The Police Awards Banquet is the last place Erick Long expected to end up when he came to work last June to pave a walkway.

WKYT met Long that day after he happened to be at the right place at the right time to save three-year-old Keelan McClanahan when family members found the boy unresponsive in a pool. "Me and all my friends, the crew I work with, we ran around there to see," Long told WKYT the day of the rescue, "and the little boy was white and wasn't breathing, so I just did what I thought was right to try to help him."

For his act of bravery, the Lexington Police awarded Long the Citizen Service Medal, but Long insists it's the police who deserve more credit than they often receive. "They do this every day," Long said Tuesday night at the ceremony held in the Bluegrass Ballroom of the Lexington Convention Center, "and sometimes the things they do, they don't get recognized. They do it every day, every night, and they just take it home with them."

They include Officer Vincent Matteini who received the Police Officer of the Year Award. "We've shut down a lot of the violence and arrested a number of drug dealers," Matteini said when asked what stood out to him from the past year.

Detective Joshua Masterson received the Medal of Merit for rescuing a driver from a burning vehicle, but if you ask him, it's all in a day's work. "That's kind of our job," Masterson said, "so I don't know that I believe that I did much more than anybody else would have done in that situation either. We're all here to do that. I don't think that any of my other fellow officers would have done anything different that day than I did."

While the officers may have felt reluctant to take a bow for their bravery, at least on this night, their acts above and beyond the call of duty left their mark on the civilians among them.

Several co-workers of murder victim Umi Southworth were also honored Tuesday night for helping police with the investigation.