ST. LOUIS, MO – September 18, 2026 (STL.News) Police officers can spend years working together, but the job can occasionally create relationships that extend far beyond a shift, an assignment, or even a career.
That is the story behind Joe Crews and Archie Shaw, two veteran St. Louis police officers featured in the latest episode of The Brighter Side of Blue Podcast, where they look back on years of police work, memorable investigations, dangerous encounters, and a friendship forged while working the streets of St. Louis. CLICK to view the YouTube Channel.
The episode, “Joe Crews & Archie Shaw: A Brotherhood Built on the Job,” was released Sept. 15. The featured interview begins approximately 31 minutes into the 77-minute episode.
For viewers, the conversation offers something different from the crime statistics, police reports, and breaking-news incidents that typically define public coverage of law enforcement.
Crews and Shaw talk about the people behind the badges.
They remember cases and fellow officers. They laugh about experiences that happened years ago. They discuss informants and street investigations, and Shaw revisits one of the most serious moments of his career—when he was shot while working an investigation in 2017.
Underlying it all is the relationship between two officers who learned what it meant to depend on each other.
Joe Crews and Archie Shaw – A Friendship Built Through Police Work
The Brighter Side of Blue describes Crews and Shaw as officers who worked together, pursued many of the same criminals, and experienced situations that people outside law enforcement may find difficult to fully understand.
Over time, their working relationship developed into a lasting friendship.
The podcast describes the two men as more than former colleagues, using “brothers” to describe the bond they built over their years together.
That theme becomes evident throughout the interview.
Police work can create unusual relationships because officers sometimes depend on coworkers under circumstances far different from those in most occupations.
The person sitting beside you one moment may be the person you depend upon during a violent encounter minutes later.
For Crews and Shaw, those shared experiences eventually extended beyond police work itself.
Joe Crews and Archie Shaw – Shaw Became Known as a Detective
The podcast’s introduction describes Shaw as a highly regarded detective, known particularly for cultivating confidential informants.
Informants can play a significant role in narcotics and other criminal investigations by providing information that investigators may otherwise have difficulty obtaining.
The podcast describes Shaw as having developed an unusually extensive network of informants during his career.
That characterization comes from the podcast and should be understood as the hosts’ description of his work, not an independently quantified departmental statistic.
But Shaw’s standing among fellow officers is supported elsewhere.
A 2022 publication associated with the St. Louis Police Officers Association referred to him as “Legendary Detective Archie Shaw” while covering the retirement of former SLMPD Major Angela Coonce.
Shaw’s career also extended beyond investigations.
The podcast discusses his involvement with young people and the Police Athletic League, an organization that connects police officers with children through athletics and other programs.
That community component adds another dimension to the portrait presented during the interview.
The Night Archie Shaw Was Shot
Federal court records and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Missouri can independently document the most serious part of Shaw’s story.
On Oct. 12, 2017, Shaw was working as an FBI Special Federal Officer while participating in an ongoing investigation involving drug distribution activity.
He was operating an unmarked law-enforcement vehicle and began following a vehicle connected to the investigation.
The situation turned violent.
According to federal prosecutors, Johnzell Moorehead and Daryaun Wines were traveling in one vehicle while associates followed in another. Earlier that day, Moorehead and Wines had been involved in an altercation that resulted in another person being shot.
Federal prosecutors said Moorehead and Wines were concerned about possible retaliation from that earlier shooting.
Shaw began following the second vehicle.
The confrontation ultimately resulted in Shaw being shot while performing his duties.
The shooting triggered an extensive investigation involving the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department and the FBI.
What followed ultimately became much larger than the prosecution of the people accused of shooting Shaw.
Shooting Investigation Helped Dismantle Drug Organization
Federal prosecutors later said the investigation arising from Shaw’s shooting contributed to the dismantling of an entire drug organization.
Moorehead pleaded guilty in August 2019 to discharging a firearm in furtherance of assaulting a federal law-enforcement officer.
In February 2020, he was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison.
Wines received a 17-year sentence, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
But prosecutors said the investigation didn’t stop with those two defendants.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Rea said during the 2020 proceedings that the response to Shaw’s shooting ultimately resulted in seven federal prosecutions, including five additional cases connected with dismantling the drug organization.
Rea also pointed to the broad law-enforcement response after the shooting as an indication of Shaw’s importance to the community.
The federal cases provide important independent context for the stories Crews and Shaw revisit years later on the podcast.
What can sound like another story between longtime police officers involved real violence, a wounded officer, an extensive investigation, and years of federal prosecutions.
Crews Helped Shaw Beyond the Investigation
The podcast adds the personal side that court documents cannot.
Crews’ relationship with Shaw wasn’t confined to investigations or police assignments.
The episode discusses Crews helping Shaw following the shooting, including circumstances surrounding Shaw’s hospitalization and recovery.
Interestingly, one of the podcast’s lighter moments comes from that otherwise serious period.
The hosts preview the hospital story as one of the episode’s funniest moments.
That mixture of humor and serious subject matter runs throughout the conversation.
For officers who spend careers dealing with violence, death, dangerous investigations and human tragedy, humor can become part of the relationships they develop with coworkers.
The podcast allows Crews and Shaw to tell those stories in their own voices rather than reducing their careers to reports and case numbers.
Crews Continues His SLMPD Career
During the episode’s introduction, the hosts describe Crews as continuing to serve with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department and say he recently assumed responsibilities involving the department’s Mobile Reserve function.
Because current police assignments can change, STL.News has not independently confirmed Crews’ precise current assignment through an official SLMPD personnel record and therefore is not presenting the podcast’s description as an independently verified departmental posting.
Crews, however, has appeared on The Brighter Side of Blue before.
An August 2025 episode, “Patrolling the 5th District…Stories from the Street,” featured Crews alongside Billy Noonan and Tony Boone discussing police work in St. Louis’ 5th District during the 1990s and early 2000s.
That conversation focused on an era when officers confronted gangs, drug houses, homicides, and street violence while working the district.
The new interview with Shaw takes a different direction.
Rather than focusing primarily on a particular district or era, it centers on the relationship created through the work.
More Than Police Stories
The episode includes plenty of police stories.
Some are serious.
Others are funny.
Some involve investigations and criminals, while others involve the personalities of officers who worked alongside Crews and Shaw.
But the interview’s greater value is that it documents a side of policing that rarely appears in an incident report.
A police report can describe what happened.
A court filing can document charges.
A sentencing record can explain the punishment imposed.
Those documents cannot easily capture the relationships formed among the people involved.
The federal records surrounding Shaw’s shooting demonstrate the difference.
Official documents establish that Shaw was working an investigation, that he was shot, that suspects were prosecuted, and that the investigation eventually expanded into multiple federal cases.
The podcast tells viewers what happened to the people after those reports were written.
SLMPD – Police Careers Are Built From Thousands of Encounters
Most police careers aren’t defined by a single case.
They are accumulated over years of calls, investigations, arrests, interviews, court appearances, dangerous encounters, and ordinary conversations.
Officers work with partners, detectives, supervisors, prosecutors, and federal agents.
They meet victims during some of the worst moments of their lives.
They interact with offenders repeatedly.
Detectives cultivate sources.
Officers mentor younger officers.
Some participate in youth programs and community organizations.
Eventually, those experiences become institutional memory.
That is part of what makes conversations with veteran officers valuable.
Crews and Shaw aren’t simply remembering individual cases.
They are preserving stories about an era of St. Louis policing and the people who experienced it.
Shaw’s Community Work Adds Another Dimension
The episode also emphasizes Shaw’s involvement with young people.
The Police Athletic League model uses sports and structured activities to create relationships between police officers and children.
St. Louis PAL continues operating programs designed to keep young people involved in athletics and positive activities while building relationships with law enforcement.
The organization’s more recent activities have included scholarships, sporting programs, and community events addressing issues including gun violence and safety.
For Shaw, that work provides an important counterpoint to the image of a detective known for informants and criminal investigations.
A career in law enforcement can involve pursuing violent offenders one day and interacting with children through community programs another.
Both can be part of the same career.
The Brighter Side of Blue Documents Police History
The Crews and Shaw episode also fits into a growing archive being created by The Brighter Side of Blue Podcast.
Recent episodes have featured current and former St. Louis-area law-enforcement figures discussing policing from perspectives that aren’t always captured by conventional news coverage.
The podcast recently featured St. Louis Police Chief Robert Tracy and has previously explored subjects ranging from specific police districts to the personal costs of dangerous police work.
For STL.News readers, those conversations offer a chance to hear directly from people who participated in events that became part of St. Louis history.
They don’t replace independent reporting or official records.
Instead, they provide another layer.
The records tell us what happened.
The people who were there can tell us what it felt like.
A Brotherhood That Outlasted the Assignment
Crews and Shaw’s careers brought them together through police work.
The job exposed them to criminal investigations, dangerous situations, and experiences most people will never encounter.
Shaw’s 2017 shooting provides perhaps the clearest example of how suddenly police work can change.
One moment an officer is following a vehicle as part of an investigation.
The next, everything is different.
Years later, Crews and Shaw can sit together and laugh about some of the experiences surrounding those difficult periods.
That may be the most revealing part of the interview.
The friendship didn’t end when an investigation closed.
It didn’t disappear when assignments changed.
And it wasn’t confined to the police department.
It became something that survived the job itself.
The latest episode of The Brighter Side of Blue gives St. Louis viewers an opportunity to hear that story directly from the two men who lived it.
For Crews and Shaw, what began as two officers working together ultimately became something much harder to describe in a police report.
It became a brotherhood.
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