Widening the blue line

Hillsboro Police spokesman Michael Rouches loves his job as a cop, but his passion is the theater

By Nancy Townsley

The Forest Grove News-Times, Dec 10, 2009, Updated Dec 10, 2009

Chase Allgood / News-Times

Hillsboro resident Michael Rouches is a police officer by day and an actor by night. The 48-year-old father of four holds down a fulltime job as spokesman for the Hillsboro Police Department while acting in HART theater’s “A Christmas Story” and producing his own radio situation comedy this month.

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Two hours into a 12-hour play rehearsal on Nov. 21, Michael Rouches the actor was called away to a crime scene in Cornelius.

There, he became Lt. Michael Rouches the police officer, explaining to members of the media how fellow officers had gunned down a 28-year-old man who’d gone on a shooting rampage through town.

“My life is kind of crazy like that,” Rouches said in his office at the Hillsboro Police Department’s 10th Avenue precinct, where he serves as the public information officer.

For Rouches, whose day job as a cop brings him face-to-face with danger, vice and the occasional pesky journalist, acting is comic relief – and an outlet he’s enjoyed since he was a teenager growing up in La Crosse, Wisc., a state he says is “like Minnesota, but a little weirder.”

Rouches and grade school friend Jeff Sharon dreamed up “Sharon and Rouches Productions” in Rouches’s garage, leading him into an acting career that has spanned five decades, minus one when he and his wife, Christine, were raising young children.

“I’ve done 50 shows since I was 14,” noted the 48-year-old father of four. “I was out of theater for a while, but I always missed it.”

Thirty years after he portrayed unscrupulous peddler Ali Hakim in his high school’s production of the musical “Oklahoma!,” Rouches reprised the role at Hillsboro Artists’ Regional Theater. “That was a kick – to do it as a teen and again as an adult,” he said.

He’s currently playing the part of The Old Man in HART’s “A Christmas Story,” which runs through Dec. 20.

‘I’m just a guy’

A one-dimensional path never appealed to Rouches. He earned a bachelor’s degree in theater arts at Viterbo University, a Catholic liberal arts school in La Crosse, during the late 1970s.

Yet he eschewed a fulltime acting career.

“In high school I was the thoughtful clown, and that fit,” Rouches said. “But I knew I didn’t want to act professionally. You really have to give up your life to do that.”

Besides, he added with humility, “I’m not the greatest actor, and I’m not a leading man – I’m just a guy.”

Another direction

Rouches soon set out in another direction, one he’d entertained since he was a boy, by picking up and heading off to Los Angeles with buddy Peter Love from La Crosse.

“I’d always wanted to be an L.A. cop,” noted Rouches. The friends rented a “crappy apartment” off Hollywood Boulevard; Love got a bit part in a soap opera and Rouches signed up for the police academy.

“I loved it,” he said with a grin. “I was living the dream.”

After receiving his badge, Rouches joined the Los Angeles Police Department and worked as a street cop, detective and school resource officer.

He moved to Oregon in 1994 and became HPD’s spokesman two years ago, a position that fits him to a tee.

“I love my job,” Rouches said. “My big responsibility is to keep the media away from officers doing their job… and then to inform them about what’s going on. The public has a right to know.”

The local department, he said, is “extremely externally focused” and sees police work as “an extension of social services,” something Rouches appreciates. “I like that we help people, I like the area, and my kids love the schools,” he said.

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