated from the Middle East, approximately 10,000 refugees from Burma and thousands from Yemen. That doesn’t mean that those are all terrorists. They’re not. But terrorists like to sink their way into the pockets of people and migrate in and our job is to find the bad ones, and so that’s what we do.”
Leona Sellers, a 17-year-old senior at Warsaw Community High School, said she chose to become a cadet because she’s interested in the criminal justice system.
“I want to go into forensics or crime scene investigation, and this really opened up a lot of opportunities to explore,” she said. “The classes are really informative, and you get to learn a lot.”
Amy Mullins’ son Cameron Charles is a cadet in the program and said he has enjoyed the classes.
“He leaves for (National Guard) boot camp in a few months, so he’s taking what he can out of this and he’s also said something about doing something with the police department when he comes back,” Mullins said, saying she thinks it’s a great program.
The inaugural class will complete the program in May. Sammons said the cadet program will be opened up to sophomores through seniors with the next class.
Future plans include having the cadets participate at community events such as festivals and KCSO’s weeklong summer law enforcement camp for youth, Sammons said.
“What ?hear most is that they’re not getting exposed to this in a traditional classroom setting,” Sammons said. “It’s not that the school wouldn’t provide it, it’s just the school doesn’t have the contacts that I?have. All of the building principals of all school systems have highly endorsed it.”
Sammons said he presented at school board meetings and superintendents support it.
Interested students can pick up an application from their high school principal or request an application by email at [email protected] or by calling 574-594-2232.
“Work hard. Do what you’re assigned to do. Do it really well and wait for the opportunity and if you’re the hard worker, they’re gonna want you,” Little told the students. “That’s life. You’ll see that it works. Work hard. Be the person that people know to go to when they want something done.”
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The cadet program was started by Pierceton Town Marshal Tim Sammons in January 2020.
“Other departments have cadet programs, so we tried to shadow what other agencies were already doing,” Sammons said. “We’re not so much trying to recruit students for the Pierceton Police Department, we’re trying to allow these students to see what city police do, what county police do, what state police and what federal law enforcement do.”
The county’s only cadet program has 12 students, males and females, 16– and 17- years-old, who attend Whitko, Warsaw, Wawasee, Tippecanoe Valley and North Manchester high schools.
The students are Alivia Marks, who is home schooled in North Manchester; Mercy Alvarez and Ashley Miller, who attend Wawasee High School; Leona Sellers, Cameron Charles and Brennan Cox, students at Warsaw High School; Cameron Sapp, Ira Lewis and Meghan Leppek and Noah Dickerson of Whitko High School; and Tahya Lybarger and Christopher Bake of Tippecanoe Valley High School.
To be accepted into the program, each cadet had to fill out a seven-page application, has a GPA of 2.8 or higher, passed a background check, attended an interview and was approved by their building principal.
“This program is not for troubled youth,” Sammons said. “It is for the student who is interested in law enforcement and the different aspects associated with law enforcement.”
The 12-month program is free to the student, who attends a meeting from 6 to 7:30 p.m. the fourth Sunday of the month at the Pierceton Police Department and earns a certificate of completion and a letter of recommendation.
Sammons is the class moderator, PPD Officer Ryan Piper is the police adviser for the male cadets, and PPD Officer Ashley Jones is the police adviser for the female cadets.
Each month has a new topic. Some past topics and presenters, who volunteer their time, have been the Kosciusko County Sheriff’s Office K9 unit, Warsaw Police Department’s K9 unit, KCSO accident reconstruction team, Lutheran EMS, Pierceton Fire Department and the Indiana State Police CSI team.
The monthly meeting begins with some curriculum about the history of that month’s topic, then goes into an hour of presentation.
April’s topic was the FBI. FBI Special Agent Billy Little spoke to the class Sunday evening. Little is a resident agent assigned to the Fort Wayne field office.
Little explained to the students what kind of education is required, training they have to complete, salaries to expect and different jobs offered in the Bureau.
The FBI focuses on intelligence, counterintelligence, criminal, cyber and counterterrorism in the United States.
Little said the FBI has about 35,000 employees and about half of those individuals are agents.
“Agents cannot get the job done without the help of all of the supporting people (who do the other part of the 35,000 employed) including intel analysts,” Little said. “These are people who spend a lot of time just doing the research and crunching numbers and looking at spreadsheets ... and then the agent can go out and do the job, do the surveillance and make the arrest.”
He also spoke about the FBI’s laboratory – the biggest lab in the world, he said.
Little, who has a wife and seven kids, joined the FBI in 2017 after retiring from 20 years as a bomb technician in the Navy.
Little joined the Navy in 1996 at the age of 21, after he spent a few years at college and wasn’t doing that well. He told the class when he was able to get his bachelor’s degree online while in the Navy, something that is required to join the FBI.
Little encouraged students who want to join the FBI to get a bachelor’s degree in anything subject to meet that requirement then work in a field such as law enforcement or accounting and do their best at mastering that to become an expert. It’s the experience that’s valuable to the FBI, he said, not the education.
“Dont’ get too hung up on the degree,” he said. “What the FBI wants is a four year degree, that’s it. Check that box. What they really want is what kind of experience and training do you have. So I checked the box for the degree, but it didn’t really mean anything, it just checked that box. They wanted the 20 years experience in bomb tech.”
Little has been a bomb tech with the FBI since 2019. He talked about his work with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF).
“We are watching for domestic terrorism, which would be like your KKK or some of your Antifa that are committing violent crimes, different racially motivated extremist, these types of people,” he said. “Then there’s also international terrorism, which would be like Al-Qaeda or ISIS or people like that where their roots come from overseas. In this part of Indiana, northeast especially around Fort Wayne and Kendallville, we have a huge population who have migrated from the Middle East, approximately 10,000 refugees from Burma and thousands from Yemen. That doesn’t mean that those are all terrorists. They’re not. But terrorists like to sink their way into the pockets of people and migrate in and our job is to find the bad ones, and so that’s what we do.”
Leona Sellers, a 17-year-old senior at Warsaw Community High School, said she chose to become a cadet because she’s interested in the criminal justice system.
“I want to go into forensics or crime scene investigation, and this really opened up a lot of opportunities to explore,” she said. “The classes are really informative, and you get to learn a lot.”
Amy Mullins’ son Cameron Charles is a cadet in the program and said he has enjoyed the classes.
“He leaves for (National Guard) boot camp in a few months, so he’s taking what he can out of this and he’s also said something about doing something with the police department when he comes back,” Mullins said, saying she thinks it’s a great program.
The inaugural class will complete the program in May. Sammons said the cadet program will be opened up to sophomores through seniors with the next class.
Future plans include having the cadets participate at community events such as festivals and KCSO’s weeklong summer law enforcement camp for youth, Sammons said.
“What ?hear most is that they’re not getting exposed to this in a traditional classroom setting,” Sammons said. “It’s not that the school wouldn’t provide it, it’s just the school doesn’t have the contacts that I?have. All of the building principals of all school systems have highly endorsed it.”
Sammons said he presented at school board meetings and superintendents support it.
Interested students can pick up an application from their high school principal or request an application by email at [email protected] or by calling 574-594-2232.
“Work hard. Do what you’re assigned to do. Do it really well and wait for the opportunity and if you’re the hard worker, they’re gonna want you,” Little told the students. “That’s life. You’ll see that it works. Work hard. Be the person that people know to go to when they want something done.”
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