Brian Parker
261 episodes listed below
Public-service careers, told from the inside.
Choir Practice Podcast is built around career-spanning conversations with people from public service. Recent episodes move through Pima County Sheriff's Department memories, FBI assignment stories, campus safety work, DUI enforcement, detective units, and the hard practical texture of the job.
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Choir Practice Podcast is a public-service oral-history show with a strong Southern Arizona center. Its recent episodes sit close to law-enforcement careers rather than headline cases. The show is interested in what a career felt like from inside the uniform, desk, briefing, transfer, and retirement party. That gives it a different shape from a procedural recap. Guests are allowed to trace the route: first assignments, difficult neighborhoods, specialized units, agency moves, family adjustments, old gear, and the moments that still stay with them. The register is casual and direct. It can be funny in the way workplace memory gets funny, but the material often circles violence, weapons, impaired driving, and tense calls. Dawn Barkman's episode draws on just over 30 years with the Pima County Sheriff's Department and includes Santa Vera, Safe Streets, DUI work, and patrol stories. Steve Patterson's conversation brings in FBI assignment life, San Francisco, Newark, Tucson connections, and University of Arizona safety work. Dave Thomas's episode reaches back through Pima County Sheriff's Department service, older equipment, mace, detective-unit transitions, and the reality of being retired for a while. The host's approach is conversational rather than investigative. He lets guests explain the jargon, linger on side roads, and return later if the career story is not finished. That looseness is part of the point. The show preserves memory at human scale, where a career is not only a resume but a sequence of rooms, partners, calls, mistakes, habits, and family conversations. It also carries a clear community texture, with references to Tucson, Pima County, local reunions, public-safety foundations, and Southern Arizona service culture. Choir Practice Podcast will not suit listeners looking for a compressed news brief. It suits a listener who wants first-person career recollection, workplace detail, and the unvarnished language of people comparing notes after years in the field. The strongest moments come when practical memory turns into perspective. A tool, a traffic stop, a transfer, or a housing search becomes part of the larger story of public service.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants candid career recollections from public-service people, especially with Southern Arizona context. It also fits someone curious about the everyday work behind patrol, investigations, DUI enforcement, emergency management, and retirement reflection.
What sets it apart: The show is less polished case file than conversational career archive. It gives guests space to move through practical details, old stories, workplace humor, and unfinished threads without forcing every memory into a tidy lesson.
First Responders, and Public Servants, share the most extraordinary experiences from their careers. Here on Choir Practice our mission is to preserve our guests personal legacies for friends and family, sharing their stories for anyone who might be curious or interested in a career in public service.
Retired badges, bourbon, and old calls: this is where you get the stories after shift.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded retirement conversation that follows Dawn Barkman through several roles and lets the work speak for itself.
This retirement interview follows Dawn Barkman through just over 30 years with the Pima County Sheriff's Department, and it works best when it stays with the work.
Dawn Barkman, a retired sergeant from the Pima County Sheriff's Department, says she worked in Pima County for just over 30 years and retired on Friday the 13th of February after finishing the DROP and a one-year extension.
A police officer shares his career experiences and humorous anecdotes about historical medicine in an interview format.
Choir Practice host interviews Steve Patterson, a retired FBI assistant special agent in charge who now works with the University of Arizona on emergency management and campus safety.
Choir Practice Podcast interviews Dave Thomas, who retired as a Pima County Sheriff’s Department sergeant in October 1995.
Choir Practice Podcast brings retired Pima County Sheriff Detective Bobby Cox back for a third interview about homicide investigations, SWAT calls, jail incidents, martial arts, and constable work.
Terry Johnson returns to Choir Practice Podcast to discuss the Arizona Fallen Heroes Memorial Riders, a nonprofit that supports first responders after line-of-duty injury or death.