TIFTON — After 30 years of serving and protecting, Garfield Rhaney has retired from the Tifton Police Department.

He was honored by the city for his years of service and dedication at the Nov. 19 city council meeting.

“He’s been dedicated,” said Captain Steve Hyman with the Tifton Police Department. “He’s been loyal. He’s been committed. He’s been involved in the community in every aspect that he could. He’s done just about everything that has been asked of him and a lot of things that wasn’t required of him. He has went above and beyond on just about everything that he’s touched as a law enforcement officer and in his personal life.”

Hyman presented a shadowbox with brass, patches and pictures that trace the record of Rhaney’s service to the city.

“I want to thank the mayor, council and city of Tifton,” Rhaney said. “Thirty years is a long time. I’ve learned a lot and am still learning, but I think I left it in good hands.”

That does not mean Rhaney, 56, is slowing down.

“Ever since I can remember, since I was a kid, I always wanted to be a police officer,” Rhaney said in an interview. “From the Batman and Robin days, to the Green Hornet, Adam-12, all the cop shows back then, and I made up my mind when I was a little kid that that was what I was going to be.”

Rhaney was 26 when he started working at the TPD.

“When I was first hired I couldn’t go on the road,” he said. “I worked as a dispatcher until I got ready to go to the academy.”

He worked as a dispatcher for almost a year before going through the police academy, taking on special details and patrols during that time.

“I would patrol around the mall during the holidays,” he said. “I’d patrol around the mall, around Kmart and Walmart so people could see a cop car there. I wouldn’t go answer calls because I wasn’t certified yet.”

After going through the police academy and first time officer training, he was put on patrol.

Rhaney saw the department through a lot of changes.

“We have more equipment now than we did then,” he said. “Back then we had to ride two per car because we didn’t have enough cars, compared to now, everyone has their own car.”

He rode the longest with a fellow officer by the name of Dexter Walker.

“We rode the south side, what they call Zone 3, which was the rough zone back then,” Rhaney said.

He also saw the department through the introduction to computers.

“When I started at the police department, computer systems (for police officers) were already out in Florida, in my home town of West Palm Beach,” he said.

He worked with a security company in Florida and the first time he saw a computer in a patrol car was in the early 1980s.

“I was working a security detail and a police officer pulled up to me and was talking to me, and he was typing on a computer,” he said. “I thought that was pretty neat. He was talking to another officer on the computer, they were having a conversation on the computer, and that was the first time I saw computers in police cars. Thetechnology had been out, it just took us awhile to get it. We didn’t used to have computers in cars. We had to handwrite everything.”

He said that the TPD has only had computers in the patrol cars for around 10 years.

Rhaney has noticed that the types of crimes haven’t changed since he first began policing, but the scale is larger.

“I don’t think we had as much crime, but I think we had the same crime,” he said. “I don’t think it was as much as we have today. We still don’t have a bunch of murders here and we didn’t have many back then.”

Rhaney attended the Federal Bureau of Investigation Academy just after 9/11.

“I had a good time,” he said. “It was 10 weeks of training. It was really, really an eye opener.”

He attended with 250 law enforcement officers from around the country and the world. Attendees have to be recommended to apply and then the selection process is rigorous and competitive.

“It’s a very prestigious thing to go through,” he said.

Rhaney also talked about a community policing program that he participated in.

“Community policing was real big and I did a lot of work in that,” he said. “When Tifton started community policing, me and a guy named Bob Rutherford, we started working in community policing, which was in an area where crime was real bad. That program was good because it allowed the officer to do what he needed to do, whatever it is, to help people. If he had to go and sit with a family and work out what they need to do, he had the time to do that. There was no rush, do this and get back on the road. You had time to do the things you needed to get done to help somebody or help a family.”

He said that he had a lot of resources and a lot of time to help people who needed it.

Rhaney moved from patrol to the detective division, and then was promoted to lieutenant while there.

He was a detective for approximately six years before moving back out on the street.

“It was okay for awhile,” he said. “Then I started getting burned out. You go to court a lot, especially on your days off, you’re in court. It can get real busy. It can get very busy back there in the detective division. But then you have some down time, so time management, you know, is important.”

He said that he moved back to patrol because there was already a lieutenant over the detective division and there couldn’t be two, so he took over a patrol unit until his retirement.

Rhaney said that the decision to retire was coming for awhile.

“You start noticing that it’s being more stressful and it’s taking a toll on your body,” he said. “Every morning I was getting up with a headache. It was stress, that’s all it was, was stress. And I didn’t want to be a person who waited so long to retire that you can’t enjoy it.”

He said he is looking forward to getting to do the things he wants to do and to spend more time with his family, which includes wife Delois and daughter Rayvyn.

Spending time with six-year-old Rayvyn is high on his priority list.

“I get to be home when she comes home from school and help her with her homework and help her read a book every day,” he said.

He is also looking forward to DJing more, which he has been doing since 1980.

G-Man, as he calls himself, also writes songs and has a CD.

“I started dabbling back then, me and my two cousins,” he said. “All three of us DJ’d for this place called Copeland’s Place. It was a little club, and all three of us DJ’d there.”

They called themselves Jerry’s Crew, because the owner’s name was Jerry Copeland.

“Back then, you had LPs and one side was instrumental and one side was vocals,” he said. “What we would do was to play the instrumental side and put our own lyrics with it. We taped, like, 10 songs and put them on a cassette, and then my cousin lost the cassette and we never redid it, so that was the end of that.”

He is also going to keep up with teaching taekwando, in which he holds a black belt.

He is not ruling out getting back into law enforcement completely.

“I may one day get back in law enforcement, just in a different capacity,” he said. “I don’t want to be on patrol. I’d rather be in an administrative position.”

Rhaney said he will miss the people he was able to work with.

“But I think I left it in good hands,” he said. “They can handle it.”

Follow Eve Copeland on Twitter @EveCopelandTTG.