Manchester Detective Honing Skills After 14 Years

Manchester Police Detective Craig Smith was heavily influenced by his family to go into law enforcement, though not always in the most positive of ways. Smith says his dad was an alcoholic and his brother a drug addict who was frequently arrested and in jail.

“I thought ‘I hate this. I can’t stand this,’” Smith said. “And I wanted to be able to do something, at least my part, to try and help the next guy or the next kid, so they don’t have to live like this.”

At the same time, Smith also had a brother-in-law who worked for the Manchester Police Department. Through his brother-in-law, Smith found out how he could in fact do his part and help out that “next kid.” Smith became involved with the St. Louis Police Explorers, an offshoot of the Boy Scouts for young people who think they might be interested in becoming police officers. 

Starting at the age of 17, Smith was an Explorer with Manchester police. He rode along with officers, helped them fill out paperwork and directed traffic at events such as the Manchester Homecoming Parade. After finishing with the explorers at age 21, Smith wanted to take a few years away from law enforcement to make sure that it was really the field he wanted to go into before enrolling in the police academy. After three years away, he decided that law enforcement was his life’s calling, and he worked full time at an auto parts department of a car dealership to put himself through the academy.

“The day I graduated was the day Manchester offered me the job,” Smith said. “That was a nice graduation present, walking across the stage knowing that I had a job.”

Smith said that it was his work with the Explorers that enticed Manchester to offer him the job. He was soon promoted to field training instructor before becoming a detective in March of 2004.

“I was a patrolman for so many years, and eventually, I wanted something more challenging...something that would challenge my mind,” Smith said.

Smith said that the difference between being a uniform patrol officer and being a detective is like “night and day.”

“Being a patrol officer you answer a radio call, you go to wherever you have to go, you take care of the situation, you write a report and then you’re done at the end of your shift,” Smith said.

Smith said that his work as a detective doesn’t start and end along with shift times. As a detective, he has to see his cases through to completion, a process that can span months or even years and may take him well outside of the St. Louis metro area. 

In one particular case involving a sexual assault, Smith had to go all the way to Oregon County, MO near the Arkansas border to find his suspect and bring him in for questioning. 

Even after that suspect, who was found guilty with the help of DNA evidence, was arrested and charged with the assault, Smith still had to stay with the case while it made its way through court. The court process took nearly a year, making it a total of 16 months from the report coming across his desk to the day when Smith could finally put it out of his mind and move on.

Even though Smith has been on the job for seven years, he said he is always looking for ways to become a better detective. Since becoming a detective, he has been to special training schools for things such as interview and interrogation, fingerprint analysis and voice stress analysis—which is another word for working a lie detector. He has also become a member of the Major Case Squad, a group of detectives that investigates homicides across the Greater St. Louis Area.

“The training is to try to keep up, but the problem is that the suspects are always finding new, innovative ways to stay one step ahead of us,” Smith said. “Criminals have no rules to play by. We have all sorts of rules.”

In addition to honing his detective skills, Smith has been building a family in recent years. He and his wife have a 14-month-old boy and another boy on the way.

“She worries all the time, she’s a worrywart,” Smith said about his wife dealing with the nature of his career.

“But one thing that’s been pretty easy for me, and I don’t know why because it’s not easy for a lot of officers," he said. "Is to detach myself from work when I go home. Now, my wife will probably disagree with some of that. My downtime is on my way home. When I leave here, I take the time to unwind, and by the time I get home I can focus on my family.”