DETROIT, MI - Jeff Banks studied to be a middle school teacher, but family members cautioned he may not have the patience for the high energy and short attention spans of young adolescents.

He went into banking, but was bored sitting at a desk, staring at a computer.

So, he became a Detroit police officer.

“Best job I ever had, until they started cutting our pay, of course,” Banks said.

With a wife and 5-year-old son at home, Banks decided to seek income on the side: He would use his teaching skills to train civilians how to protect themselves with the very firearms he had sought to take from the hands of “bad guys.”

He started helping his cousin with a Michigan Concealed Pistol License class in Royal Oak, and business boomed. It was so good, in fact, that he recently moved the business to its own location on 12 Mile Road in Southfield and plans to expand classes for Protection First CCW beyond the one-day, eight-hour course he currently teaches on Saturdays and Sundays (and some Tuesdays).

A Groupon offering the Protection First CCW training for $75 – it usually costs an average of $150 – sent demand for his class through the roof.

“Fortunately or unfortunately – I don’t know – the demand has been so huge, that I was planning on offering one of the additional classes at the first of the year, but the demand kept growing and growing and growing, that I really haven’t had the opportunity or I haven’t had the time to offer the other classes,” Banks said.

Those weekend courses are in addition to the four 12-hour shifts Banks works every week for the Detroit police department. The 32 year-old started with the department in 2004, and now works about 84 hours biweekly for the department and spends about 32 hours teaching his CPL classes.

Banks has been on gang squads, and on drug patrols commonly referred to as "narco" units in unmarked cars, and was most recently on a breaking-and-entering task force.



Then, last summer, for the second time since Banks had become an officer, the Detroit Police Department announced additional pay cut – this one a 10 percent across the board slash – in addition to switching officers' hours.

“When they changed our hours from the normal eight-hour shift to a 12-hour shift I had an option – I could either work from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., or work from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.” Banks said. “Well the daytime schedule wouldn’t work for my family, so I took the night schedule.”

It's important to note that Banks is slow to disparage the department, and still very much enjoys his job.

“I do. I really do. I really do enjoy chasing down the bad guys,” he said. “The thing that was, I guess, my specialty, or the thing that I prided myself on, is guns - finding people with illegal guns, or finding people that were carrying concealed illegally. And that was our little thing, our little specialty. And we were good at it.”

Now, faced with his both love for his police work and his rapidly growing, National Rifle Association-certified firearm training course, Banks said he plans to continue both lines of work. He will retire with the police force when he has put in his 20 years, and if necessary, he will hire additional instructors for his classes.

It comes as little surprise that there is a demand for Banks' training in a city that is at or very near the top in annual violent crime statistic compilations. An analysis of FBI crime stats puts Detroit as the second most dangerous city in the country, with 2,137 violent crimes per 100,000 people, just behind Flint's 2,337 violent crimes.

Protection First CCW instructor and Detroit police officer Jeff Banks talks to students during the firing range portion of his class.

But talks of “gun control” in Washington D.C. and beyond have only helped spur more business, Banks said.

“I think what the federal government is doing right now is help driving demand up a lot,” he said. Adding that he does not feel as the CPL classes like his are under any scrutiny anyway, and he fears no long-term impacts. If anything, more regulations may even lead to more business, with more training required for obtaining different firearms.

And as someone who has seen both the criminals with the guns, and the everyday people he says pass through his classroom’s doors, Banks said some things about the way people currently acquire guns could be tweaked.

“Do I believe there needs to be more scrutiny as far as the process to receiving a firearm? Yes. Do I believe there needs to be a total ban on firearms? Absolutely not,” he said. “I think during the (Newtown) Connecticut incident, a police chief made an excellent point: For a police officer to receive a firearm, they have to go through extensive training. They have to sit down for psychological tests, they have to go through firearms tests, they have to go through physical tests and all these other things before they are given these firearms, where regular citizens just checks ‘yes’ or ‘no’. I think they have to change how they go about screening people. “

Still, with some 500 “regular citizens” that have taken Banks’ class, he said he's not concerned that the people he was training how to use firearms could be dangerous later.

“Generally, if I were just to take a look out at the class room, it’s just everyday citizens that want to protect themselves and their families. It’s regular people that work regular jobs, and there’s not any vigilantes.”

He added, “I’ve had more people who were absolutely positively terrified than who were super Gung-ho.”