Skyler Talbot always wanted to work in law enforcement.Whenever he was asked about his dream job as a kid, Talbot always said he wanted to be a police officer. The rush of seeing a patrol car speed by with flashing lights and a blaring siren never faded, and he started his career in dispatch as soon as he graduated from high school.Now, Talbot is a sergeant with the Summit County Sheriff’s Office. With over a decade of experience in law enforcement, he’s been chosen to fulfill a brand new role for the Sheriff’s Office and the Summit County Attorney’s Office — senior public relations liaison.“I think that our relationship with the media and our relationship with the public, outside of the day-to-day responding to calls, things like that, it’s important,” Talbot said. “Building trust in the community is a super important thing, and we do that just in the way that we respond to people’s calls for help, but we also do that behind the scenes in how we deal with the public in those non-emergency events.”Three years after becoming a dispatcher in Salt Lake County, Talbot was offered a job with the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office and went through the police academy. He worked as a bailiff at the Matheson Courthouse, where he developed an interest in the legal aspects of the justice system.“I was like, ‘Oh, maybe I want to be an attorney,’ so I started thinking about that, going down that road a little bit,” Talbot said. “I was actually approached by my bureau chief in Salt Lake County, and I had only been working there for less than a year. He pulled me aside and said, ‘Skyler, hey, we have an opening in the media services bureau. I think you’d be great for this job. Is this something you want to do?’”Media relations wasn’t a career path that had ever crossed Talbot’s mind. His bureau chief explained that he would essentially become a public information officer, working with the media and becoming involved in community outreach programs.“That scared me to death,” Talbot said, laughing. “I was like, ‘No, I don’t want to do that.’ I think there’s this misconception in law enforcement that the media is something to be feared or the media is something that is damaging to law enforcement. When I first started, that was the mindset that I had. I was ignorant to the whole idea of it.”Despite his hesitations, Talbot agreed to a job in the media services unit, where he handled public relations for the Unified Police Department and Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office. Over the course of six years, Talbot served under two different sheriffs and discovered he had a knack for community outreach, including school assemblies and neighborhood watch events.Talbot, who is from the Salt Lake area, grew up visiting Summit County as a kid. His family owned a cabin in the Christmas Meadows area, and Talbot would frequently visit Jordanelle State Park and Rockport State Park.His love of Summit County and its mountains eventually led to a move in 2019 to the Summit County Sheriff’s Office, where he was a patrol officer for two years before moving to the school resource division.Talbot transitioned back to patrol two years later and passed the promotional exam to become a sergeant. As a sergeant, he also became involved with the Sheriff’s Office’s public relations team, a small group of deputies who responded to media inquiries after the previous public information officer, Andrew Wright, joined a different agency.“One thing that we found, though, is that all of these individuals we had on this public information team, it was all a collateral duty for them. It was all a part-time duty,” Talbot explained. “As a patrol sergeant, I still had a lot of responsibilities as the watch commander, like on a graveyard shift being the head law enforcement officer in place of the sheriff for all of the county, and then I also had to do the PIO stuff.”Chief Deputy Kacey Bates met with County Attorney Margaret Olson and the two decided to create a position for a joint full-time public information officer, ultimately selecting Talbot to fill it. And although Talbot said it was bittersweet to clean out his patrol car, he said he’s grateful for the opportunity and looks forward to getting more involved with the community.“I would just put a huge plug in for Sheriff Frank Smith, Chief Deputy Bates and also our prosecutors Margaret Olson and Brad Bloodworth. They understand my passion for public outreach, for media relations, public relations, and they’re incredibly supportive,” Talbot said. “I think sometimes it’s an underestimated value that not a lot of law enforcement recognize, and I really do have a passion for the position.”The post New public relations liaison finds he’s a natural in role with Sheriff’s Office, County Attorney’s Office appeared first on Park Record.