CORONAVIRUS (COVID-19) RESOURCE CENTER Read More
Add To Favorites

Big shoes for the city's next chief

Danville Register & Bee - 9/3/2017

Law enforcement has been the vocation, the calling, of Phillip Broadfoot for almost half a century, and Thursday, Danville's chief of police decided it was time to take off the badge and retire. Both Danville and the greater law enforcement community will miss him and his leadership.

Broadfoot, 65, came to Danville 14 years ago as the successor to Chief Neal Morris. Prior to Danville, he had spent his entire career in the police department of Waynesboro, a small city in Augusta County. He began there in 1973 as a patrol officer, serving in every division of the department including a stint as the SWAT team commander and a 13-year tenure as chief beginning in 1990.

In Danville, Broadfoot oversees a department with 238 employees - 153 in law enforcement, 36 in adult detention and 49 in juvenile detention.

Broadfoot's service in Danville has coincided with some of the city's most challenging years: the population drop that began around 2000 as the region's economic base of textiles and tobacco withered and the onslaught of the Great Recession in 2008 that hit an already-reeling Southside economy especially hard.

In recent years, the city has experienced a surge in the number of homicides, reaching a record-high of 16 in 2016 and nine thus far in 2017. But, highlighting the ebb and flow nature of crime, the city had record low homicide numbers in 2012 and 2014.

The 2016 homicide numbers, though, give an idea of the nature of the crime problem Broadfoot, the department and his successor face. According to the chief's data, five of those killings were gang-related, but four occurred at the hands of a person known to the victim.

Tackling the rise of gangs in the region is one of the biggest challenges to law enforcement. As Chief Broadfoot said in a recent interview with the Register & Bee, the best antidote to a gang problem is a strong economy and good jobs, but modern policing is also required. And that's been where Broadfoot's data-driven approach to community policing hopefully will bear fruit.

That data approach served the department well in lowering the number of burglaries, which was spiking three years ago. By pinpointing where and when the crimes were occurring, the police department was able to deploy officers before crimes took place, deterring would-be criminals from attacking their targets. And it worked, with burglary numbers falling dramatically in recent years.

With gangs, the department is prepared to take much the same approach, backed up by new resources specifically tailored to combating this new type of crime. A prosecutor in the commonwealth's attorney's office is cross-certified with the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Virginia in Roanoke. The department has established a community-focused gang task force, and the city is looking to hire a gang prevention coordinator to work with a range of agencies to prevent gang violence from cropping up in the first place.

The biggest challenge facing the next chief is attracting and retaining officers. The department has a 13-percent vacancy rate in sworn positions, and pay is the biggest hurdle. But the department Broadfoot's successor will take over is a strong one, made more so by the chief's leadership and vision.