Cop By Day, Musician By Night

Roderick Cotton may look like your everyday budding musician. You can say he is good with his hands, down to the fingertips and as an officer with the Mobile Police Department's CSI unit, he gets a lot of practice. "The task that we have to do, sometimes the times of day that we have to do it, the conditions whether it be weather or the environment that we have to do them in, could be very stressful,"Said Cotton. Collecting evidence may be tedious work, but Cotton says it's the circumstances surrounding the job that creates more pressure. "Some of them you know could be homicides, burglaries, rapes, assaults, things of that nature,"Said Cotton.But the crime scene investigator says he tries not to let it get to him. "You don't take your job home with you because if you take it home with you, you'll be working it from the time you left the scene until you get your next call."  It's what this cop does after hours, as a jazz saxophonist, that helps put a rough day to rest.  "I can play it at the house, I can you know come here and play with my fellas, it's always an aspiration that I wanted to do." Cotton says while becoming a jazz musician was a childhood dream, so was becoming a police officer. But to him, you really can't compare one to the other. "They say you know there's no better excitement than being a law enforcement officer, but once you get on stage and you're feeling the music, you're feeling the crowd and you're playing..there's nothing better than that to me."