Get to Know Major Timothy Carter

This article was published in the April 2022 issue of Warrenton Lifestyle magazine.

“My wife and I…[have] lived in Fauquier County all our lives,” says Major Timothy Carter, deputy chief of police for the Warrenton Police Department. “I went to Fauquier County High School when it was the only high school.” After graduating high school, Carter enrolled in George Mason University, where he embarked on an educational journey to become an accountant.

During college, Carter spoke with a career counselor who directed him to career-finding manuals and aptitude tests. “Everything kept saying, ‘Well, you can do lots of different things — you’re very adaptable.’ But it said, ‘You like working with people [and] you like helping.’”

These results did not lead Carter straight to his career in law enforcement. Rather, a chance conversation with a friend’s mother — who was the administrative assistant to the chief of police at the time, Dale Koglin — led him to the doors of the Warrenton Police Department. “She said, ‘What are you doing these days?’ and I said, ‘Well, I’m working security for a private school, but I’m looking for something else, I just don’t know what I’m going to do,’” explains Carter. “And she said, ‘Did you ever think about being a police officer?’” Carter hadn’t considered it but was intrigued by the idea. He applied and subsequently was called in for an interview. “I still remember that like it was yesterday, sitting across the desk from [Koglin], scared out of my mind. And next thing I knew I was a police officer…. It’s one of those things where you don’t know until you know. And I didn’t know, but once I got in it, I couldn’t think of anything else but it.”

This year, June fourth will mark three decades of service to the town of Warrenton for Carter.

Cultivating the Department’s Culture

As deputy chief of police, “my day is very diverse,” says Carter. “My job is to make sure everything runs smoothly…. I have my two lieutenants who handle what we call ‘both sides of the house,’ so to speak — they handle the different divisions. I work through them to make sure that everything that needs to happen, happens.”

According to Carter, this can include anything from budgeting and procurement to sitting in meetings to going out and working within the community and more.

However, Carter says his favorite part of the job is his ability to help and mentor the next generation of officers, not only with career development, but also to ensure they have a healthy work-life balance. “Back when I was coming up it was like, ‘You’re a police officer so it’s everything for the job. If you have to sacrifice, you have to — that’s just the way it is,” he says. “The officers who are coming in now, they are more about, ‘I will sacrifice when I have to, but if I don’t have to, I am absolutely not going to.’ And those of us who have been doing this a long time, at first glance when you hear that you’re like, ‘Woah, that’s not what we do, that’s not what this job’s about.’ But then when you stop and think about it, you’re like, ‘No, actually, that’s how you keep families together…that’s how you look back on a career at the end of it and go, ‘I'm very happy with how my life went and my career.’”

What’s more, Carter explains this is not only healthier for the officers, but also better for the community. “We’re no good to the community if we don’t take care of ourselves, because what ends up happening...is you put everything into the job, and as you do that you slowly lose…all the stuff that makes you who you are, so that then one day all you have is the job. You don’t have those things that balance you,” he says. “Unfortunately, we see a part of the world that no one should have to see, but someone has got to do it. But it’s our significant other, it’s our kids, it’s our friends [that] live in the real world. [These are] our anchor[s] that, when we have a bad day, we can go, ‘Okay, I need to center myself back into reality. This is where everybody else lives, and this is what I am doing this job for.’”

Off the Clock

When Carter isn’t checking in with his lieutenants, sitting in a meeting, or out in the community, you can find him spending time with his wife and his 15-year-old daughter, who is a competitive swimmer. “One of the things I enjoy doing is watching my daughter pursue her passion,” he says.

And, Carter says, his family has an affectionate nickname for him: Tim the Tinkerer. “I have an addiction to fixing things,” he says. “We’re in a house that we’ve been in for 15 years now, and every appliance in our house has broken at some point in time and I’ve fixed every single one of them.”

Carter also spends time with his family on road trips in pursuit of information for a genealogy project he is working on. “I am trying very hard to get as much information as I can and go back as far as I can on both sides of my family,” he says. “I think it’s very important. I tell myself I'm doing it for myself, but I really feel like I'm more doing it for my daughter.”

These are just some of the ways Carter practices what he preaches to the new generation of officers about maintaining a healthy work-life balance. “These are the things that keep me centered,” he says.