He met his future wife, Suzanne, just before he began his enlistment with the Marines. After returning from active duty, Gray landed a job as a big rig truck driver up in Northern California. By then, his long distance relationship with Suzanne had taken off and he was looking for a more stable employment opportunity so they could get married. Gray was accepted into the LAPD police academy, completing twenty-eight years of service with them before he was hired at the Escondido Police Department, working there for fourteen years. D.E. Gray is the author of The Warrior in Me.

According to the book description of The Warrior in Me it “offers readers a look back at the author’s distinguished career with both the Los Angeles Police Department and the Escondido Police Department. It contains several accounts of true events that happened in various locations of California from murder to robbery and chases. Along the way, Gray learned that there were cops, and then there were real cops – the ones who worked the streets everyday. Gray further surmised that law enforcement organizations are comprised of two groups of people – street warriors (who patrolled the mean streets) and administrators (who worked their way up the ladder through promotions). Ultimately, this book emphasizes in detail the police culture like no other book could.”

About the Los Angeles Police Department

The deployment of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Gang and Narcotics Division (GND) is a revolutionary change in law enforcement strategy.  The GND is one component of the LAPD Gang Initiatives 2009 “total solution” to combat the gang and drug problem in the City of Los Angeles.  The consolidation of Gang Operations Support Division and Narcotics Division into GND fosters greater efficiency and facilitates the rapid deployment of resources to identified crime problems.  Since there is a nexus of guns, gangs, narcotics and crime, the increased cooperation between experienced gang and narcotics investigators will result in more effective investigations, a quantifiable increase in arrests, and a reduction in the crime rate.  Joint operations between narcotics and gang detectives, in cooperation with other City entities and resources, will also be developed to abate chronic narcotics and gang locations.  The GND will be focused on disrupting violent gangs who support their lifestyle through the trafficking of narcotics and guns.  The GND will operate in partnership with allied law enforcement agencies and expand the highly successful High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTA) Task Force to reduce violent gang crime.

The Warrior in Me D E. Gray  More Info True to the Blue D E. Gray  More Info

According to the book description of True to the Blue, “D. E. Gray’s first book, The Warrior in Me, was a collective memoir of his forty-two-year career in law enforcement, twenty-eight years with the Los Angeles Police Department, and fourteen years with the Escondido Police Department in the North San Diego County.

Even though his new book titled True to the Blue is a work of fiction, it is based in part on a true story, along with actual events that the author experienced or witnessed while on the job. Many of the characters portrayed in this story are patterned after real people who have either worked or crossed paths with D. E. Gray during his forty-two-year career as a street cop.

This story begins in early 1999 and follows the hardships of Sergio Ortega, a six-year veteran of the LAPD who is assigned to the elite CRASH1 gang unit of the Operations Central Bureau. It follows Ortega’s struggle to be the best at what he does, getting the bad guys off the streets while staying true to his badge and the blue uniform that he wears and that represents cops in every city.

With the infamous LAPD Rampart scandal about to break wide open and Chief Bernard Parks’ hard-line approach with his officer accountability policy, Ortega eventually discovers that being a good cop is more than he had bargained for. When he is faced with protecting the identity of an “ELA Dukes” gang member who has turned confidential informant for an LAPD Hollenbeck Division detective, he finds himself in trouble with the department. He soon realizes that the Hollenbeck detective would turn his back on him only to protect his own career. Ortega’s 1 Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, usually known by the acronym CRASH, was an elite but controversial special operations unit of the Los Angeles Police Department.

His hard work and dedication to the job would destroy his marriage and alienate his friends and partners who would abandon him in his time of need. Ortega would have to dig deep into his past to come to grips with his downward spiraling life to try to salvage it from the disaster it had come to be.”