Chardon OHP Post honors trooper

When Ohio Highway Patrol Trooper Evan Mace graduated from high school in 2004 and was trying to decide what to do next, being named the OHP Chardon Post Trooper of the Year hadn’t crossed his mind, even though a career in law enforcement had.

“I wanted to go into law enforcement right out of high school and I wanted to go into the military right out of high school,” Mace said. “I didn’t know what path I was going to take and I ended up going to college first,”

After graduating from Mount Union College, where he majored in psychology with a double minor in legal studies and criminal justice, he went into the Army, where he became an intelligence officer.

After serving 5 ½ years in the Army, Mace joined the OHP, where he has been for the past five years.

“All of those options were always going to be there, it’s not like they were ever going to go away,” he said. “There is always going to be the need for law enforcement; there is always going to be the U.S. military; so I kind of chose that path to give myself some time to sort some things out and figure out what I was going to do after high school.”

Mace’s decision to choose OHP was influenced by his grandfather.

“I had two grandfathers who were in the military, and my one grandfather who is still living ... has always had a deep respect for the patrol,” Mace said.

He described how his grandfather is a very traditional guy who always watched the news and had seen interviews with troopers and with police officers and the way OHP supervisors and leadership talked when they spoke with the media impressed him.

“There was just such an air of respect he saw,” Mace said of his grandfather. “He told me if you are going to go into law enforcement, that is the organization that you want to go into. So, that made an impression on me when I was younger, so it was the patrol after the military and the rest is kind of history.”

Mace, who has been with the Chardon Post since he started with OHP in 2012, enjoys the work he does.

“I like the fact that it is something different every day and that it is what I make it,” he said. “If I want to go out and work traffic enforcement and just sit on the interstate and write speeding tickets and slow people down, I can do that. If I want to go down into the city and target narcotics and get drugs off the street, I can do that. If I want to work midnight shift and focus on removing impaired drivers from the roadway and arresting OVIs (operating a vehicle impaired),

I can do that. I can tailor my job to what I like to do within it and I can do something different every day if I want to.”

Mace feels the ability to do different things is what keeps him interested in his work every day. He serves with the criminal patrol team, which is part of a drug interdiction unit he describes as a group that watches for large shipments of narcotics in an attempt to take drugs off the street before they get distributed.

“We are trying to get it at the source,” he said. “We have had some success but, there is obviously stuff that we are missing. We are not getting all of it and that is the goal, to get it all.”

Mace feels he was nominated for Trooper of the Year because he worked really hard this year and thinks he has had a successful year as far as statistics and numbers go.

“I just kind of buckled down and did what I was supposed to do and stuck to the goals of the division, and I think that my peers and my supervisors saw that I worked really hard and they rewarded me by nominating me for the Trooper of the Year,” he said.

He sees the nomination as a great honor because it came from those with whom he works directly.

“They recognized that I was working hard and doing my job and hopefully that I was helping them out and making their lives and their jobs easier through my hard work.”

OHP Chardon Post Commander Lt. Charles Gullett said in a new release that the selection of Trooper Mace was in recognition of his outstanding service at the Chardon Patrol Post during 2017.

“Fellow officers stationed at the Chardon Post chose Trooper Mace based on leadership abilities, professional ethics, courteous treatment of others, enthusiastic work attitude, and cooperation with supervisors, peers and the public,” Gullett said.

He noted Mace earned the Ohio Highway Patrol’s physical fitness award in 2014, 2016 and 2017.