Key Takeaways
- FBI Director Kash Patel named Shaquille O’Neal an honorary FBI special agent during the National Academy’s Session 299 graduation ceremony in Virginia.
- Shaq immediately revived his longtime Inside the NBA rivalry by telling the graduates, “If you see Charles Barkley, arrest him.”
- The honorary title adds to Shaq’s decades-long law-enforcement résumé, which includes reserve officer roles in Los Angeles, Miami Beach, and Doral, Florida.
Controversial FBI Director Kash Patel named retired NBA star Shaquille O’Neal an honorary FBI Special Agent on Thursday (Sept. 17), and he immediately joked about using his position of power to detain his Inside the NBA co-host Charles Barkley.
Shaq was named an honorary FBI agent during the graduation ceremony for Session 299 of the FBI National Academy in Virginia. This doesn’t mean that Shaq is an actual FBI agent now, because he didn’t take the ten-week curriculum required for graduating law enforcement, but he’s still trying to use it as an opportunity to troll Chuck once again.
“Some of you will go back to your regular jobs, some of you will go to specialized training,” he told the graduating class. “Some of you will go do what I do, be undercover. Well, I was undercover… But I just wanna say I appreciate you guys so much. Congratulations. I am not here for this; I am here for you. … And if you see Charles Barkley, arrest him.”
In a post shared on X, Patel thanked Shaq for his appearance at the ceremony.
“FBI was honored to be joined by one of the best supporters of law enforcement in the country—@Shaq—who graduated with this session and became an honorary FBI agent,” he wrote, as seen in the post below.
This isn’t the first time Shaq has gotten involved with law enforcement. While he was still active in the NBA, he went through the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Reserve Academy training program and became a reserve officer with the Los Angeles Port Police. He was later awarded an honorary U.S. Deputy Marshal title in 2005, and became a spokesperson for the Safe Surfin’ Foundation.
When he was traded to the Miami Heat, he became a Miami Beach reserve officer. During his time in Miami, he witnessed a homophobic hate crime and helped the Miami-Dade police track down the suspects, resulting in arrests on battery, assault, and hate crime charges, per an NBC News article from 2005. In 2015, he was also sworn in as a reserve officer in Doral, Florida, and was sworn in as a sheriff’s deputy in Jonesboro, Georgia, the following year.
