"most people interested in your background give you an opportunity to explain what happened as far as the charges being dropped" No they don't. Say yes to being arrested and your application ends up in the round file without an opportunity to explain regardless of what you put in the "Explanation" block. Hypothetically, lets say that nurse in Utah is awarded a modest settlement and being a caring individual decides she can positively influence more lives by being a nurse practitioner or a nurse anesthesiologist.Thanks to Officer Bully she can now afford to take some time off work and pay the tuition. However, she has to say yes to ever been arrested? Because there are 100 applications for each seat in those programs she could be Florence Nightingale but she is not going to school.
A real example. A ghetto playground and 2 middle school kids are shooting hoops. Suddenly a caravan of unmarked Crown Vics rolls up, doors fly open and out come a bunch of cops with 12 gauges. No AR-15s or body armor because it was not invented yet. With my face planted in the brick wall I was making the most convincing argument I could that we were just shooting hoops as the other officers searched the window wells for our stash or other drug paraphernalia. Fortunately no dopers had recently left anything there. By the grace of God nothing was found in the window wells and it was not Sargent Bully asking the questions with an "arrest them all and let the prosecutor sort them out" patrol philosophy or my life would have been totally different.
Ed, I bet you can look back on your childhood and had you run into the wrong officer you would not have been afforded the opportunity to serve in the profession you have so obviously dedicated your professional life to.
