Opportunity Seized

PICTURED ABOVE

Department of Criminal Justice Training Instructor Walt Ridener spends countless hours in various trainings to keep up-to-date on topics related to narcotics and drug cartels. (Photo by Jim Robertson)

The son of an Air Force retiree, Department of Criminal Justice Training Instructor Walt Ridener was brought up around law enforcement.

His father was a member of the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigation – that branch’s federal law enforcement and counterintelligence agency.

Ridener learned a lot from his father, but one of the most important lessons was not to pass up an opportunity.

“His life was full of missed opportunities,” Ridener explained. “It’s not that he wasn’t successful, but he missed many opportunities.

“In the Air Force, he was selected to go to officer candidate school, but he decided not to go,” Ridener continued. “That’s been my driving point. When I want to achieve something, I go for it. I don’t want to reflect on my career and say, ‘Hey, I wish I would have done that.’ Even if I attempt and fail, at least I gave it my best shot.”

That is Ridener's attitude to his job as a DOCJT instructor, starting with his first foray into law enforcement at tiny Pippa Passes/Alice Lloyd College.

Humble Beginnings

Pippa Passes is a small dot on the map in Knott County in Eastern Kentucky. While Ridener earned his degree at Alice Lloyd College, the law enforcement bug bit him.

“They had a work-study program, and I started writing parking tickets,” he joked. “When a (full-time) position came open, I took it.”

 The police department is a combined unit between the city and the college.

From there, Ridener moved to the Hindman Police Department in Knott County.

“It was only a two-person department,” he said.

He spent four years with Hindman before making a career-altering decision.

“I decided if I was going to be in law enforcement, I probably needed to do it on a grander scale to support my family,” he explained.

Lexington Police Department

Fortunately for Ridener, the Lexington Police Department, and Kentucky State Police were hiring. He applied to both agencies.

“Lexington offered first, and I jumped on it,” he said.

“I did a lot of stuff there,” he recalled. “I started in patrol and ended up working in the Fourth Platoon, which is the criminal patrol unit (CPU).

“When I look back at my career, patrol was the best part,” Ridener continued. “Of course, it was early in my career, so I was still young and excited about it.”

Patrol work appealed to Ridener because of the variety of calls he got to work.

While he enjoyed patrol life, that didn’t stop Ridener from furthering his career. After a few years, he joined LPD’s Emergency Response Unit (ERU).

“I started reaching and achieving,” he said. “I was selected as a sniper in the ERU.”

After working patrol and the CPU for five years, Ridener spent his final 10 years in law enforcement working in LPD’s narcotics unit.

“Lawrence Weathers, their current chief, was my sergeant,” he said. “When (Weathers) went into narcotics, he pulled me in with him. I spent 10 years working drugs; that’s what I know.”

Among his greatest accomplishment was the case involving Todd Howard.

He worked on that case in 2007 as a member of LPD’s narcotics unit.  Ridener said that case is an excellent example of how the Mexican cartels have encroached into Kentucky.

“We saw (Howard) throw a couple of kilos (of cocaine) out of a window,” Ridener said. “We got a search warrant for his car and found nine more kilos. We got him to roll. The feds came, took over, and assigned a task force officer.”

The Howard case led LPD to Pedro and Margarito Flores (also known as the Flores twins), who were in direct contact with the Sinaloa cartel and Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

“We were only two or three layers from the main person in El Chapo,” Ridener said.

Teaching Narcotics

In 2010, Ridener retired from LPD following an injury, and for a few years, he was employed by the Clark County School System and worked with students with behavioral deficiencies.

In 2015, Ridener took what he had learned in law enforcement and brought it to DOCJT as an instructor. But the transition wasn’t easy. After being away from the profession for five years, Ridener had to do some catching up.

“When I came here in 2015 to teach narcotics, the heroin epidemic had hit hard,” he said. “Most cases I worked in Lexington were pills, cocaine, and marijuana. Being away for five years, I didn't realize how heroine had taken over.”

Ridener met the challenge head-on as he spent countless hours researching the various topics relating to narcotics and cartels.

“One of the biggest topics I researched was addiction,” he explained. “When you’re talking to law enforcement officers, they don’t see what addiction is. When they see a group of people who are now doing bad things to feed their habits.

“When I started researching addiction, I realized that some people didn’t have a choice,” Ridener continued. “When you look at opioid addiction, your brain tells your body that (the drug) is a lifeline. When you’re going through withdrawals, I’ve never been through withdrawals, but (experts) say it is one of the hardest things to go through.”

Like many DOCJT instructors, Ridener brings his experience into the classrooms, where he’s found a new passion for teaching Kentucky’s law enforcement community. Many of those law enforcement officers are veterans and know the ins and outs of narcotics, so Ridener said when he presents a class, he caters it to meet the needs of those with varied experiences.

“When you’re up there teaching, it’s about bringing a good product,” he said.  “But it’s also about getting the people engaged and buying into what you’re trying to teach. When you have seasoned detectives, who have been in the game for quite a while, the challenge is how I will win their minds over. That’s a big challenge.

“You don’t want to be so simple to the point they’re bored, but you must remember you have different (experience levels) in the class,” Ridener continued. “This officer over here needs the foundation, while this other officer has the foundation. It’s about balancing those two things together.”

To keep his classes fresh and current, Ridener becomes a student, attending 40 or more hours of continuing education a year.

“I’ve gone through a lot of training, such as the California Narcotics Officers Association Interdiction and Narcotics training and International Narcotics Interdictions Association,” he said.

Ultimately, Ridener’s passion is to help combat the drug scourge by passing on his life lessons as a narcotics officer and applying the professional development training he receives to Kentucky’s law enforcement officers.

“It’s being able to get up in front of officers and talk about drugs,” Ridener said. “What’s cool in teaching is I look back on my career and wish I would have been a teacher as an investigator because you learn so much more about what should have been done, even in my cases.”