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Harold Scott’s office is empty.

He’ll retire Wednesday morning as assistant police chief, and during his retirement ceremony inside the City Council chambers, he’ll give his badge — No. 986 — to his son and his daughter and begin thinking about the next chapter in his life.

It’ll be tough. But he won’t tell you that. His wife, Kay, and his kids will. They’ve seen the pacing and heard the half-hearted “Hey” when he gets home. But it’s easy to understand, particularly for a 27-year veteran with the Greensboro Police Department.

Once a cop, always a cop. Scott, people will tell you, was a good one.

He started out on patrol, a baby-faced college grad from Appalachian State. He wanted to go to law school. Instead, he chose rookie school.

He wanted to protect and serve the people in his hometown.

It sounds old-fashioned, especially today in our jaded world. But that’s Scott. He was raised in Greensboro’s College Park Baptist Church, the youngest son of two deacons, and he followed these old-fashioned values of right and wrong.

Even today, his wife says he is an “Andy Griffith,” a cop with an easy demeanor and a relaxed drawl. And he’s all Greensboro.

Scott grew up in what he calls a “goodie two-shoes world,” a world where he met his wife in high school and saw downtown from the 15th-floor office of his father, an underwriter supervisor with Jefferson-Pilot.

He didn’t know the other side of his hometown. But he learned. And along the way, he realized good street sense is somewhere between paranoia and relaxation, and heaven and hell in his hometown is separated by a 10-minute drive.

“Do you get scared?” people have asked him often.

“Yes, I’m scared,” he’ll respond. “But you stay smart.”

He has. But not without one close call.

The date: Feb. 17, 1991, a late Sunday afternoon. He was behind a restaurant off Wendover Avenue, filling out a shoplifting report, when he heard recognizable sounds that made his heart stop.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

Someone was firing at him. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. The shots tore up his cruiser. He climbed from the car, huddled behind the driver’s door for protection. He radioed for backup, saw blood oozing from his right hand and realized he had been cut by the rain of glass.

Then, everything became quiet. Eerily quiet.

“I don’t want this guy to walk up and kill me,” Scott kept thinking to himself.

He didn’t. The guy was caught 33 yards away, in Scott’s blind spot, armed with two pistols, several long guns and an assault rifle. In court, he blamed his escapade on drinking and served a few years in prison. It seems Scott was in the wrong place, wrong time.

But he didn’t forget.

He keeps the memory forever in his mind, of coming home to see his then-pregnant wife before going to the hospital and hearing his son, then only 4, ask a question in that vulnerable voice of innocence.

“Why did that bad man want to hurt my daddy?”

Since then, Scott has kept a photo in his office of his bullet-riddled cruiser. Across the photo are 10 typed words spanning left to right in capital letters: “NO MATTER WHAT. THANK GOD FOR LIFE, THEN CHERISH IT.”

And he has.

Every week for months, he drove to Atlanta to visit a cop paralyzed in a freak accident. Every year since 1992, he has helped organize the ride to Burnsville to visit a family of a fallen cop and place a wreath and fly an American flag over his grave.

In the meantime, he’s never gotten far from the street. In his last gig, he oversaw the patrol division. And when he could, he patrolled and doled out advice that held true for him for years.

It’s poignant, particularly now for an agency questioned constantly in the court of public opinion because of lawsuits, department politics and black book controversy that never seems to end.

“As long as you believe in yourself,” he’s told young officers, “you’ll still be the professional you need to be.”

And now, Scott retires. He’s young. He’s only 50. But he had spent 31 years working for the city of Greensboro — he worked for the parks & recreation department in high school and college — and he knew he could receive a supplement of his salary, as part of his retirement, until age 62.

But he doesn’t want to walk away. He wants to become a police recruiter, to help find the next generation of peacekeepers in his hometown. If that happens, you can expect he’d remind them of at least one timeless lesson: Old-fashioned ideals don’t exist only in Mayberry.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com