Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast. As always, my name's James Gearing, and this week

it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show, former police officers and current members of the

Acadia Healthcare team, Bill Mazur and Joe Collins. Now, this was an incredibly unique

conversation. You have two police officers from totally different geographic areas in the U.S., each with their own powerful

mental health story, each in a leadership position in law enforcement, transitioned out, and now is

working on the mental health side for the biggest mental health facility organization in the U.S.

So we discuss a host of topics from their journeys into law enforcement,

some of the challenges facing the modern day police officer, leadership, mental health, addiction,

the gamut of facilities available to our first responders, and so much more. Now before we get to

this incredibly powerful conversation,

as I say every week, please just take a moment. Go to whichever app you listen to this on,

subscribe to the show, leave feedback and leave a rating. Every single five-star rating truly does

elevate this podcast for the sole reason to make it easier for

others to find. And this is a free library now of well over 800 episodes. So all I ask in return

is that you help share these incredible men and women's stories so I can get them to every

single person on planet Earth who needs to hear them.

So with that being said, I introduced to you Bill Mazur and Joe, I want to start by saying thank you so much for taking the time. I know you're in two different locations, so we're doing a kind of three-for today. But thank you and welcome to the behind-the-share podcast today.

Thank you, James. Thanks, James. We're just very honored and thrilled to be here to have our talk.

So we're going to kind of lead you down the path that I normally do, but obviously with

three of us, we'll do it one of the time.

So we'll start with Bill.

I want to start the kind of early life and then walk through.

...