Hollywood star Erik Estrada known for his many decades starring in TV shows and movies, has now forged a new path as a law enforcement official who works undercover to stop child sex predators.
The 75-year-old actor recently shared with Fox News about his journey from Hollywood into policing. The latter was a childhood dream he began to recognize in 2008 while working as an actor.
He became a reserve cop for the Muncie Police Department in Indiana and later became a deputy sheriff in Virginia. It was in that latter role with the Bedford County Sheriff’s Office that Estrada began working in his department’s Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force, Fox News reported.
When the actor realized the horrors unfolding on the internet against kids, he was enraged.
“I got so upset when I saw what I saw because my daughter was 7 at the time,” Estrada told Fox News. “It really upset me. And then I got angry. [It] made me mad.”
The actor spent the next eight years using various technologies to catch sex predators.
Today, he works with the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office, where he entraps deviants by using fake identities to try and snag them before they can hurt kids.
“While they’re talking to you, they think they’re talking to Kimmy, 13-and-a-half [years-old],” he told Fox News. “Once you tell them your age, if they don’t sign off — just a matter of time before they make that move and cross that line and give you probable cause to go get them.”
Estrada continued, “And then once we go to your house or you come to get us thinking it’s a go, then we take you down.”
The irony of Estrada’s work, of course, is that he played a police officer in “CHiPS,” making his eventual foray into law enforcement a prime example of life imitating art.
But the roots of his passion for public service were, again, set when he was a young child.
“At the age of four my mother fired my dad because he was stuck on the needle,” Estrada said in a past interview, according to Faithwire. “And she started dating a cop, so that’s where my love of cops come from. That’s why I’m a real cop today.”
