Dale Sutherland has lived many different lives during his long career as an undercover detective for the Washington DC Police Department.
At one point he posed as a body shop owner, at another he was a Philadelphia gangster, at another he ran an import-export business, and at another he was just a heroin addict buying drugs on the street corner.
But through it all, including his 29 years on the police force, one role was above all else: that of a preacher.
“I was a pastor and a police officer,” Sutherland, 60, of Vienna, Virginia, told The Washington Post last week. “So at night I’d be in Washington buying drugs, posing as a recording studio owner, and I’d often get calls from the church about counseling meetings the next day.”
“Or I’d be preparing a sermon for my church and I’d get emails and calls from drug dealers who were bringing in loads of drugs,” he continued. “So it was like both worlds coming together and it was really crazy. It was a bit confusing.”
Now, 11 years after retiring from the Washington, DC police force, Sutherland has started his own podcast, called “Cops, Criminals, and Christ,” which explores not only how these three worlds intertwine, but also the strange duality of a God-fearing, Bible-carrying man who made a living by lying.
“What I’m really good at is lying,” Sutherland, now pastor of City Light Church in Falls Church, Va., said with a laugh. “I’m really good at it. That’s not what you want in a local pastor. I’ve been fooling people for 22 years, conning people into thinking I was something I wasn’t.”
“But the way we see it, the Bible is clear that society needs to be protected from evil people,” he said. “And this was a way to faithfully help the community to keep out really bad people.”
“That’s what I knew in my heart,” the married father of three continued.
“Mentally, I was OK with going to strip clubs, buying drugs and hanging out with some really rotten people for that kind of thing because I truly believed that was the best way to catch these guys. Nobody else could catch them like we could.”
Sutherland, a native of northern Maine, said he and his colleagues had worked for 22 years, mostly undercover, trying to take down gangs that roamed the nation’s capital city – from MS-13 to foreign drug cartels to ultra-violent street gangs.
That sometimes meant simple street buying, where work occasionally took him to Washington, DC, or Manhattan’s Washington Heights.
There were also lengthy cases where actors developed a character’s identity and remained in that role for months afterward.
But to Sutherland, it was all the same.
“The techniques are the same,” he said, “but if I can buy drugs from the crowd on 178th Street and Broadway, that, to me, is the essence of undercover work.”
Sutherland loves the job and says he’d do it again in a heartbeat if he could.
But life on the streets is not without heartbreak and danger.
He said he was nearly killed more than six times.
Then in 1992, a source he had become close with was shot and killed by a violent street gang he was investigating, and Sutherland nearly lost his own life in the incident.
“This informant and I went out shopping,” Sutherland said, “and we were late, which is a common occurrence for me, but it ended up saving my life, because they were going to shoot both of us in the car when we got there.”
“But we delayed so much that they gave up,” he said. [the informant] “They got out of their car and went looking for them, and when they found him, he was killed … shot 28 times.”
“I was just with this guy, sharing the teachings of Jesus and getting to know him really well,” Sutherland said. “I was with him 10 minutes ago and now he’s been shot. It was a difficult time and very sad.”
That’s where his faith was born, he said.
In fact, that’s why he became a cop in the first place.
“The foundational promise is that we truly believe that anyone can have an intimate, personal relationship with Christ,” Sutherland said of the nondenominational church where he preaches.
“That’s what I’ve been striving for my whole life, and I joined the police department to be able to do that better.”
Along the way, he saw the worst of humanity, but it only reaffirmed his beliefs.
“I mean, I saw sin live,” he said. “As a police officer, I drove around the city and I saw the broken lives and the children and the consequences of addiction and violence. And I was like, ‘Oh, the Bible is right.’ And it is.”
Sutherland started the podcast, which has three episodes currently airing, because he thought it might be another way to spread the good word.
And a new documentary series called “Dale Undercover,” which premiered at France’s Cannes Documentary Film Festival in April, might help.
“I don’t think what’s happened in my life is all that interesting,” he said, “but what I’ve learned is that it’s just a different path, a different way to get the same message across.”
“I am more [likely] “I have more interesting stories to tell than the average preacher,” he continued, “so maybe God can use me to share this truth.”
“But maybe through this story more people will listen.”
