Almost every morning after his overnight shift, Mike Costello runs through an apartment complex near his house where a fellow police officer, a friend of his, was shot four years ago.
The racially diverse neighborhood has been Costello’s home for two years. He moved into the city of Atlanta as part of an initiative to better integrate police officers with the cities they patrol.
That means his running route is not only his daily exercise, but is also an extension of his job.
“I’ll throw on an Atlanta Police shirt, and run through all the streets in the neighborhood, just to show, like, ‘Hey, there’s the neighborhood cop,’” Costello, who is Caucasian, told CNN, sitting in his backyard one spring afternoon.
On his cop’s salary, Costello says he never would have been able to buy a house on his own in the Atlanta n