The Anne Arundel County Police Department honored local hero George Phelps, Jr. this month by, posthumously, making him an Anne Arundel County Police Officer.  As a police officer, he would have been encouraged to join our FOP, and therefore, we recently voted to make him an honorary member of our FOP. Born in 1926, Brother Phelps  was the nephew of the late Wiley H. Bates and he graduated Wiley H. Bates High School.  Bates was the only high school in the county that black students could go to until the mid-1960s when  segregation ended in Anne Arundel County.  After high school, he attended North Carolina A&T College and joined the U.S. Army, which took him to  Europe during World War II for service as a military police officer. With his education, military, and policing background, he would have made the perfect addition to the Anne Arundel County Police Department.  But in 1950, not many people could imagine a black man hired to a position where he could arrest a white person.