Former UFC Fighter Jimmie Rivera Explains Why He Became a Police Officer

Former Ultimate Fighting Championship competitor Jimmie Rivera now juggles his roles as a Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship star and a police officer.

Rivera parted ways with the Las Vegas-based promotion in August 2021 before signing with BKFC last year. “El Terror” co-headlined BKFC 56 on Saturday in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he suffered a technical knockout loss to Jeremy Stephens at the end of the third frame via doctor stoppage.

When he is not slugging it out in bare knuckle contests, Rivera is also a cop at the Elmwood Park Police Department. Rivera, who admittedly needs to keep himself busy, initially tried his hand at dispatch during the pandemic as a sense of uncertainty engulfed the world of sports.

“I won’t say I have ADHD, but I can’t stop. I always have to work. I’ve always got to do something. I’m all about the grinding. … It’s also very bad mentally, to not do anything. You see people who retire and they don’t do anything. They end up getting right back into it or they mentally degrade and don’t look the best anymore,” the 34-year-old recently told MMAjunkie.com.

“I told [Elmwood Park Police Department chief Mike Foligno] I wanted to get a little dispatch in. I told him I wanted to get my feet wet a little bit. At the same time, he was like, ‘Yeah, I want to launch this program.’ So we launched a program with Ron Schulmann, one of the co-founders of Tiger Schulmann’s. That did great.”

After working dispatch, Rivera found his true calling in a new program where he gives jiu-jitsu lessons to fellow officers. According to “El Terror,” the benefits range from better mental health to a decrease in the use of force.

“People who are cops who are scared, they overcompensate at 100 when this could’ve been settled at a one or a zero. It didn’t have to be like that. We’ve seen it already with the Elmwood Park Police Department [N.J.]. The use of force has gone down. Complaints have gone down. It’s a completely crazy nine-day difference after doing it for a couple years, twice a year. What a tremendous difference,” he said.

“Health is very close to mental illness. So being able to take care of your health is going to be able to take care of your mental illness. Police officers, they don’t have mental illness, but they have a lot of stress. This s—t helps them a lot, just getting in, hitting a bag, relieving stress on the bag, and at the same time, getting a workout in. It’s something else we do as well.”

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