Retiring Buffalo Grove Police Deputy Chief Roy Bethge likes to talk about the founding principles of police work and the social contracts that helped develop them but lately, he enjoys talking about boredom.
His interest in boredom, he said, isn’t the result of him soon entering retirement. Once he officially retires Monday, he plans to continue working with a consulting group he helped start that trains workers in the public sector to become future leaders.
But Bethge, 50, said he wishes he had a little more boredom during his 27 years in law enforcement.
“In a perfect world, I would never have to arrest anybody,” Bethge said.
After having to make a countless number of arrests and respond to a number of police calls throughout his career, Bethge plans to start his retirement Monday following a ceremony at the Buffalo Grove police station.
The Chicago native, who said he grew up less than two blocks from Wrigley Field and later graduated from Maine East High School in Park Ridge, now plans to expand his consulting firm called The Virtus Group.
The term “virtus,” Bethge said, comes from a Roman political philosophy that involves the ideas of valor and courage. With police-involved shootings dominating national headlines lately, Bethge said he worries that the country is losing sight of those values and the theoretical social contracts that bind them together.
“The police are the last bastion of those social contracts,” he said. “We as a civilized nation need to stop and think about that for a moment.”
Bethge said he first learned about police work through a police explorers job-study program at Maine East.
While attending Oakton Community College, the school hired Bethge as a security guard and later added him to the police staff, he said. He came to the Buffalo Grove Police Department at 22 years old.
He said he did not expect to spend the rest of his career in Buffalo Grove.
“It’s been amazing,” Bethge said. “If someone had told me things would work out this way, I’d have told them they were crazy.”
During his last full week on duty, Bethge declined to answer when people asked him to reflect on a high or low point that stood out in his career.
After nearly three decades of public service and thousands of interactions with people in various situations, he said the totality of his work was too important to try and single out one episode.
“As a police officer, you’ll never know the moment in time when you’ll have the biggest impact on someone because they’ll never tell you,” he said. “It’s not about a moment. It’s about a career.”
Twitter @RonnieAtPioneer
