Mony Nop’s voice chokes up when he talks about police officers and the role they play in a community.
“When I worked here, I met so many incredible police officers, our hearts are always in the right place, and we just want to serve people,” the 45-year-old former Livermore police officer said. “Still today, if I get an opportunity, I would run into a building when shots are fired.”
It hurts him, he said, that in our current climate it seems “every police officer in the nation is getting painted with the same brush,” as being abusive of power or a “bad-ass.”
And that’s the main purpose of his new children’s book, “Officer M.N.O.P. and Me.” To dispel misconceptions about police officers and educate youth.
The book has a subtext too — he hopes that by including a diverse array of characters, as police officers and in other leadership roles, readers from all backgrounds can see themselves represented and be inspired to assume those roles themselves.
The story follows the journey of Alex, a young boy who harbors fears of police after his mother is arrested for using drugs. Gradually, his fears are assuaged after numerous positive encounters with law enforcement officials, from classroom DARE visits to roadside emergencies.
And along the way, Nop has embedded tidbits from his own unique life path and 17 years on the police force.
Nop was born into a Cambodian labor camp during the rule of the Khmer Rouge, a repressive Communist regime in the 1970s responsible for killing at least 2 million Cambodians in the name of instating an “agricultural revolution.”
His family lived in a little shack with a grass roof, he recalls.
“I brushed my teeth with rock salt, I had a log under my head as a pillow, and I had a rag as a blanket,” Nop said.
At the age of 6, he and his family, along with thousands of other Cambodians, escaped on foot to a United Nations refugee camp in neighboring Thailand. The trek there was a bloody one.
“Dead bodies were all over the place, people were getting shot and maimed all over the place,” Nop said. “I’ll never forget the middle of the night where I had to step over a bloated dead body in the middle of the river in order to continue our journey.”
His family would live at the camp for four years, and for the first time, Nop was able to attend school.
Nop’s family came to the United States in 1983; he was 10-1/2 when they arrived at a sponsor’s home in Tempe, Ariz. He recalls his first time sleeping in a “regular household” and his first “real meal” — a whole chicken was cooked for them.
The family would move to their own place a week later, but those first seven days at the sponsor’s home was a whirlwind of firsts, from church to grocery shopping.
“My siblings and I ate so much,” he said of their first picnic, “that we had to sit there and breathe with our mouths open, because we went to bed hungry every night before that.”
A year later, they moved to Stockton, attracted there by his father’s friend and the presence of a large Cambodian population.
It was a time when he learned to fend for himself, he said. A time when his father became an alcoholic and would leave home often to gamble, taking Nop’s mother with him.
So Nop went to school, and learned to sign his own paperwork. In school, he was with classmates four years younger than him — while in Thailand, his father had lowered his birth date on paper, so that if they were to ever come to the U.S., Nop and his siblings could access more years of schooling.
He only discovered his true birthdate — Dec. 2, 1972 — years later, after doing research and probing the memory of his mother, who died a few years ago.
Eventually he advanced to classes with students his own age, by skipping ahead and convincing teachers of his maturity level.
Perhaps foreshadowing his later career, he helped put his father in jail at the age of 17, when an argument between his parents threatened to turn ugly, with his dad bringing an ax to the table.
At this point, he had had enough of home trouble, and decided to move out and work to become a police officer, though this journey was riddled by further challenges, including being falsely accused of a drive-by shooting, he said.
Nop fulfilled his dream when he was hired by the Livermore Police Department on Dec. 4, 1995, the department’s second Asian police officer at the time.
He served with LPD for 17 years before retiring from policing, during which time he obtained a degree from St. Mary’s College and raised two sons, whom he has sole custody over. Nop is now a Realtor in Livermore and also works in the nonprofit sector.
His new book is part of a larger plan, and possibly the first in a series, with future books detailing life lessons he’s learned as an immigrant and businessman. He wants to use his own experiences to inspire children from marginalized backgrounds like his own, to show them they too can vanquish obstacles in their own lives.
The characters and icons that flit in and out of the pages were part of his life as well, from his friend Officer Swanson to the LPD badges and police cars.
The title character of course is himself, Officer M.N.O.P. (Yes, the punctuation marks are on-purpose — when local students pointed out that his police badge reading “M. Nop” was four letters alphabetically in a row, he unofficially became “Officer M. N. O. P.”)
Officer M. N. O. P. guides Alex through positive encounters with police, showing him that police officers are an important part of society, people who can be trusted.
The second half of the book consists of a workbook for young people, with activities, additional information and poetry about police officers written by children.
“This book is a tool,” Nop said. “For parents to have conversations about police officers. When they read the stories to their children, it’s highlighting many positive things that police officers do that do not otherwise get spoken about.”
“We want to really change children’s perception of police officers,” he continued. “There’s a lot of negativity out there. And I hope that this book can serve as a counter-balance to that.”
The books are now available for purchase online at Amazon.com. For more information, visit www.officermnop.com.
