Between them, Detective Jess Burks and Sgt. Harlie Curry have nearly 20 years of law enforcement experience, nearly all of it with the Lexington Police Department. And for the past year, they’ve put that experience to work as members of the department’s investigative division.
“They get along together [and] they feed off of each other, which is what you want a team to do,” Lexington Police Chief Angela Greene told The News-Gazette in an interview she did this summer before she left for a new job with the Virginia attorney general’s office. “They bring different skill sets, different ideas, different thoughts, and they start pulling a thread on investigations and they start working together.”
Burks joined the Lexington Police Department in 2011, working special enforcement before going to the police academy and becoming a certified officer the following year. She worked as a patrol officer until last year when she made the move to the investigative division.
“I’m just one of those people that needs and likes stimulation of some type, like learning new things and developing different skills,” she said. “Patrol is a lot of the same thing over and over and over again, and I guess maybe getting a little bit older and having a family, that lifestyle was getting a bit old for me. Or I was getting a little bit old for that lifestyle, rather, and just wanted a change of pace.
“Investigations is not anything I thought I would really find myself in, because I like to show up, solve the problem and take care of business,” she continued. “But investigations … is a lot more timeconsuming in terms of working on this case and then moving on to this case. It’s completely different, a complete 180 in terms of how we’re handling things. It surprised me that I’ve been enjoying it so much. I didn’t expect I was going to be enjoying it as much as I do.”
Burks’s key areas of focus as an investigator are domestic violence cases, sexual assault cases and crimes against children.
Her position is funded by a grant which the department applied for after seeing a rise in reported incidents of domestic violence in the city, and since Burks became an investigator focused on those incidents, there has been a decrease.
From January through July of 2024, 20 incidents of domestic violence were reported. In the same time period this year, there were eight reported incidents, a 70 percent reduction. There was also a 100 percent reduction in reported incidents of sexual assault and domestic aggravated assault for the same period, and a 50 percent reduction in crimes involving children.
The increase in the number of incidents being reported was also part of the reason Chief Greene began making efforts to expand the investigative division and increase the number of investigators in the department.
“We were having multiple incidents of domestic violence, and it was always these repeat offenders and these repeat victims, and nothing was happening other than incidents were escalating,” she said. “We started realizing if we were taking more time on the front end when we initially went to these calls, we could potentially prevent these incidents from escalating, connect these victims with the resources they need to get out of this bad situation, and at the end prevent a person from becoming a victim and prevent an individual from committing these crimes and having to arrest them. But that takes time, and that takes resources one person investigating all of these crimes doesn’t have time to do.”
Part of the effort to reduce those numbers involved a shift from focusing solely on the perpetrators of these incidents to also working to try to get the survivors the resources to seek help.
“Traditionally in law enforcement, we’ve been so focused on the offender … and the survivor was kind of left hanging and not focused on at all,” Burks said. “In addition to stepping up our focus on offenders, we’ve [also] stepped up our focus on survivors and trying to connect them with services and provide them with information. This whole process is a survivor-led process. I can’t force somebody to leave somebody when I see it’s a toxic situation or a bad situation, but generally, that abuser is separating them from support and resources and a way out, essentially. It’s all about power and control.”
Curry is newer to the department, having joined in 2023 after serving as an officer with the Covington Police Department for a year. She’s also been a registered emergency room nurse since 2013 and worked in that role before making the switch to law enforcement. In 2024, she became the resource officer for Lexington City Schools and also joined the LPD’s investigative unit.
“It’s been amazing,” Curry said of her experience in her new roles. “People have different perspectives of cops, but being able to have that connection and make that connection and [show] the kids not all cops are bad, it’s been awesome.”
As an investigator, Curry also has a focus on crimes involving children.
“Because I have first contact with the kids through the school, if something were to happen I can be the first one to investigate it, especially in the school setting because I’m already there,” she said.
“If we’re having issues with children, more than likely they’re stemming from [their] home,” Greene said. “So we needed an individual that would be trained in identifying those kind of predispositions to crime where we’re seeing issues with the children coming to school that [indicate] there’s probably something going on at home, and even though we deal with children in school, if they go right back to the home, the cycle’s just going to keep going.”
Having a school resource officer who is also trained as an investigator is part of a holistic approach to trying to identifying issues before things escalate to the point where an arrest is warranted.
“She was all for that and wanted to learn and wanted to have those investigative skills in her toolbox,” Greene said.
Curry said that serving in the dual role of school resource officer and investigator has been somewhat different than she expected.
“I went in with expectation of ‘This is my job. I’m going to protect them and help them when needed,’ but to be able to get close [to them] and become someone that these kids can come to and talk to is something I wasn’t expecting,” she said. “I’m glad that it happened, because people’s perception of a school resource officer is you just sit there and monitor cameras and that’s not it. I go and spend time with these kids in their classrooms and they come into my office and talk to me about their personal problems. That’s been very rewarding. I wasn’t expecting that part of it.
“I genuinely love my job,” she added. “I love being the SRO and I love being in investigations. In a sense, they coincide. I am the first person, with the kids at least, they come in contact with. I think it was a wonderful idea to have an SRO as an investigator and I’m just very grateful and appreciative of where I’m at.”
In addition to providing more focus on these kinds of crimes, adding officers to the department’s investigative division provides additional resources to each detective in the form of someone to bounce ideas off of and collaborate with.
“That’s been one of the biggest things, just being able to sit down together and collaborate and say, ‘I feel like I’m hitting a wall. Can you help me through this?’” Burks said. “Getting a new pair of eyes, a fresh pair of eyes on something … That’s been the best part, being able to collaborate and just have a team approach to solving something, or even just making an advancement [in the case]. That’s probably been the most rewarding part of having a unit.”
“[I like] having multiple people able to work together for a common goal and kind of bounce ideas off each other,” Curry said. “If I have an idea and it doesn’t work, Detective Burks might think of it a different way and it might work, and vice-versa. I think having different brains in it helps a lot.”
“I think it’s working wonderfully,” Greene said. “I think the numbers speak for themselves … so what we’re doing seems to be working. We’re still learning and we’re humble enough that we’re still tweaking things along the way and [asking] where can we do better, how can we improve … I think it’s working wonderfully and I hope we continue on this trend.”
