Airmen from Scott AFB help train Iraqi police force

Efram Ramirez

In an effort to return stability to the country, members of the 375th Security Forces Squadron at Scott AFB have deployed to Iraq as a police transition team training members of the Iraqi police force for the inevitable handover of power.

Senior Airmen Richard Acosta, Joseph Hovis, Ben Grote and Michael Altenburg of the 375th volunteered to deploy in service of the 732nd Expeditionary Security Force Squadron Detachment 2 in Baghdad. The soldiers participated in training ventures in Iraqi police stations, performed dismounted patrols and assessed the security of police checkpoints located throughout the city.

This was the second time that airmen Hovis and Altenburg had worked together, with the latter telling the military press that that Hovis had "grown up and matured" since the last time they served together. The two men were stationed in Iraq two years prior to this assignment.

While the work was difficult, Hovis tells the news provider that the soldiers still made time to perform humanitarian work.

"[We would] go into a neighborhood or a market with four or five Iraqi police intermixed with us... meeting the local population and doing humanitarian work," Hovis told the news provider."We would stop by a school and do a humanitarian delivery along with the Iraqi police, trying to get the Iraqi populace to trust the Iraqi police."

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