Police officers are not supposed to exude emotion. They are not supposed to smile. And they are certainly not supposed to be at all affected personally by the experiences, including tragedies, associated with their jobs.##M:[more]##
Not true, West Windsor Detective Don Edwards says of the popular image many officers are given. And the work and connections he has made with the residents in town — most importantly the kids — serve as a testament that there is a person beneath the blue, button-down shirt and shiny badge who is genuinely concerned and simply wants to help.
Now, as Edwards retires after a 25-year career with the West Windsor Police Department — 18 of which were spent as the juvenile detective — he knows his efforts have erased some of the police officer stereotypes, at least for those in the town he has watched grow from 7,”000 residents to a population that today hovers above 26,”000.
As he prepares to officially leave his position in the department on Tuesday, September 1, Edwards recalls the perception of police officers as he was growing up. When an officer drove down your street, you’d better go back inside and stay out of trouble because they were obviously monitoring you or your street because they were suspicious that you’ve done something bad, he says.
This idea is understandable, Edwards admits, because in most cases, if a police officer must interact with someone, it is most likely because something bad has happened to him or her or someone the person knows. Or it means that person is one who has done something wrong or been involved in a law-breaking incident — whether it is committing a criminal crime or simply not wearing a seat belt while driving.
But Edwards, who originally did not want the job as a juvenile detective, created his own approach — one that had him visiting all of the schools in West Windsor, interacting with administrators, teachers, and most importantly, the students, who began to trust him as someone they could approach with concerns, problems, or simply as a person with whom they could chat.
“That was one of the barriers that I wanted to break down — that police officers are people to be afraid of,” he said. “Those barriers came down like the Berlin Wall.”
Edwards grew up in Lambertville and earned a degree in business at Trenton State College (now the College of New Jersey) in 1981. His father was an electrician with the bridge commission that maintained the bridges over the Delaware River, running between Trenton and Phillipsburg, and his mother was a school bus driver.
After graduating from college, he “bounced around” until the end of 1983, when he took the path that led him to his career.
He became a police officer as a result of peer pressure — the good kind — and it ended up working out for him. “As I went through college, I just had it in my heart that I just wasn’t a person to sit at a desk and crunch numbers,” he says. A few of his friends had been getting into law enforcement positions and encouraged him to do the same. While flipping through the newspaper in the summer of 1983, he saw that the state police were offering the state trooper test in Trenton, so he took the test. He was subsequently hired by West Windsor in August, 1984.
Edwards spent his first three-and-a-half years as a patrol officer on a squad working shift work. At the time, there were only four detectives — one sergeant detective, two regular-duty detectives, and one assigned as the juvenile detective, although those responsibilities were part-time and the officer did other detective work as well.
As the town grew, the department expanded, and the police decided to have a full-time juvenile detective. At the same time, one of the regular detective positions opened up as well, and Edwards applied for both positions, hoping for the latter.
Working as a detective, and not just a juvenile detective, is the “meat and potatoes” of the job. “You get to do the fun CSI stuff as a detective that you just don’t have the opportunity to do as a patrol officer,” Edwards explained.
While he wanted the adult position, “I guess my reputation at the department preceded me, and they thought I would be more suited for [the juvenile] position,” he said. “Fortunately, they were right.”
Edwards says he was originally upset, but when he was asking about his new responsibilities, he was told that “you get to make of this what you want, as long as it accomplishes the police’s goals,” he recalled. So, he made the decision to take a hands-on approach.
In fact, Edwards became such an integral part of the school community that most of his information gathering came from seemingly trivial and casual conversations and questions students would ask him. “I got some of the best information because they didn’t even realize” that what they were saying in casual conversations was relevant, he added.
What nobody saw behind the scenes was that Edwards would make notes about students’ interests, hobbies, grade levels, and siblings, and other information, like suspensions — and he filed them in his office. This was not solely to provide a source of background information on students for investigations that may come up, although he says it was used for that. Rather, he explains, he used it more to help him remember who the students were, even the good things they did.
And when the conversations he had to have with students or other juveniles in the community had to take place for unpleasant reasons, “it made it easier because I knew them, and the kids knew my reputation,” Edwards said.
Edwards was so good at getting to know the kids in the community that he often found himself in one particularly recurring situation — what he calls getting looks of “shock value” from parents.
One specific incident he recalls occurred when he attended a golf tournament with a co-worker and the two were paired with two other participants at the event. One of the other participants happened to be a West Windsor resident, and Edwards asked him for his last name. The man replied, as so many West Windsor residents had done, “You won’t know my kids because they’re good kids.”
When the man told him his last name, Edwards rattled off a list of his children, their names, and their activities. Edwards likened the expression on the man’s face that followed to that of someone who was wondering why Big Brother was monitoring him.
“He could absolutely not figure out why I knew his kids,” said Edwards. The reality of the matter is, however, “I know a lot more kids in West Windsor for good reasons than bad.”
With regard to actual incidents involving juveniles in town over the years, Edwards says that any criminal crimes that occurred in West Windsor were “almost always committed by kids coming into our community from the outside.”
For the most part, juvenile offenses have been limited to criminal mischief and theft cases, involving typical mischief like stealing items from an open garage and playing “Mailbox Baseball.” Edwards also said he didn’t really have to deal with many fights, as parents and school administrators were satisfied already by the disciplinary measures the district utilized to deal with such things, even though he was always informed about those situations.
For the most part, juveniles in West Windsor have remained consistent between 1989 and 2009 in the types of trouble in which they engage — underage drinking, criminal mischief, and theft. And the town does not have street gangs, said Edwards.
Sometimes, over the years, students from the high school would encounter students from rival schools and cause trouble outside the township’s borders, and sometimes, those outsiders will follow those kids back into town, causing trouble, he said.
Where the difference lies over the years, however, is in the types of possessions students are stealing from each other, and that is related to the technological advances over the years. Back in the 1980s, before cell phones, video games, iPods, and other gadgets were available, the most common thing a person would steal was a bike. “That was the property that was the most valuable,” Edwards said, adding that money and jewelry were also things students back then liked to swipe.
Now, new technological devices are the targets. “The most obvious thing is that as the gadgets become more and more common, and because of the affluence of the community, their parents were able to afford” them, Edwards said. “At every advancement, parents in the community were able to keep their kids on the forefront,” and of course, there would be some students who were not as fortunate, leading to some of the incidents, he said.
Aside from that, kids today are pretty much the same as they were two decades ago, he says. “The volume has probably increased, but that goes with the population increase,” he said of the crimes.
As the juvenile detective, Edwards became involved in many aspects of student life and the district’s programs and activities. He talked to students about Halloween safety, read to kindergarten classes, attended Mathematics Day — in which parents make presentations about how math is used in their professions — and made latch key presentations. Most known, though, was his D.A.R.E. program (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) at the upper elementary school level. He was also involved in eighth grade health classes, where he spoke about topics that were prevalent at the time.
He would also chaperone trips at all levels, including the senior class trip to Florida. “As long as I could do it, I would do it,” he says.
“There was no such thing as a typical day,” he said.
After serving 18 years as the juvenile detective, Edwards decided to go back on the road, as a patrol officer in January of 2007, mostly for personal reasons. He and his wife had made the decision that they felt it was important to have a mother at home with their three young children, so going back to patrol allowed Edwards to become available for extra duty jobs, like traffic control for construction projects.
Taking over juvenile detective responsibilities is Marylouise Dranchak. He says she is doing a great job, but that the job is different than what it was when he held it. There are different supervisors now, and everyone does the job differently, he says. “Not everyone is going to do things the way I did it,” he said.
Edwards says that when he gave up the position, he avoided going to the schools and visiting the people with whom he had developed relationships. “Everybody needs to realize she’s the one they’re going to have to rely on now,” he said.
In addition to serving as the juvenile detective, Edwards also found himself emotionally involved in other aspects of the job that directly related to the wellbeing of the township’s residents. He was the West Windsor contact person during September 11 who had to give out information to those who lost loved ones in the terrorist attacks. “I was affected by it more than I actually realized,” he said. “You can’t help but be affected by tragedies that affect someone.”
Now on the horizon for Edwards is a new position outside of his police work, although his experience in both law enforcement and what he learned while spending time in the schools is going to be beneficial to his new position: the schools outreach manager for Special Olympics New Jersey, based in Lawrence, where he resides.
His passion for working with the organization grew out of a function he attended as a West Windsor officer. Earlier in his career, he heard that Special Olympics NJ was looking for volunteers to run in the torch run as a fundraiser. He and another West Windsor officer decided they would do the run, and they met up in Princeton, where the torch run began.
They were invited back the following weekend for the Special Olympics games, and were asked to hand medals on the winners during the ceremony. When the time came to hang the medals around his participant’s neck, “he jumped into my arms, and that was the snake that bit me, and I’ve been involved in Special Olympics ever since,” Edwards said.
For a while, Edwards served as the organization’s law enforcement representative. Recently, the organization was looking to reinstate the schools’ outreach manager’s position, which had lain dormant for a while, he said, and they chose Edwards for the job.
Now Edwards will be working with school districts that have existing programs developed by Special Olympics NJ. He will also be trying to network with those districts that don’t to encourage them to initiate those programs at their schools.
His experience working with WW-P district officials, and because his wife is a former teacher, Edwards says he learned how passionate teachers can be of the programs they offer, and it can sometimes be stressful to find time to add another initiative into their programs, especially when they have to prepare students for standardized testing and meet other educational requirements already.
While he says he is sad to leave the connections he has made with district officials, and most importantly, the district’s students and children living in West Windsor, he knows the connections he has established here were beneficial to all parties involved.
“Because I was in the position as long as I was, it didn’t matter” whether students saw him in his police uniform or not, Edwards said. “They realized I was actually a person.”
“While that it is the cliche it is, I know the things I was able to do here have helped people,” says Edwards. He recalls former students coming up to him years later and telling him that the advice he gave them, especially about “eventually having to learn how to grow up,” worked.
“That will be my legacy — fulfilling the cliche that I definitely helped people.”
