Just out of the police academy, the 21-year-old officer in plainclothes was part of a reverse drug sting where the bad guy runs and the good guy chases. In this case, the bad guy climbed into a car and locked both doors.

With bare hands, the good guy grabbed the car door and ripped it from its hinges. The bad guy was pretty surprised.

"It was a junk car," says the good guy.

Not long after that, the good guy became known on the street as The Terminator. It is not a name he particularly likes, "but it's better than being called pig."

-- Polite to a fault, Oakland Park Public Safety Officer Dan Iosia holds things for people while they sign the ticket he just issued them. He prefaces official requests with "please." He tells two men who were fighting at the scene of an accident to "have a nice day."

Someone calls him "sir" and it astounds him.

"Sometimes I'm playing counselor. I'm not even married. Everyone who looks at you in this uniform thinks you know everything, from how to get a restraining order to directions. I don't know everything. I'm just a rookie."

It is not an excuse. He doesn't say it plaintively. In the first months of his new career, he has spent most of his time overwhelmed by the paper work and flooded by the number of things he will have no chance to practice getting good at.

On his first domestic call, a woman was being severely beaten by her boyfriend. She did not want to file charges. He had to walk away after handing her a social services brochure. They did not teach him helplessness at the academy.

The next day, he went to a house where a dog had been hit by a car and the owner was crying. He could only offer comfort. Somehow, he doesn't think it's enough.

"Why do people call cops then?" he asks. He answers, almost sadly: "It's because they'll come."

While working undercover, a hooker propositioned him. "You don't want her to think you're a cop. I was laughing, it was so weird. When we arrested her, she was crying. I felt bad but you have to not look at her. You have to do your job. She's not doing the right thing."

A month into the job, he saw his first fatality. "There was blood everywhere. The woman had died of cirrhosis. I thought, 'This is real life.' It was someone I didn't even know. I'd never walked into anybody's house like that, that I didn't even know."

That first fatality shook him. By the second, he helped the family call the funeral home and make arrangements.

He explains that "you don't look into the faces of the dead, you look through them. It works, but then again, I haven't seen a dead child yet."

The difference between the two incidents was eight months. In that eight months, Dan did not cease being the rookie, he just learned to be what everyone else expected him to be: in charge.

And, he found, if you act that way long enough, you become it.

-- Dan is finishing his first year as a public safety officer, which means he is a full-time cop and an occasional firefighter. A year ago, the Northeast High School graduate was a certified firefighter with high marks from the Broward police academy, an award from his fellow cadets, Marine Corps discipline and the ability to do 102 push-ups in two minutes.

At 22, he is now what stands between those who follow the rules and those who don't. In one short year on the street, he has found that it is impossible to tell where the line is drawn.

He started out trusting because it is what he knew. Now he starts out suspicious because it is what he has learned. His mother, June Iosia of Oakland Park, says he wasn't naive, "but he doesn't like to see some things. You know, my kids were amazed the first time something was stolen from them."

His training officer, John Edwards: "Dan found out that people look you straight in the face and lie. He'd go to the teletype or the computer and cross-reference warrants and information and find that out. He doesn't believe it all anymore."

It is a rookie's education. It started hard and it stayed that way.

In early December 1988, two Metro-Dade police officers were shot and killed by a man who had just been released from jail. He had taken a gun from one of the officers and blown them both away.

Dan was in the academy then, Class No. 135's company commander. The shooting did not scare him away from his chosen career.

"You have to do your job," he said at the time.

It is an attitude that did not change during months and months of being scared and bored and confused and hurried and panicked. It is his job and he will do it. He has proved that. To his family and his co-workers and his bosses. Even to the people who knew him growing up and thought him directionless. But mostly, he has proved it to himself.

-- Dan graduated from the police academy on Feb. 16, 1989. On March 21, a fellow officer was shot during a struggle with a robbery suspect. Arriving as the two men scuffled, other officers shot the suspect several times. The suspect seemed unfazed. Dan's was the fourth car on the scene.

By the time he got there, all the shots had been fired. The officer and the suspect were bleeding and Dan rushed to hold the suspect down.

"The bad guy was lying on his stomach with a couple of holes in him. He was moving around like nothing happened. I put him in custody."

It would be one of the few times in the year that Dan would not have time to think before he acted. He says he isn't sure how you learn that.

"Experience can't tell me because I haven't got any. I know we were allowed deadly force in this case."

Like any cop, he won't speculate about the suspect, won't speculate about the motive, won't talk about what, if any, drugs were involved. He won't even let you see how much it hurt him.

It's a very lonesome job for a young man who has never had to have secrets.

"When Dan used to be with you," says his mother, "you'd have his undivided attention. Now his eyes have changed. They are never still anymore."

-- His first shifts are day shifts, driving through Oakland Park, through a designated zone, listening intently to the radio positioned next to his left ear. Around his waist is 15 pounds of what will save him when he needs it: a gun, ammunition, flashlight, nightstick, handcuffs and radio transmitter. In the trunk of his car is 14 pounds of firefighting gear that he will don if he gets a fire call.

His days are filled answering complaints that range from murder to bicycle theft. He does traffic stops, he checks locked doors, he takes a truant back to school. He fills out reports on all his activities and tries to make sure that his nose is clean. No two days are the same and any call could be life threatening, but it is not Miami Vice. He is wise enough to be glad about that.

The real world, he has found, is far messier. Some crimes don't get solved. You have to choose your battles. You go where you are told despite hell breaking loose around you. And you do everything you can to increase the odds on your side of the line.

Dan has paid close attention to the odds. His 3-pound bulletproof vest, though uncomfortable, is his best friend.

"It's like when you wake up in the morning, you don't put one sock on, you put two. I try to put it on first thing so that it won't feel right if I don't have it on."

-- Dan watches a cab illegally change lanes in front of him. He has been out of training for three days. He pulls the driver over.

"A lot of people get nervous. Little do they know I get nervous, too."

It doesn't show. That is the first rule, the first unwritten one, at least. People expect things from cops. They expect these men and women to draw the lines clearly for them. They expect decisiveness; they want confidence; they demand authority.

Dan walks into a restaurant in uniform and people turn. For the longest time, he thought it was his size. (He is 6-foot-1 1/2, weighs 235 and can bench- press 400 pounds.) It's more than size. Dan has learned that people know when a cop is close and they act differently. If you're driving by, they wave. In fact, "everybody waves to you. Even if they're up to no good. Maybe especially if they're up to no good."

They wave in the ghetto. Driving through a section of Oakland Park known for its drug dealing is an exercise in futility. The cops know the players and they know the houses. They know the snitches and the plants and the back alleys. What they do not know is who's holding and if they can catch them before they throw it down or sell it or stash it or smoke it.

Dan worries he is taking too long when a crack bust develops. The new barricades that have gone up make it difficult to get back inside the neighborhood.

He mentions that he should have been a pizza delivery man so he could do better with the addresses.

In the first months of his first year, he is moved by the plight of the people who live here.

"We have hard-working people here. It's not like there are not nice people here. They don't like what's happening in that neighborhood. Just because they don't live in a nice area doesn't mean they're not nice people."

He has since made five pursuits on foot through here at night. In one night alone, he drew his gun three times. Through 10 months, he has pointed his gun maybe seven times. He has not pulled the trigger. He is glad about that. He has learned a lot on the midnight shift.

About the drug dealers, he is now less moved.

"You can't feel sorry for these guys. There are people who get out of this neighborhood; they do it by busting their hump. These guys are taking the easy way."

He has had to arrest people he played high school football with. He has talked a kid out of suicide. That kid he remembers from when he worked in the Oakland Park summer recreation program.

"I had to tell him whatever it was wasn't worth it."

Joe Torok is an Oakland Park police officer who has known Dan since both were in Little League. One night the two men chased a robbery suspect on foot and caught him. Torok says any cop is pumped at a time like that and Dan was no exception. Torok took the man into custody and asked Dan to return to the scene of the crime.

"I got there maybe three or four minutes later and Dan was completely changed. He went from this 'beat your ass' kind of cop to immediately calming the store clerk down. She'd stopped crying. He was great. It took him less time to switch gears than it would have taken me."

In the past year, Dan hasn't lost his compassion, but he only has so much and he has seen too much to want to waste it.

-- A year changes everybody. But it doesn't change who they are.

"It's hard being a cop 24 hours a day. I'm not sure you are. When I take the uniform off, I'm still the guy they used to know."

He is not the Terminator he has been made out to be, though he talks the talk of a Marine -- all yes ma'am, just my job, ma'am, somebody's got to do it, ma'am. It is a very official way of talking but he believes it. It doesn't make him seem naive. If anything, it makes him noble. It makes the people he's with feel very safe.

It is what cops should be.

"What most people think cops do is Hollywood. This isn't TV.

"If we aren't gonna do it, who's going to? I'm doing this because if I don't, no one else will. If I die, I do. I'll take that risk."

And he doesn't romanticize it anymore.

"What do I hope for on this job?" Dan asks. "I just hope that I can come home with as many holes as I left with."

Yet he is a son who must hear the concern in his mother's voice.

His mother and father say they'd rather he react and explain, than not be alive to explain. "I'd rather not think about what he does. He has to do this and we have to let him," June Iosia says. "If, God forbid, something happened, he can say he did what he wanted."

He is also a brother. His picture is in his sister's wallet "just in case she gets stopped in Oakland Park."

And he is a part of the cop fraternity, people who really do call the bad guys "the bad guys."

When the Oakland Park police raided a bar early last year, they arrested 16 people. Dan's job was to block the back door.

"I had no idea who was coming out the door. I was the rookie, I said I'd go in first."

He still will.

Officer Edwards: "The people on the midnight shift respect him. He's become a pretty smart street cop. He can take care of himself. And if they get in trouble, they know he'll be there and he'll do what he has to."

Dan began the year making $9.77 an hour. He now makes $13.81. In late December, on his first Friday off since June, he took another "detail." That's moonlighting, approved by the department, guarding stores at Christmas. He says the money is nice.

He is no longer a green rookie, he is a cop now. And yet he still doesn't sleep well.

"We'd be saints if we didn't give tickets. In the beginning, I felt sorry for them. Fifty-two bucks is fifty-two bucks. I didn't want to get a ticket, why would I want to give one? Now I realize it's my job."

It is not as easy as it sounds.

"I sometimes don't feel very appreciated. There's this feeling that some people just don't like you. Other times I do. But especially working midnights, people give me some attitude.

"I'm not out there for myself. You're the authority, you're the taxpayer. These are your rules."

-- After seven hours on the street, the sun is coming up pink in the east and Dan walks through Royal Palm Park, which he remembers as a vacant lot where little boys rode BMX bikes.

"This place shows you how much this town's changed since I was little. I used to come here when I was a kid and that was not that long ago.

"The world is not a worse place. It's just a lot of stuff goes on you don't know about. It was me being gullible. I'd drive by prostitutes and not think twice. Now I pick out stuff that just doesn't belong. The bad -- it's always been here.

"But I never expected to see so much crime."


During a 10-month period from February through November 1989, Oakland Park public safety officer Dan Iosia logged the following activities:

Complaints answered: 492

Accidents investigated: 37

Court time: 2 hours

Training hours: 199 1/4

Recovered autos: 4

Field interrogation cards: 54

Open doors found: 31

Bar checks: 113

Felony arrests: 8

Misdemeanor arrests: 37

Juvenile arrests: 0

Retail theft investigations: 4

Moving violations: 148

Non-moving violations: 231

Major fires fought: 1

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