CROTHERSVILLE
He grew up with the nickname “Scooby” because he said he ate just about everything, including Scooby Snacks, and watched the show based on the cartoon dog.
That stuck.
Then later on, while attending the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy, the instructors made nicknames for everyone, and one of them told him he looked like Martin Luther King Jr., so they called him “MLK.” Another one said he looked like Carlton Banks from the television show “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.”
One day, they got ahold of his cellphone and were going to change his Facebook profile name to Carlton Banks, but that was already taken, so they used Banks Carlton.
That’s going to stick for a little while longer because Facebook only allows a person to change their profile name once every six months.
Perhaps the nicknames were given because they weren’t sure how to pronounce his real name: Ayyoob Abd’llah.
Now, people can call him a new name: Officer.
The 23-year-old is the newest member of the Crothersville Police Department.
So far, the Michigan native said he has felt really welcomed by the small southeastern Jackson County community and surrounding area.
“There’s a really tight brotherhood and camaraderie among the guys, and being the new guy, they brought me right in. Even though I’m the new guy, I’m not ‘the new guy,'” he said of meeting his fellow officers.
“Even everybody in the community, everybody is just really friendly. Everybody has been outgoing,” he said, noting many positive comments he received from people on Facebook when his swearing-in photo was posted. “That’s the most welcome I’ve ever been anywhere, so it has been incredible.”
Growing up in Dearborn, Michigan, Abd’llah was the middle of seven kids and was born into an Army family. From 2003 to 2010, the family lived in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, United Kingdom and Canada. Then they returned to the United States and lived in Michigan, Tennessee, Illinois, Minnesota and Indiana.
“My dad was in the Army a few years,” he said. “He got out right before I was born, so we still maintained that military lifestyle, so we moved quite a bit. That lifestyle, we just never have settled. Even in Indiana, we just moved house to house each year.”
Because of all the moving around, Abd’llah took online classes and received his high school diploma from Hoosier Academy in 2016.
Having started his own landscaping business three years before graduating, he thought about continuing with that, but his mother, Yvette McLaren-Roberts asked him about firefighting since he had a longtime interest in it. He then became a volunteer with Northern Monroe Fire Territory in Bloomington in 2016.
With his mother having a teaching background, she pushed Abd’llah and his siblings to go to college. His senior year of high school, he took a couple of culinary classes to earn college credit.
When he started at Ivy Tech Community College, he wanted to become a lawyer, so he pursued a criminal justice degree. Then he changed to homeland security and public safety and earned an associate degree in 2018.
He worked security jobs at College Mall in Bloomington, Indiana University Police Department and Monroe County Community School Corp.; was a special deputy jailer at the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department; served as a part-time firefighter with Monroe Fire District; and had a brief stint as an administrative clerk in a township trustee’s office.
Abd’llah had applied with the sheriff’s department and Bloomington Police Department a few times in hopes of starting a career in law enforcement.
Finally, in 2019, he was hired by BPD.
“Through the fire department, even though I was on scene doing fire stuff, I always just had some sort of gravitation to see what it was like on the other side, so I would always go talk to the officers,” Abd’llah said.
Shortly after being hired, he went through the 16-week law enforcement academy in Plainfield.
“That first week was definitely rough,” he said. “It was my first time away from home for any length of time and just a new environment, so it was tough.”
The toughness of the instructors and encouragement from the other officers, though, helped him stick with it.
“I can’t thank them enough for that because the day of graduation, whenever they called us across the stage, it was like, ‘I finally made it. I had been trying for this for four years and finally achieved my goal,'” he said.
He remained at BPD until suffering an off-duty injury.
One night, he was talking to one of his ILEA classmates, John Amis, who had worked at the Crothersville Police Department for a while before taking a job at the Brownstown Police Department.
Amis told Abd’llah about an opening at Crothersville, so he reached out to Officer Jonathon Tabor. Abd’llah filled out an application and brought it to Chief Matt Browning.
“Just that brief interaction with Matt, I was like, ‘This is a place I could see myself working,'” Abd’llah said. “Coming in here, I was in my personal vehicle in civilian clothing, and just to see people drive by and wave and just be really friendly toward the police, I was like, ‘This is a place I really want to work.'”
Shortly after, Abd’llah had an interview with the Crothersville Town Council, was offered the job and was sworn in.
“I want to grow with the department. I want to grow with the town,” he said. “I plan on being around for as long as they’ll have me. I want to be there for them.”