Marine Veteran, Turned SWAT Officer, Called To Serve
Image of Officer Arkeen Young
Watching his mother cry in front of the television, as she watched 9/11 unfold, deeply affected Arkeen Young. In middle school at the time, Young felt inspired to emulate her brother and his uncle, a U.S. Marine.
After high school, Young enlisted. Soon enough, he was in Combat Engineer school learning about demolition, explosives breaching, and encountering Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). His training took him to war in Afghanistan, where gunfights and chaos were common. Young would later deploy on a Navy ship for a year in the Middle East before reaching other parts of the world.
While Young was in the military, he was also a volunteer firefighter in a small town outside of Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. He would become a certified firefighter and EMT, serving for six years until his mother came calling.
‘Are you ever going to come back home?’ she asked Young, while informing him that KCPD was hiring. And with that, Young, a planner, worked full-time as a firefighter while flying back and forth to Kansas City several times during the hiring process.
In 2019, Young graduated from the police academy with the goal of joining the SWAT team.
“I did explosives breaching in the Marine Corps,” Young said. “That’s bread and butter for me. I love doing that stuff here. It mirrors the Marine Corps.”
KCPD’s SWAT team members carry out many duties. Young, for instance, is a sniper, a medic, an explosives breacher, and a roper. That’s just a glimpse of the work.
Not a requirement, but a reward is the camaraderie. The lifetime relationships have great meaning.
“You can compare the police department to the military,” Young said. “It’s structured the same way. You feel comfortable. You find similarities here, people with the same goals, the same characteristics. It feels like home.”
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