Being a Chief in a Small Town
By Chief Danny Watson, City of Darlington Chief of Police
I can clearly remember when I decided I wanted to become a police officer; I thought maybe I should do a bit of research on it. I went to a local library and got two books on small town policing. I do not recall the names of either of the books, surprisingly enough, but I do remember one consistent theme in both of the books. Don’t do it! Basically, by the end of both of books the recommendation was if you could find anything else to do just do that instead.
I know that this may seem a bit funny and looking back after all of these years I must admit it is a bit humorous. You just never really know what you will run into when you go to work as a police officer. It might be the car you pull over in the middle of the night and the driver gets out with no clothes on or a hundred other crazing things. (Yes, it really happened to me at 3:00 a.m. on a rainy night.) There are so many funny – and not so funny – stories I could probably fill several pages just telling you about them.
Some of my favorite stories have always included a conversation that starts out with, “Don’t you know who I am?” or another personal favorite is “Do you know officer whoever?” When you have been around a small town or city for a while, you begin to learn the landscape pretty well. I am taking nothing away from big city police officers or departments; they certainly have their hands full. They are so busy in fact they have very little time to do more than rush from place to place.
The luxury of being the chief in a small jurisdiction is the opportunity to know all of the people who work for you. They are not strangers to you, but a part of your extended family that you care for as if they were a blood relation. The people in the town you work in are much the same you get to know them and in turn they know you. Most of my conversations start with someone telling me that they hate to bother me because they know that I am busy.
Everyone is busy in their own way, but people are the business of my life. Taking the time to speak to someone who has a complaint or a concern should be every chief or sheriff’s goal. I by no means am the best chief in the world. I strive every day to think of better ways to take care of the people who work for me. I strive every day to think of better ways to employ our resources to make our city a better place to live. At the end of the day, it is an ever-changing process. We work, we strive, and we hope to get better. Sitting upon the laurels of the past will not make things better tomorrow.
This requires that you are a person who is willing to listen. In a small jurisdiction like ours, I have an opportunity to give people that access. It is being willing to go to the window, sit in the hall, go to someone’s house, walk through their neighborhood, or walk through the door of their store with open ears. Even when you don’t have a solution or a quick fix to a problem, people feel better when they have an opportunity to be heard.
Being a chief in a small town is a blessing. Not because there are no problems, there are certainly enough unique problems to fill a day. Not because there is no crime, because even in a small town you will have people who refuse to live within the boundaries that society has established. Simply because you can get to know the people you serve and they can get to know you. Even if they know you will not always tell them what they want to hear, they know that they can trust you to have their best interests at heart. My door is always open and I am always willing to listen. Wouldn’t it be nice if everywhere you went was just like that? Everywhere you go won’t be like that. It will in this small town, however, as our agency has been proudly woven into the fabric of what make this a great place.
Chief Danny Watson MPA FBI NA # 228, Chief of Police for City of Darlington, has been on the Darlington Police Department since 1994 and Chief since 2011.
The News & Press will be sharing updates and opinions from Chief Watson on a regular basis; you can also keep up with the department on their Facebook page: Darlington Police Department.