First Black female to hold position
By Jack Criss
The Bolivar Bullet
The Bolivar County Sheriff’s Department recently named Angelisa Butcher as an investigator, the first Black female in the department’s history to hold that designation.
“I joined the department in February of 2020,” said Cleveland-native Butcher. “I have been certified in law enforcement since 2018. I received my Associate’s Degree in Criminal Justice from Coahoma Community College and then went on to self-sponsor and get additional training at Mississippi Delta Community College Moorhead through the WIN Job Center. I then went on to work with the Greenwood Police Department. At the same time while I was an officer, I got my Bachelor’s Degree in Criminal Justice at Delta State and will also receive my Master’s this May.”
Butcher said she wanted to get a Master’s in Criminal Justice for future options. “If I ever get too stressed out on the job I will have the education to allow me to teach,” she said. “It’s good to have something to fall back on and I think that’s true of just about any career.”
“I lost my grandmother last September,” said Butcher. “She and my grandfather raised me and I wish she was still here to share this honor with me. I was thrilled to find out I was the first Black female investigator in Bolivar County and I know if my grandmother was still alive she would be calling all of her friends sharing the news!”
Butcher will be officially certified as an investigator in May, either in Jackson or Tupelo.
Comparing the duties of an investigator to that of a police detective, Butcher said she deals with criminal cases such as murder, fraud, assaults, larceny and those types of crime. “Thankfully, we don’t have a whole lot of open cases right now,” she said, “and I hope it stays the way. But, things can change quickly and you always have to be prepared.”
Nobody in her family was ever in law enforcement, said Butcher, but she credits her grandfather’s love of crime shows on television as her motivation to enter the field.
“Growing up in the house with him, he always had ‘In The Heat Of The Night,” “Blue Bloods,’ ‘Law And Order,’–all of those crime shows were on all the time!” she laughed. “And I just became interested in them, too, and decided when I was very young that I wanted to go into law enforcement. So I have him to thank for that!”