It may be served in a bed

SUNDAY, JULY 3, 2022 Ilya Bezuglov, service at ‘dream job’

By Lauren Keene

Enterprise staff writer

For Ilya Bezuglov, immigrating to the United States exposed him to a number of new experiences — including carpeting, of all things.

“I’d never seen it before,” Bezuglov, a Davis Police Department lieutenant, said of the worn floor covering at the West Sacramento apartment he shared with his family.

The year was 1994, several years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Bezuglov, then 23, came to America on a refugee visa with his sevenmonths-pregnant wife and his mother-in-law after growing up in Uzbekistan.

He recalls his first trip to a grocery store, the local Safeway, as “a religious experience.”

“I never knew there was more than one pack of cheese,” Bezuglov said. But it was another opportunity, while attending Sacramento City College, that would end up shaping the trajectory of his life.

A public safety recruitment program directed Bezuglov to the Los Rios Police Academy, from which he graduated in 1998. His father, who along with most of his family worked in the medical field, “didn’t speak to me for a year.”

Accustomed to corruption in law enforcement, Bezuglov’s father shunned his son until he paid a visit to the U.S. “and saw that things were quite a bit different,” Bezuglov said.

His academy graduation led to a job with the West Sacramento Police Department, and he later moved to the Davis Police Department in 2001.

“I fell in love with the community,” Bezuglov said. “It’s a really great department.”

Twenty-one years later, Bezuglov plans to retire from the agency to pursue another new opportunity — coordinating the Los Rios Police Academy that recruited him nearly three decades ago.

“I’ve done everything I wanted to do,” said Bezuglov, who has worked patrol and Rachel Kraeger/ McNaughton Media

Davis Police Department Lieutenant Ilya Bezuglov, originally from Uzbekistan, plans to retire from the agency to pursue another new opportunity — coordinating the Los Rios Police Academy that recruited him nearly three decades ago.