Deputy Doug: 'The best thing about it is the kids'

Beefy, burly and intimidating, Kootenai County Sheriff’s Deputy Doug Goodman has been a scrapper since the beginning.

"I grew up rough, and I mean rough. I started fighting at 4, training and boxing, took martial arts," he said. "By the time I was in high school, I was lethal."

Despite his involvement in strong-man tournaments, competitive arm-wrestling and his tough exterior, the strapping sheriff's deputy has a soft spot for kids.

He participates in community events like bike rodeos to connect with families and get to know his neighbors. He's a school resource officer at Dalton, Hayden Meadows and Atlas elementary schools, as well as Northwest Expedition Academy and a few private Christian schools.

From the drivers he meets while running traffic to the students who get to throw a pie in his face at an assembly, everyone knows Deputy Doug.

"The best thing about it is the kids," he said. "My wife and I are foster parents, we have kids of our own, and I really enjoy kids. I like the spontaneity, I like the enthusiasm and also I like how malleable they are. I worked at a max prison for a while. You try to help the guys out there, but a lot of them are older and their personalities are kind of set. With kids, what I say to a kid today could vastly change the trajectory of his life."

Goodman graduated from the Peace Officer Standards and Training at North Idaho College in 2012 after applying for a position with the sheriff’s office in 2011.

"It was in POST that [Sheriff] Ben Wolfinger gave us a lecture on law enforcement," Goodman said. "He said that we are not law-enforcement officers, we are peace officers. Our job is to bring peace, and that really resonated with me. As a peace officer, we enforce the laws inasmuch as it’s needed to keep people safe, to bring peace, and that's one of the things that I’ve always had, is a strong protective instinct."

Goodman served in special operations in the Navy as an explosives diver. Because of his love for kids, he applied to be a high school math teacher and was soon working with students with special needs.

"I worked with kids with autism that were really violent, and everybody really liked me because I’m very skilled when it comes to violence, but I don’t respond emotionally,” he said. “If somebody punches me in the face, I don’t get mad about it. I’ve been punched 1,000 times before. It’s OK, it’s part of the job. So people really like the way I respond."

He then worked for the juvenile detention center but was told by his colleagues his skill set would be better put to use as an officer or deputy. When he applied, no school resource officer position was available. “Then they created the [resource officer] position and a senior guy took it, but that guy moved and then they needed someone and I’m like ‘Hey! Me! I’ll do it!’” Goodman said.

Each kid he encounters leaves an impression, especially one nonverbal and violent student he worked with for six months.

"This kid would walk along the halls, punch people in the face, spit on them, kick them, you name it. He was like a little ball of fury,” Goodman said. But after three weeks of working with the student, "I extinguished his aggression."

"I taught him to do double-digit addition and subtraction, taught him to take written directions,” Goodman said. "I was the guy who was dealing with him directly because the speech therapist and others couldn’t be close to him because he would attack them. I was his academics, his behavioral, everything. I was with him all day. By the time I finished the case, they’re like, ‘Hey, let’s mainstream this kid, let’s get him in regular high school and get him graduating with his class.’ I’m like, ‘Holy moly!’ Institution to mainstream. That is just amazing."

Goodman said the worst day he can recall is when he found out, after the fact, that a student had been getting molested for several weeks.

“She'd missed some school, but she came to school several times and she never told me, and this is a student I had some rapport with," he said. "If she would have just said one time, 'Something wrong is happening, this is happening to me,' anything, I would have done what was necessary to keep her safe."

This made him wonder what he could have done differently.

"That’s something that, moving forward, I try to correct so the kids feel free to share that with me," he said.

Outside of the schools, traffic is a big part of Goodman's job, and he has plenty of stories from the road.

The best excuse for speeding?

Goodman grinned. "One guy, I pulled him over at like 2 o’clock in the morning on Highway 53, and he was moving like 80 miles an hour. I turned my lights on and he pulls into a driveway and I pull in behind him. I come up to the car, and he’s bouncing up and down and he’s like, ‘I know was speeding, you can give me a ticket, please, just let me go in the house to go to the bathroom.’ I was like, ‘OK, you know you were speeding, I’m not going to give you a citation, go ahead and go to the bathroom.’”