POCATELLO — After a promotion ceremony held at City Hall on Tuesday afternoon, Shannon Bloxham became the Pocatello Police Department’s first female sergeant in more than 20 years.

Bloxham started her career with the Bannock County Sheriff’s Office, working there from 2009 to 2013, before transitioning to the Pocatello Police Department in 2014, where she has remained for more than a decade. Bloxham has an associate degree in criminal justice and obtained her advanced patrol certificate in 2018.

With more than 2,700 hours of POST-certified training in a variety of courses, Bloxham’s qualifications include dedicated time training in leadership, law enforcement, cryptocurrency, homicide scene investigations, interview and interrogation, courtroom testimony and other valuable instruction that has added to her large repertoire of knowledge and skill.

Bloxham is a POST-certified instructor in Hardline, the Pocatello Police Department’s defensive tactics program, and is recognized for her role in law enforcement as a drug recognition expert and phlebotomist.

In 2022, Bloxham attended the Top Gun undercover narcotics investigation school and was immediately invited back in an instructional capacity, teaching there for the last three years. Prior to her promotion, she was a detective in narcotics with the BADGES task force and United States Marshals Service task force. The BADGES Task Force is a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, or HIDTA-funded, task force that includes the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Pocatello Police Department, the Idaho State Police, the Bannock County Sheriff’s Office and the Chubbuck Police Department.

During her time on the HIDTA task force, her casework and grand jury testimony led to 13 federal indictments for narcotics trafficking in 2024 alone.

While many in the audience came to support Bloxham, including her parents, federal prosecutors and U.S. marshals, it was her young daughter who pinned her new badge on her uniform.

For Bloxham, the promotion means she has a greater capacity to advocate for those who serve under her and provides an opportunity for greater leadership rather than control.

“The promotion had nothing to do with gaining authority for me. It was all about leading teams on a grander scale,” Bloxham said. “The hardest thing, I think, is that there was this underlying sense that people thought they had to treat me differently just because my embroidery color changed. I think it was just reminding people that I’ve worked with for years that I’m still the same person and they can still come to me. Just because my brass and embroidery is gold doesn’t mean that they can’t still trust me and come to me.”

That level of trust and loyalty also extended to Bloxham’s superiors, and as the only female sergeant in the force, it meant a lot to her that leaders within the Pocatello Police Department trusted her to take on that role and lead groups of primarily men.

In the end, the promotion as the department’s only female sergeant felt like the culmination of all the hard work, dedication and years of work that Bloxham put into serving the community and her diligent loyalty to the men and women in blue.

“It’s leading on a greater scale,” Bloxham said. “I’ve been leading as a corporal and detective and a field training officer, and now I get to lead an entire team all the time. I really am looking forward to it. It’s been fun so far, but it really kind of goes to show that the hard work does pay off. Because for the longest time you wonder, what are you doing it for sometimes, right? Because it’s a pretty thankless job. So it was gratifying for my hard work to have paid off and for it to speak for itself and for them to see in me and trust me to do the job.”