Chief Ryan Zuidema on Leadership, Community Engagement, and Innovation

Season 6 - Episode 136

Ever wondered how the integration of professional staff into traditional policing roles can revolutionize law enforcement? Join us as we chat about the journey of Chief Ryan Zuidema, from his beginnings in Buffalo, New York, to his impactful 28-year career with the Lynchburg Police Department. You'll gain insight into his  efforts, including the founding of the Leadership Institute for Tomorrow's Executives (LIFTE) at Liberty University, which is making waves in cultivating future leaders in law enforcement.

Chief Zuidema opens up about the critical importance of relationship-building within the community, especially in African-American neighborhoods, and the role of mentorship and continued education in shaping effective police officers. Hear firsthand how programs like the National Academy, SMIP, and Harvard’s state and local government program have expanded his perspective, shedding light on universal policing challenges and innovative solutions. This episode also tackles the essential role of accountability and collaboration in restoring public trust.

Discover the internal and external challenges of leadership within the Lynchburg Police Department. Ryan shares his inclusive management philosophy, illustrating how he transitioned from an authoritarian to a collaborative leadership style. By incorporating professional staff in senior command meetings and fostering a culture of mutual respect and involvement, he's paving the way for more innovative and effective policing. Don't miss this wide-ranging discussion on the future of law enforcement leadership and community engagement.

Contact us: copdoc.podcast@gmail.com

Website: www.copdocpodcast.com

If you'd like to arrange for facilitated training, or consulting, or talk about steps you might take to improve your leadership and help in your quest for promotion, contact Steve at stephen.morreale@gmail.com

Chapters

• 0:02 Police Leadership and Innovative Ideas
• 10:03 Building Relationships for Effective Policing
• 17:55 Community Engagement and Police Accountability
• 23:56 Inclusive Leadership and Team Approach
• 27:51 Developing Future Police Leaders
• 37:11 Leadership Development in Law Enforcement
• 41:03 Leadership Development and Continued Growth
• 46:59 Leadership Training Program Expansion

Transcript

Intro/Outro Announcement

00:02

Welcome to The CopDoc Podcast. This podcast explores police leadership issues and innovative ideas. The CopDoc shares thoughts and ideas as he talks with leaders in policing communities, academia and other government agencies. And now please join Dr Steve Morreale and industry thought leaders as they share their insights and experience on he CopDoc podcast. 

Steve Morreale Host

00:32

Hi again everybody. This is Steve Morreale. I'm coming to you from Boston today and this time we're going down to the hills, the valleys of Virginia, to Lynchburg, and we have Chief Ryan Zuidema who is with the Lynchburg Police Department. Hello there, Ryan, how are you doing? 

00:50

I'm doing well Steve, thanks for having me. We were sitting in a meeting actually at Liberty University and you are one of the founders of a new command college called LIFT Leadership Institute for Tomorrow's Executives. In essence, you're one sharp guy. I've got to have your point of view on the podcast, so thank you forward-thinking that that you have. You are a thought leader in my mind. So, to get started, I want to talk about how you ended up at Lynchburg, how long you've been there, tell the audience about the police department, how big it is, what the demographics are such. 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

01:24

Again, thank you for having me A great opportunity to always talk shop with some folks. Enjoy that. So Lynchburg we're kind of geographically located in the center of the state. We're about two hours west of Richmond, about three hours southwest of DC. The city is about 82,000 in the city. 

01:39

Virginia is a little unique. Not being a native here, I learned a few things when I moved here. There are independent cities in Virginia which are not a part of counties, which is kind of unique to Virginia. So we're surrounded by three counties that are somewhat suburban, somewhat rural depending on which area you are in them, and the metropolitan statistical area is about a quarter million or so people. 

01:57

So the department consists of 270 incredible men and women. 179 of those are sworn officer positions, the balance are professional staff as well as our emergency communications officers that run our 911 center for us and so great community called the Goldilocks Zone. It's big enough that you have things to do and keep you busy, both personally and professionally, but it's not so big that you're dealing with some of the larger city issues that a lot of folks have to deal with. So a great place to live and certainly a great place to be. I moved here to Tail End in 1996. I was born and raised outside of Buffalo, new York, and I lived there until I got old enough to realize I didn't have to and I left. 

Steve Morreale Host

02:34

Was it the weather or the people? 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

02:36

Oh, it was the weather 100%. When you're a young kid and you just go out playing, it's a lot of fun, but we used to average about 130 inches of snow a year where I lived and school still goes on when you get a foot of snow overnight and the world doesn't stop for it. So I just want to get away from the cold and snow. 

02:50

And I had a brother that was actually in law enforcement, started as a sheriff's deputy working the road in the county we lived in in Western New York and then his wife drug him down here. She was from the area, had gone to college down here, and so I kind of followed him a couple of years after he came down here. He's since left the department, went on to be a police chief down in North Carolina and he's since left that and is a town manager down there now. But that's kind of what got me down here and had every intention of staying in Lynchburg about three years and then going on to do something federal. And here I am going on. January will be 28 years I've been with the department, so it's just a great, great place. 

Steve Morreale Host

03:25

Well, in that period of time you've seen major changes, significant changes in the way policing is done, in the demands of the people that we serve, in the mistakes that have been made in other places, and I want to talk a little bit about that. But I want to also hone in on this term, which I know is bandied about quite a bit professional staff. The reason I ask that is because I espouse that it can be very valuable to not necessarily drag a sworn officer with those skills to some of the necessary but unnecessary for a sworn officer to serve in some of these units or jobs. Talk about what you have seen in your department and other departments, where civilians plus up the organization by bringing them in. 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

04:07

When I started, almost every role short of records and administrative type tasks is filled by a police officer. Right, we had them in every imaginable role possible. And I think over the last 28 years as a profession we've realized that, in essence, putting a cop in a position that we don't need somebody that's a gun toter right, we need somebody that can think clearly, has good judgment and is intelligent, and we have a lot of those folks who don't wear badges and guns right. And so that also allows us to do is take those resources that are extremely limited in today's day and age, yet to find a police department that has just said I don't know what we do with all these police officers we have here. That just doesn't happen. So, you know, it allows us to get those officers back out doing more traditional police work out on the street, whether it's, you know, on a patrol function, an investigative function, whatever it may be, and it allows our professional staff members to have some more upward mobility too. 

04:54

Right, there's other positions. So we've done that here with several positions our intelligence unit we have some professional staff in there. We've done that with our information desk, our front desk basically used to be all cops. Now that's a mix and we're moving towards making that all non-sworn positions. We've done that in our crime scene unit. I would get people that would come to me. So I also serve as an adjunct professor teaching criminal justice and have for many years and I used to get students that would come to me and say, hey, I really want to be. 

Steve Morreale Host

05:20

CSI. 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

05:21

Of course, the CSI effect, of course, the CSI effect Absolutely, and what I used to always tell them was well, that's really great. How are you at science? Yeah, you might be able to do that after you've been a cop for a while because, that was our model here for many, many years. 

05:33

And the reality is, you know, we have people that have a desire and interest in the ability to do that and they don't want to wear a badge and a gun. Then we'd be fools not to take advantage of that. So we have two full-time traditional crime scene positions here that are non-sworn, two young women that do an incredible job for us, well-educated and hard workers, and it's been a great opportunity to kind of weave them into the fabric of our organization, help folks understand that. Hey, you know, just because you don't wear a badge and a gun doesn't mean you can't bring significant value to us. So something that down the line. 

Steve Morreale Host

06:08

I'd like to continue to do that with additional positions we have and again free up some of the limited resources that we have in the sworn level to better serve our community. With those and we're talking to Ryan Zuidema, who is down at Lynchburg Police Department as the chief. Do you see value in the different perspectives that those professional staff bring? A hundred percent. 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

06:19

Cops are cops are cops. Right, but we may be different. We look through a very, very similar lens at things. Another function we used to have here that was a sworn function for years was our public information officer, our PIO position, and I can tell you we hired the first full-time, non-sworn PIO back in 2019. You want to talk about an eye-opener. 

06:39

When you go into a meeting with this great plan that you're going to roll out, related to whatever the communication is, and that PIO looks at you and says you really think you want to do that, we all look around the room, all the cops, and we go why wouldn't we? 

06:51

Well, this is how it's going to be perceived. If you do that, right, and it's just, it's a different lens, right, we all get somewhat calloused and hardened, quite honestly, almost myopic, right. And so to have that in any role, whether it's a PIO role or other roles, and bring those staff members and when I do my command staff meetings, you know I bring in my non sworn folks into those meetings too and they sit and listen to internal stuff. They sit and listen to, you know, confidential information that they wouldn't probably otherwise be privy to. But, like, we background these folks and we trust them to do their own thing Right and so and that was something that was a little different they're on the team and of course you know I'm like, hey, it's IT, you just push a button and it happens, right, it works, and he, luckily, is able to kind of ground us a little bit. So it's been a great experience getting them more engaged and more involved in kind of the daily running of the police department. 

Steve Morreale Host

07:52

You know, I liken that. I don't know that I've had a conversation like this on the podcast, but I liken that to us running our house right. My wife, your, you need to fix the pipes. Listen, you got to know. I know my limits stay in your lane and the plumber is going to know, whatever the electrician, the heating person, and in a lot of ways, if we look at it in that same, from that same view, that's what civilian professional staff bring, don't they? 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

08:18

Specialization, a hundred percent. Yeah, you know. So our staff meetings that we'll have. We'll have my administrative manager who does all of our finances, our grants, our payroll, and anything related to money. I have an IT manager in there that handles all things that we do, which technology, of course, nowadays is just. We are so dependent upon that in this profession. We'll have other professional staff members in there. That again, they just give us that perspective and it makes us more efficient, I think, in the long run really, because instead of dreaming up this great idea and a bunch of cops getting around at the table and say, yep, this is what we're going to do, let's go forward, and then you take it to the people that actually have to implement it and then they go yeah, that's really not going to work actually because of all these other things. 

09:06

Yeah, absolutely. 

Steve Morreale Host

09:07

You're absolutely right. So let's talk about you, your experience, leadership, leadership development, development of others, you over time. Here's a guy coming out of upstate New York and heading to Virginia completely different view of life in a lot of ways and much more laid back and much more respectful in a lot of ways, as a Northerner talking to a former Northerner. But you had to make some slight modifications to the culture and to adapt. But here you are, a new police officer. You're running on the road and you climb up the ladder. Talk about that. Talk about your first experience to your first promotion. 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

09:45

So I'll start by saying I don't know if I'm a former northerner or a recovering northerner maybe I was told years ago when I was down here, that I was no longer a Yankee because Yankees just come and visit. I was a damn Yankee because I came to stay All joking aside, is definitely a different culture, certainly moving here. So you've got to kind of adapt to that and understand kind of what the important things are and what they aren't, and kind of fitting into. You know, anytime you're new anywhere, whether it's a brand new cop or brand new anything, you're trying to look see how you can fit in. But you obviously at the same time you want to uphold the values and the morals that you believe are important. 

10:19

And you know, luckily we share in this profession a very pretty consistent group of values and morals. You know there are some differences but across the board you can be hard pressed to find a cop that doesn't think integrity is important, right, or doesn't think that we need to do the right thing. And I always say that you know the only people that hate the bad cops more than the public are the good cops, right. And so, coming up through the organization, I was really lucky. I had a lot of folks that, for whatever reason, took a liking to me and affinity to me. Maybe they were just like oh, this poor hanky's down here, he needs somebody to guide him and show him I need to block for this guy. 

10:50

Yeah, yeah, there was at some point in my retirement I think I'm going to write a North to South translational dictionary, because people didn't understand a word. I said I didn't understand half of what they said, but I've got to the point where I've lived here much longer than I lived in New York. So this is home, definitely. But you know, from a leadership standpoint, you learn a lot from folks just by watching what they do, right? You know, I think you can always tell what's important to someone by what they spend their time doing. I had a lot of really great leaders that I worked with. I had some folks that were not always consistent. I told myself that, look, I may be consistently bad or consistently good, but I just need to be consistent, right? Folks need to come in the door and they need to know that. You know they're going to get the same thing every time they come into the door, right? 

11:38

Working our way up back when I was a young officer, our first promotional opportunity was to a police officer 3 position. 

11:44

That was a tested position back at the time. 

11:46

Now it's a progression, and so the first time I got an opportunity to really supervise, I was actually a member of our canine unit and so we had a group of five dogs at the time, myself being one of the handlers, and you operate in a pretty high liability arena there with a dog. 

12:00

Our dogs are all dual, trained at the time patrol and narcotics dogs and so you're involved in a lot of critical situations and it was an eye-opening experience to that, I think, and I had some really great mentors in my career that really helped me out, understand and push me, because I'll tell you, as a canine handler, before getting into supervision, I would have loved to just work a dog the rest of my life To this day, hands down, the best assignment I've ever had. But I had a couple of folks that came to me and said, hey, look, don't stay there too long, kind of thing. You've got the ability to do other things, encourage you to do that, and sometimes that's all it really takes, right? You've got a lot of folks that work for us and with us, that have all the ability in the world but maybe just never crossed their mind to be a supervisor and it takes somebody saying, hey, you know, someday I'd love to be a police chief, right? Not what I was thinking. 

Steve Morreale Host

12:52

I'd say the same thing If you told me at 21 that I was going to get my doctorate and I was going to be a professor. I'd say you're nuts, I hate school. I'm not good at school. You know, I love this cop stuff. I like this DEA stuff, so I understand. So life takes different turns for all of us Over time. You got promoted. I know that. You went to the National Academy. You went to SMIP for Perth. You've been at Harvard. Talk about those experiences and how those opportunities were blessings for you, and how it began to take the rose-colored glasses off or to take the blinders off of you and think much broader. Is that a fair assessment? 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

13:28

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the biggest challenges in this profession is that all we tend to do is hang out with other cops and talk shop with other cops Right, which is great and it's important. We need to do that Right, because some of the best lessons you learn are through other people's mistakes and sometimes you know we don't need to reinvent the wheel. Right, a lot of the things that we're dealing with someone else has dealt with. Reach out to your network, figure out what they did and tweak it for your organization and make it work. I was a graduate of the 239 session of the National Academy back in 2009. Great experience, you know, got 250, 260 classmates from 49 states and 30 foreign countries. Still communicate with several of them to this day and it was an opportunity to just see really how important this profession is. Right, it's easy to look at what it looks like in your community or even in your state, but when you're looking at it on a global front and you see that the guy that's in Iraq is dealing with some of the same things you're dealing with, how many similarities there really are in getting perspectives from everything from somebody in a department as big as NYPD to somebody down to an apartment that's got 10 people in it, right, and understanding that you're dealing with the same issues but how you go about them is very, very different, right. So it was an opportunity there. Going to SMIP with PERF and then to state and local government program with Harvard was an opportunity. You know Harvard, definitely. Even you know PERF is still a bunch of cops getting together right, the Harvard class, and you know there was 80 or so people in there and I think there were maybe six or seven of us that were cops, right, and so to really sit down and hash through some of the issues in society that we're dealing with and see the very different perspectives, I think was pretty incredible, really an eye-opening experience to be able to sit down and have conversations with people that are maybe diametrically opposed to what you do, maybe have very different views on what policing looks like or should look like in America. 

15:12

An eye-opener in terms of the importance of relationships, even with those people who think differently than you. Right, there was a guy in my class. He was a senator out of Georgia, his name was Mike Dugan and former military guy, and he said something to me that sticks to me to this day I still use all the time, which is that if we start with our differences, we're never, ever going to get anywhere. But if we start with what we have in common, even if you're far right, I'm far left or vice versa, it doesn't matter what our views are we start with what we all agree on, which is, hey, we all want a safe community, right, we start there and work backwards, we'll actually make some progress. 

15:43

But if, when the bell rings, you go to your corner and I go to my corner, well you know, we're going to see, largely, unfortunately, what we're seeing in America today, right, which is digging your heels in and not really making any progress on anything. So learn from those classes, I think, that value of stepping across that divide, so to speak, and having those conversations with people. I may not agree with you at the end of that conversation, and that's fine, but I'll at least understand your perspective and hopefully I'll have had an opportunity to help you understand my perspective and we'll both be the better for it. 

Steve Morreale Host

16:09

I mean clearly some growth opportunities, and I'm assuming you bring those back to the department. And that's so important to me in terms of our minority communities and we talked about this in classes a couple of weeks ago Get to know them, get to understand where they're from and how they're treated in their country. If they're coming from out of the country by their police, that may be why they are so timid, why they are so reluctant or resistant. How do you drive that conversation around the table? 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

16:41

Yeah, I think it sounds so simple and it is, but the carrying out of it's more difficult. It's relationships. It truly is relationships. That's what policing is all about, isn't it? It's a hundred percent. And having those difficult conversations right with folks and hearing things that you maybe don't want to hear but need to hear. 

16:57

You know, we 2020, obviously, George Floyd, and all the chaos that came out of that. You know we had riots here in our city and after kind of the dust had settled from that, one of the things we did is we went out and did what we call listening sessions, right, and we went to specifically and intentionally to some of our lower income, predominantly African-American communities, to some of the neighborhood centers, their community centers there, and we sat and listened. We had a facilitator that we had hired to come in and do it, an African-American woman, great facilitator and she sat down and told us upfront like, okay, here's what's going to happen. We're going to go there and you and your command staff and other officers that are there are going to be there and you're going to listen. People are going to say things that are going to really make you mad. 

Steve Morreale Host

17:33

They're going to feel attacked. 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

17:38

Yeah, they're going to say things that maybe aren't even true. 

Steve Morreale Host

17:40

And you know what you is that to hear. 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

17:43

Well, I mean number one cops don't like being told Right. And then certainly you know if you're getting attacked or you get an information thrown at you that you want to reply to Right. It's tough, but we did that. We did several of those listening sessions and I think what came out of that is there was a woman at one of these listening sessions, African American woman. She had two sons. I knew both of them by name when she brought them up People. African-American woman. She had two sons. I knew both of them by name when she brought them up. 

18:04

People we had dealt with pretty regularly in the criminal justice system here. She said hey, look, one of them's in prison and the other one's probably on the brink of going to prison. She said I've sat here and listened to all that I've heard and it was all the same similar concerns you've heard, you know, after George Floyd. So it wasn't anything unique to Lynchburg. But she said look, we want you and we need you in our communities. We just want you to treat us properly. You got to kind of peel that onion back a little bit, right? She didn't say much more than that, but I understood it and that onion is that it's not that long ago, right, modern policing that people that wore the same exact uniform I'm wearing, with the same badge, were treating people in the African-American community horribly in this city, like many other cities around the country, and that is a part of their history, that is something they shared with their ancestors. They passed down to their brothers, their sisters, their nephews, their children, grandchildren, and we've got to recognize we aren't the ones that were responsible for that individually, right, but people that represent the same organization we do. So it's getting out there and understanding how what we do makes people feel right. It's not so much always what we did, it's how we did it. 

19:06

I tell my young officers I sit and meet with every one of my young cops before they go out on the street, right, they get done with the academy and they're getting ready to go to FTO and I sit down with every one of them. And how you deal with people and how you respect them is so, so critical, because you know that every interaction you have with a community member and that impacts the rest of us. And so, understanding that history there is in their mind and they've been told those stories over and over again. It's our challenge to kind of overcome them and show them a different side of policing, which is to engage with them in non-enforcement settings. 

19:35

Right, tell every one of my cops you know you work a 12 hour shift. You better be out of your car at minimum one time per shift introducing yourself to somebody you don't know. You can't do it on a call for service, that's cheating. Right, you got to get out there and just talk to them, let them know who you are, let them know you're there to help them. Because what we can't have is a community that feels over-policed and under-protected, right, and it sounds like an oxymoron, right. But if the only time we're showing up is to come in their community and lock people up, and we're definitely feeling under protected, so that's our goal is to not make them feel that way. 

Steve Morreale Host

20:04

We talked at one of our meetings about history and you just brought that up. I think it's so important for everybody to understand history. But I also think that one of the things that we should be suggesting to officers and I ask these questions in many training are we customer service oriented? Are we customer centric? Who is our customer? And everybody will say yeah, yeah, we are, we are, we are. Or some will say no, we're not, we're service-oriented, but we're not customer service. And one of the things that I'll say to them well, if you want customer service and that's your expectation, does it come off your lips? Do you tell people that's what you expect? Do you tell people that you're going to ride them if you operate in a different manner? And so I'm just curious about how you feel as a police chief and what your expectations are and how your expectations are communicated with people. 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

20:54

One of the things I implemented when I started. I'm a very, very simple person. I don't need a plaque on the wall that has a vision statement, a mission statement, a value statement that's three pages long, right? Because, quite honestly, nobody's going to read it and they're sure as heck not going to remember it, right? So one of the things I instituted was what I call the ABCs, because everybody can remember that, and it stands for accountability, buy-in and collaboration, and that's something that I preach and preach to all my folks, to make sure my new folks understand what it is. Accountability, of course, is first and foremost to yourself. You know the buy-in piece to tell them is. It's really simple, it's the difference between owning and renting something, right? And if you're a renter, you've rented a car before, I'm sure, like I have, and you don't probably treat that car quite as nice as you treat the one you own, right? So I tell our folks that they need to be owners of our organization, not renters. And if you're going to be a renter, then you maybe need to be a renter somewhere else, right? 

21:51

Collaboration piece, which is so critical, and it's collaborating, obviously, with fellow co-workers, other law enforcement agencies, collaborating with our city partners, because, you know, I tell our cops, the majority of stuff we go to has got nothing to do with police work, right? People just don't know who else to call and we really have to be that conduit to get that individual from whatever the issue or problem they have is to the resource that they actually need, which a lot of times isn't us right to address and deal with their issue. And that's why having those partners in the community is so important. And lastly, got to collaborate with our citizens. Right, we don't do anything well as a police department if we're not doing it with the folks that live here, the folks that work here. So driving those three things home with them, I think, really helps them understand what our purpose and our goal is. Right, we can arrest people without being jerks to them. Right, we need to treat people with respect, because sometimes that's all they have and if we take away their dignity, then that's where we run into bigger problems. Right, and we've got an opportunity to impact people positively every day we go to work. 

22:40

It's one of the greatest professions in the world. There's a retired FBI agent that was in this area, that was our academy director for a short period of time. His name was Ed Sulzbach and had a really interesting history and everything from a school teacher to a bus driver to an FBI agent and everything in between, and he said something that sticks with me as well. He said you know that if you look at society as a high rise building, you know, with the top being the penthouse, the richest of the rich, and the bottom being the poorest of the poor and everything in between, you know that law enforcement is one of the few professions that gets off the elevator on every level, right and. And you got to know how to interact with all those folks and do it well. And the core of that is, whether it's the CEO, executive or it's a homeless person, you need to treat every one of them with respect, right, period, and you can't go wrong doing that. 

Steve Morreale Host

23:23

So let's talk about you taking over in 2018. Here you are, coming up through the ranks. You've sat through meetings. I'm not looking for you to cast dispersion on the predecessors, but I know that you have been, especially given the period of time that you were in, that people treated staff meetings differently. They weren't as inclusive, they weren't as interested in hearing what everybody at the table had to say. May I assume that there was a change in the way you prosecute meetings and the expectations that you have in meetings with command staff? 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

23:55

I think so. I think it's fair to say my predecessor was an outside chief. So Lynchburg has gone kind of inside outside for 30 plus years now. Interestingly whether that's somebody's master plan somewhere or not I find probably hard to believe is there's been plenty of city managers in between. So my predecessor was in a role just shy of three years. It'd come from outside the state as well, not just outside the department, and so very different culture here than where he was from. 

24:19

Prior to that was an inside candidate, that was a chief, and I don't know that how I run them is right. Right, Like everybody's got it different and I tell you what works for me. And what works for me was I'll never forget I hired the PIO probably six, eight months into my tenure as a police chief. We'd not had a full time PIO before. That was an ancillary duty for a sworn position. And I'll never forget, we brought PIO into my first kind of senior command staff meeting where we sit down and we talk about internal affairs investigations, Right, we talk about lawsuits, we talk about all these things that are going on. I mean get into some of the details of where we need to and the individual that was briefing us on the internal investigations. 

24:56

When I said, okay, go ahead, so-and-so. And person looked at me. They looked over at the PIO, they looked back at me and they said we're going to do this with her in here. Oh, my goodness, yeah. And I said yes, we are. And he looked at me again with this just like utter disbelief on his face. I said are we? 

25:12

Okay, everything good, he said yes, sir, 

Steve Morreale Host

25:16

Are you sure? 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

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•  
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25:16

about this. Not agreement with my decision. 

Steve Morreale Host

25:20

The outsider supposedly, yeah. 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

25:26

Right, right, and you know cops are very untrusting of new people coming in. 

25:27

You know that You've been in the business for a while and you know when you don't carry a badge or even a little more, like hmm, should they be here, kind of thing. 

25:32

And so part of the message was one our professional staff, generally speaking, in law enforcement, is often treated like second rate citizens within the organization. Right, they just are, and that's some of the most important work that is done. Are those folks? Because our officers out on the street, our detectives out working cases, couldn't do what they do if our professional staff wasn't doing all the work they do behind the scenes. Right, and they're our unsung heroes and so engaging them and bringing them into those meetings I think was a little bit of a culture shock at first for folks. But I think over time people see the value of that and they've understood, kind of why we do it. The approach I've told all my folks is you know we're a team, right, and we're either going to win as a team or we're going to lose as a team, but we're going to do it together, right, I try whenever I can, just because I sit in the seat or wear the Chiefs badge right doesn't mean I'm all-knowing. 

26:17

I've got to surround myself with people that are way more intelligent than I am and that have skill sets that I don't have, and I've got to have subject matter experts that can step in and provide me with a level of understanding that I can then take either in front of the media or in front of city council or wherever I need to take it, and so kind of this team approach to hey, I'm going to gather as much information from all of you as I can. 

26:35

I want to get your input, I want to get your feedback. Ultimately, knowing that I'm the decision maker that finally says yay or nay to whatever we're doing, but more of a kind of an inclusive approach to making sure that we manage by committee when and where we can. Obviously, in a crisis, that's not the time to bring everybody in in a gunfight and ask them what their opinion is on how we should have respond right, but when you have the luxury of time on your hand, we certainly want to engage those folks. It makes them feel a lot more part of the team and hopefully keeps them kind of rowing the boat in the same direction. 

Steve Morreale Host

27:02

You know we're talking to Ryan Zuidema at the Lynchburg Police Department. He's the chief there and I just got a communication from some listener and they said to me you know, I just got transferred and I'm not happy and I haven't been happy for a while and that struck me because I think there's a lot of progressive chiefs but I know that there's a lot of kind of hangers on and autocratic chiefs that are out there. Gratefully, it's moving. And one of the things we talk about in training is you may not be able to control the entire department as a sergeant, a lieutenant, a captain, but you're entrusted with a certain number of people. Pay attention to your sphere of control, lead that. 

27:41

And one of the things, Ryan, I want to say is this Help me understand. You know that I'm writing a book and I've just made the decision to entitle it differently than I was and it's called choosing to lead. And the point is that when you are promoted, in essence your expectation at first you as a chief is manage what I'm giving you, manage your shift, manage the department, lead as in, not as an afterthought, but lead where you can, but manage first so you can choose to lead. But you know so many people in policing can just manage their way. We're happy with the status quo. I'm keeping everything on track and I'm doing my job. Can you talk about that in terms of your expectations of new people coming in, new people? You're promoting new people. You identify as having promise. It's interesting. 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

28:25

I haven't been in the role now for about six years. I need to promote leaders right Period. People that can manage. That's great, and ideally in a perfect world you've got somebody that does those both well. The reality is that's not always the case right, and if I've got to pick a strong leader over a strong manager, I'll take a strong leader every day. And so, as I'm looking through folks, we run a competitive selection process for promotion with an outside vendor. That facilitates all of it so we can take away any internal biases there may be in that process. 

28:54

And what I find interesting is that when you sit down and talk to some of these panelists that serve on your promotional selection processes and you hear some of the things they're going to do one of two things right they're either going to validate your belief or thought about Steve's ability to be a lieutenant or a captain or whatever, or they're going to look at it through a very different lens, and so I rely on those groups a lot to give me feedback. I just fill the deputy chief position that I'd had vacant for a period of time. A former deputy chief of mine went on to be a police chief down in James City, county, Virginia, and actually a guy I went through the academy with good friend of mine and hated to see him go but was very, very happy for him. And you know, in running that process, sitting down with a panel mostly chiefs and deputy chiefs from around the kind of eastern coast that sat on that sitting and talking through what is important and it's. You know, this job is so similar, no matter where you go, change the patch, change the badge, right, and it's. 

29:46

Yeah, you have your intricate issues that you deal with that are specific to your locality, but making sure that we've got folks that have one, the capacity to lead. Two, they're willing to be challenged, right, because if you got a boss or a leader that just doesn't want to ever be challenged, like, I will tell you you don't have a leader. Right, I tell my folks I want you and I need you to challenge me. Right, I'm getting ready to do something really stupid. I expect you to grab me by the back of the collar, just like my FTO did 27 years ago, right, and said, hey, dummy, don't do that. Right, that's going to end bad. 

Steve Morreale Host

30:15

Have you thought about this before you do that? 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

30:17

Right, right and sometimes we get a little hyper-focused, especially if we're passionate about whatever the topic or issue is, and so we've got to take those folks and find those folks that we're going to promote to leadership roles, that are willing to challenge a process. 

30:29

Right, I got to have folks that are willing to say, hey, look, we may have done this this way for however long, but we need to consider another way of doing it, we need to consider not doing it at all, and I think those are the folks that are willing to kind of step up and step out, that really kind of get my eye, so to speak, the ones that aren't just really good at managing things. 

30:48

We need those folks too, but I need the folks that are willing to challenge the status quo. I need the folks that are willing to say, hey, what are we going to push to next? Or hey, here's a new thing that's kind of new to the industry I think we should be going towards, right, I don't ever want to be that caretaker chief that, just well, I'm just going to keep the wheels moving in the right direction and hope nothing really bad happens, right, because you're doing a disservice to your community, right? And so you've got to have those folks that are kind of still looking down the road what's the next thing? Those are the folks that I really look towards when I'm looking at promoting as the person that's going to challenge that status quo. 

Steve Morreale Host

31:20

Well, everybody has a sell-by date, right? You're not going to be a chief for the rest of your life. And how do you sustain the organization? And promoting the right person, the right people, giving opportunities for the department to continue, not necessarily in the way you had it, but that you have set the table? Is that a fair statement that you're looking forward? 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

31:40

Yeah, I think you have to right, and I'm looking right up at a thing on my wall here. It says honor legacy, encourage innovation right. And so it's that beautiful marriage of doing that right. You know we're very proud of our history in law enforcement. There's certainly some things that we aren't as proud of that have happened right over the years that we already alluded to. My department's been around since 1805. So we're going on 220 years here shortly and you know we want to honor that. But we want to keep pushing that forward and I think you know my role is not to say, oh well, he did this right. 

32:09

I don't ever want anybody to say that I did anything. I want people to say the department did X right. And you know my job, my responsibility is set up a structure that sustains time. Right, because if I do something that's just wow, this is so great while he was there, and then as soon as I leave it falls apart, well then I'm a failure as a leader and as a chief. Right, I got to build a structure that's sustainable. I've got to build a bench, for lack of better terms. 

Steve Morreale Host

32:32

Oh, I love the idea of bench step for sure, yeah. 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

32:34

Yeah, and you will quickly realize in a crisis, how deep your bench is or isn't. And I will tell you that I mentioned some riots we had here in 2020 around George Floyd time Great group of men and women that put themselves in harm's way out. There, we had police cars destroyed. I had my armored vehicle shot up with my people inside of it. 

32:52

The fortitude, the courage, the bravery, the dedication they showed over that period of time, which was several days, was just incredible, and I had some really strong leaders in key positions that allowed me to focus on all the other things I needed to be focusing on. 

33:05

Right, which was a city council that we had gone to and told, hey, we're bringing the National Guard in. 

33:10

Right, and you can imagine how that went over in some arenas. Right, a city council that we went to and said, hey, we need to institute a curfew for everybody in the city from 9 pm to 5 am. Right, you can imagine how that went over with some folks. Right, and that allowed me to focus on those things, knowing that, operationally, my folks had everything taken care of, and that's because I had a bunch of really good people that knew their jobs, knew their roles, they were good at it. So you know, a lot of people talk about legacy and things like that, like I don't ever need to be the guy that's remembered for anything. Quite honestly, that's not who I am. I think the fact that the organization continues to move forward professionally and progressively right in terms of keeping up with modern technology, keeping up with better ways to interact with our public, keeping up with better ways to use intelligence to address crime, those are the things that I think speak for themselves for an organization. 

Steve Morreale Host

33:57

Well, there's a bit of humility that I'm hearing from you, but there's also some confidence, not only in yourself but in the group of people around you, because I think what you can be proud of and that's what I was finding when I was down at Liberty that you, your midsize agency that you are, have created other leaders, people who have moved on to other jobs. How important is that to you? Oh, it's huge. 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

34:18

Don't quote me on the number, I'd have to pull the document up but in the last 30 years we've produced 13 police chiefs, I believe, out of Lynchburg Police Department. Right, that's something that we should all be proud of. Right, we set a pretty high standard for who we hire. We set a very high standard for who we promote and the fact that these folks are able to go on and become police chiefs elsewhere, I think it's huge. Right, I think the fact that we are known as a professional organization, right, right up front, we're not perfect, we don't always get it right, and some of that, when you don't get it right, is stepping right up and saying, hey, we didn't get this right, we screwed it. 

34:48

But I think building those relationships in the community and that was started long before me Chuck Bennett was the chief that hired me. He's a retired deputy chief from the city of Richmond, Virginia. He'd done 26 years there and he came here in 1994 and kind of modernized the department really and he brought in community policing formally to the department in 94 and started that relationship building there and he lasted 14 years here, which is an eternity for a police chief. Right, he helped get us on that right path and, interestingly, when I was sworn in as police chief, I asked him to come and present my badge to my family to pin on me, and so it's connecting that legacy piece right. It's one of the things we do. 

35:24

That seems really simple but I think helps. When we give new officers badges and I present them to their family members to pin on them in a formal ceremony I talk to them about a previous officer that's worn that badge right, and name that officer and talk about their history. And we promote folks here. We try whenever we can and usually are successful in bringing in a former supervisor, whether sergeant, lieutenant, captain, deputy chief, whatever, to actually present the badge they used to wear to that individual. I'm kind of passing that legacy along and also kind of you know, very honestly, putting my notice a little bit too, like hey, I wore this, don't screw it up because you're going to tarnish it for me too. Right and so, but it's. It's just building that, that culture within the organization and I hate to see people leave here, especially our really good people, but when they leave here to take higher roles of responsibility and other agencies, I think that speaks well for our department. 

Steve Morreale Host

36:11

And I agree with that, and one of the things I don't never want to hold people back. I have had faculty members and other agents who've worked for me that want to go on to other organizations and I've had literally leaders who would say screw them, I don't want to talk to them, Let them leave. Today, and I'm thinking this is great. We now have a friend in a new agency and, by the way, the people who leave are usually some of your better people. I want to ask you about teachable moments and events that happen in other places and how your agency uses those as teachable moments, uses those to communicate with the people in your community to say that's not us. So I hate to keep going back to the same thing, but you know Floyd was. Is that what you were going to say? 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

36:55

A hundred percent. 

Steve Morreale Host

36:56

Yeah, Floyd was a major change in policing in this country, in this world. 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

37:00

Rodney King was, prior to George Floyd, kind of the biggest. Not to detract from Ferguson by any means, it was I don't want to say life changing, but it was, it was close to it. You know, both personally and professionally. I mean, I remember very, very clearly Steve going home to my wife not too long after our riots and some of the other craziness that's going on, and telling her, hey, I may not be the police chief anymore. And she's like, well, what happened, what did you do? And I was like nothing, I'm just the police chief. 

37:26

And we're in. Chiefs are going because communities want them to go. You're very much like the coach on a sports team, right? 

Steve Morreale Host

37:33

If you're winning. 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

37:33

If you're well, yeah, if you're winning, it's all good. If you're not, they don't fire the team, right, they get rid of the coach. But you know, I think when you go back to your question about you know kind of learning moments, you know, one of the things that we really pushed out to our community our officers, our staff, our PIO was to push out. We got this long list of demands from the community, like a lot of did, and then a lot of them boilerplate honestly language that someone had pulled off of you know some other community that they were saying, and to the point, like one of the first things we said is you guys need to have tasers and body cameras. Well, we've had both of those for quite some time, long before this happened. Right and just so we realize is we need to do a better job of educating our community about what we do Right, and if there's a flaw in modern policing, it's we don't tell our story as well as we should. 

Steve Morreale Host

38:20

No, we don't market ourselves very well. 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

38:22

No, not at all, and we're doing great things Well every day, right and collectively, as organizations and individually as officers. 

38:29

Like I had an officer the other day that went to a domestic call and the woman didn't have any food in her house. She had young kids, didn't have a bed. Officer went out and you know, you've heard these stories right, they go out, they get their wallet out, they go buy groceries. You take it there, they call a buddy who's got an extra bed. The buddy delivers the bed to the house. You know like all that it is. 

38:46

And humanity and it's just not told because it doesn't sell in the mainstream media, and that's where we've got to do a better job of telling our own story, right? And so to your question. I think you know the lesson learned there was was educating the public that, hey, you know all these crazy things that you're hearing going on in the public. It was educating people on not just what we did, but the real takeaway was educating them on why we do it the way we do it. Right, because most people's education on law enforcement comes from a few places the movies, right, which we know are not anywhere close, right? 

Steve Morreale Host

39:18

And most crimes are solved in a half hour or an hour. 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

39:21

Right the CSI shows, and then, if those fail, they go to the most tried, trusted and true source of information for all law enforcement activity, which is social media, right, which is always 100% accurate. Of course, I'm not being sarcastic, but we had to do a better job, and so we spent a lot of time after those listening sessions of going and getting with our community and helping them understand why we do what we do and how we do it. And that's an ongoing process, right? You can't just check that box off and say you're done. It involves continued community engagement with both individuals and groups to get them kind of behind the curtain, so to speak, to see what we do as an agency and why we do it, and having those relationships as well. 

Steve Morreale Host

39:56

Well, and like our relationships in our own lives, it's not one and done. You have to pay attention and do some work, work on and work on it mutually, not just you but the other parties too. 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

40:06

And that's it. Both sides have to nurture it. If you don't, it just doesn't work out real well. 

Steve Morreale Host

40:10

So we're talking with Ryan Zuidema and he's the chief of police down in Lynchburg, Virginia, and as we continue to talk, I had a question about newly promoted staff. Let's talk about sergeants first, because to me, patrol is the backbone of law enforcement. front-line the ways. Talk about what you expect from sergeants, what kind of contact and connection you have with them when they are promoted? 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

40:33

So the expectation of a sergeant is, first, helping them understand that it's arguably the most critical role and position we have in the entire department. Right, they truly help set the culture, help set the agenda and the expectations for what is and is not acceptable. And it's also the first time, right, that a lot of our folks have had an opportunity short of being in another agency and doing it right, to be the boss and understand that as the boss, you can't always be everybody's friend, right, and that's as a young boss of being one at one point in my career as well. That's the biggest transition, which is, like, you're going to have to make some decisions that are going to upset your buddies. Right, you know it's helping them, though, understand that, one, you need to do that, but, two, you've got to help explain the why to them. Right, like we were. 

41:15

Just when I started in law enforcement, you didn't ask why. Right, it was because I said so and just do it. But you know we're in a different time, a different era, where we need to help explain to our officers the why as well, so they can be bought in, as I talked about earlier, and so making sure that they understand that you are the leader, you are the de facto person that they are going to go to, understanding that you can't just come in there with a heavy hand that, hey, I'm the boss and you're going to do things the way I say. You're going to do them because I'm the boss. You've got to earn the trust and the respect of your folks, right, and you do that by humbling yourself no-transcript. 

Steve Morreale Host

41:59

We talked about that in training. You come from a different unit, you're back in patrol, haven't been in patrol in five or six years. You've got to lean on them to say okay no-transcript in our criminal investigations division. 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

42:21

Never been a detective and I had a lot to learn. 

42:24

I was lucky. I had a sergeant who'd been over there for the majority of his career and I just went to him and say, look, I need you to keep me from stepping in, I need you to basically mentor me as your boss and get me in line. And I just had to humble myself to. Most of the detectives that worked for me at the time had been on the job longer than I'd been a cop right, and so they were kind of some grisly old dudes, right. 

Steve Morreale Host

42:43

Who's this young punk coming in. He's never been in investigations. Right, exactly right, and so you know. 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

42:49

Just, you try to help them. You show up on the calls with them to see not what they're doing, but to see what resources they might need and how you can help them out and what you can do to assist them right, and I think if they see that you care right, then they're willing to kind of let you into the mix a little bit more, so to speak. So it's showing people you give a crap about them. Quite honestly. It's really what it boils down to. With a lot of leadership and people know you care that they're going to do amazing things for the underlying concept is relationships all the way through inside and outside, right. 

43:16

Absolutely, absolutely, and you wish that you could instill the importance of that and the understanding that into young, young cops. But I know I started as 22 year old kid I just turned 22. And like, all I want to do is just chase people and lock people up Right, like probably every young cop does, and you know, my frontal lobe wasn't completely developed yet, still Right, and so it was a little bit of work. The goal is trying to instill the knowledge, the wisdom that you gained over all these years and into these young folks so they can not make the same mistakes that you made when you were a young cop. 

Steve Morreale Host

43:44

So you hold yourself as a lifelong learner? I believe you do, and if that's the case, are you still evolving as a leader? 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

43:50

A hundred percent. If you're not evolving as a leader, you're falling behind, right? You've got to continually engage yourself in settings that are outside of your comfort zone, and that's something as cops, we're not always as good at, right, like we want to go to the ICP stuff, the PERF stuff, all these other things, right, that are kind of industry standards and that's great. You need to go to them, right, I'm not dogging them, I go to them. 

Steve Morreale Host

44:20

But you also need to expose yourself outside to other things that are going to kind of push you and challenge you a little bit. 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

44:24

I was lucky that yeah, Tell me about that. 

44:25

It's a group that's run through the Aspen Institute and to say that I felt slightly out of place when I got involved in that group would be an understatement. 

44:33

The fellowship was specifically designed to bring together people of very different backgrounds with very different thoughts, very different experiences, ideologies, religions, you name it to kind of work through together different taxing issues on our society right, and develop some great friendships with those folks. Really helped me kind of broaden my understanding of things. I hope I've done the same for many of them and it's an interesting dynamic to see how you can take one topic and there's about 20 people in our group and you could really have 20 very different perspectives on it. And so it's. Those are the things that help you grow. You grow when you're uncomfortable and I try and tell our cops that, like folks that want to get promoted, I tell them like, look, I need diversity of assignment, right, the best bosses are people that have worked in as many areas as they can, and I had one young guy years ago but I don't want to be a one trick pony, right, right. 

45:19

It's this guy I'm like well, what else do you want to do? I love patrol, that's where I'm at, that's where I want to be. So well, you may not be a sergeant if you only ever want to do patrol. I'm not saying you can't get promoted from patrol to be a sergeant and that, having not ever done that, we've certainly promoted plenty of folks, but you're going to be much more of. I need folks to be utility players, right, I going to be able to go, you know, if you only know X, and I need somebody that can do Y and Z and A, b and C. You may be limiting yourself a little bit, right? So we want to get that diversity of assignment as much as you can, because I can tell you, after going to CID as a lieutenant, I had a very new respect for what they did over there. Right, because there's a lot that goes on that, unless you're good, you just don't understand it. 

Steve Morreale Host

46:00

Let's begin to wind down and I'll ask you what the impetus was from the greater Lynchburg area to create a command college, with all of the opportunities that are out there, but having Liberty as a partner, tell me the mindset of you and the other members of the advisory. 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

46:19

The idea was we send folks literally all over the country, right, at least my department does. We sent folks to Northwestern to SPI, to PERF, to NA, rather, yet we sent them down to North Carolina AOMP Command College in Richmond. I mean, we literally send them all over the country to go to these schools, which is great. But we're, like you know, we've got a pretty decent university right in our home backyard, right, that has a ton of folks. One of the things that they do well is they bring in a lot of practitioners there, right. 

46:47

As you know from your experience, there's oftentimes very different experiences of learning from someone who is a lifelong educator versus someone who's been a practitioner turned educator, and so the balance of those things is great. 

46:59

And we want to provide another opportunity to have that same concept, which is to bring together folks from different agencies right to go through some of the similar training, but to also have it be somewhat experiential, right, so we're not just sitting in a classroom all the time and then also provide opportunities for folks to learn from each other, right, and that's the value of any of those trainings. 

47:18

We learn in the class setting, certainly, but a lot of the learning takes place on the lunch break on the after-hours stuff that we're getting together to do just the sitting around shooting a breeze kind of thing. That's where a lot of that experience, I think, really transfers, and so the idea was to do something a little more local here. We're kind of the urban hub for this area, with a lot of rural areas around us, and the initial thought was to try and get some of these. We want to eventually make this a program that's nationwide, obviously. So we're in our trial run with it and so far I've been extremely pleased with how it's been going. And you're obviously a big part of that and it's bringing in folks that again are not just the police leaders, right? 

47:53

Would I love to have Bill Brighton come to Lynchburg and sit at Liberty and talk. Absolutely right, I had the pleasure of listening to him when I went through the SMIP school. And we want those people too, the thought leaders within the organizations, within the industry. But we also need folks that are very successful CEOs of private industry that have nothing to do with law enforcement. 

48:12

That different perspective that you experience A hundred percent a hundred percent, because you know the reality is is whether you're making widgets right or whether you're running a law enforcement agency. The leadership concepts are that you different. 

Steve Morreale Host

48:24

Right, the common denominator is people and the differences of people. 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

48:27

Yeah, and it's how to motivate them, it's how to lead them, it's how to build teams with them. It's all these things that the CEO of a Fortune 500 company is having to do, just like a police chief or a sheriff is having to do, and it's just scale and what the product is right. 

Steve Morreale Host

48:41

Yeah, it's interesting. One of the comments during one of the sessions really sort of blew my mind and as they were sitting there, they said well, there's 12 people in this particular class and I'm the facilitator for that last session and somebody said you know what I like about this? I've got 12 different teachers. Well, at first I thought that's so nice, but I also thought, like, what about me? 

49:01

You're talking about each other, but the fact of the matter, it was so validating because they were clearly learning from each other, and that's the opportunity you have given the people who are participants. 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

49:11

So it's a great, great program. We look to successfully complete this one and then expand it in the years to come for greater reach, and we hope it becomes one of the go-to kind of command colleges. For folks like some of the others I already mentioned, it's another opportunity. The university's got incredible facilities there that are not matched probably by about anywhere you go, and it's just a great great institution to have here in our backyard and certainly one that benefits not just the community but very strong supporters of law enforcement, and that's a huge piece of it too. 

Steve Morreale Host

49:43

Well, thank you for your support. I look forward to continuing to play in the sandbox. So we're talking about Lyft at Liberty University Leadership Institute for Tomorrow's Executives. We're talking to Ryan Zuidema and, as we wind down, Ryan, I want to ask you what's your prognosis for policing? There's a pendulum that has swung. They love us, they hate us, they love us, they hate us, they tolerate us. 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

50:04

Right as a society, we are definitely, I think, on the upswing coming back, We've got to realize that, regardless of the politics that are going on, regardless of the interest groups on either and any side, we've got to stay true to who we are and not stray from what we do right. And it's so easy in times like this to get caught up in some of the political nonsense that's going on and our job has got to be 100% removed from that right. We've got to stay apolitical at all times. We've got to make sure that, no matter what is going on, we are staying true to our values. 

50:52

And I think law enforcement is still the greatest profession in the world, Without question. You will not find a better group of men and women than those folks who come to do this work every single day, from our officers to our professional staff to our 911 dispatchers. We all come with the same mission right, and that's to make our communities better, to keep people safe, and we have the honor of doing that. And you know the impact that you can have in this profession is unlike probably any other profession out there, and I tell my folks that every day you have a chance to truly make a positive impact every day in the people you meet. 

51:25

And I think the profession is going back in the right direction. It's going to take some time. We've got to get to a point I don't know we'll ever get here, but where society understands the value of what we do Right. And we've got to make sure we do that through educating folks. Because am I naive enough to think that we're going to pay cops what we pay Hollywood actresses and actors and football players and baseball players? No, I'm not that naive. 

51:49

But I think folks need to understand that so many things that we do as individuals in society and what our society does in general would not be possible if not for the men and women who go out there every day and put themselves in harm's way to keep our community safe, part of our military folks. 

52:03

The camaraderie that you enjoy in this profession right, is unparalleled short of the military, and we've got to remember that we get the honor and the privilege of doing this work every day, right. It's. Steering clear of the politics is the hardest thing, I think, right now for a lot of folks in a lot of places, because it's easy to jump and assume certain groups support us and certain groups don't. But I will tell you stay faithful to what we believe in. Stay faithful to what our mission is. You can't go wrong there, because that pendulum is going to swing back and forth continually All right, it has over my 28 years in this profession almost and it will continue to do that, and we've got to be that one kind of solid North Star, for lack of better terms. 

Steve Morreale Host

52:39

We have had a wide-ranging chat with someone I believe is a thought leader in policing. It's Ryan Zuidema, the chief of police at Lynchburg, Virginia Police Department. So I want to thank you very much for your time and for your energy. There's so many other things I would love to ask you, but time, time doesn't permit. You're a busy guy and we're going to cut this. Thank you, you have the last. 

Ryan Zuidema Guest

52:58

I appreciate the opportunity to be on the show, Steve, and appreciate what you do to continue to promote the profession. Quite honestly, there's more folks out there and my hope is that, with people listening to your podcast and others that do similar work, that we can continue to help people better understand what we do, how we do it and why we do it, and not rely on mainstream media or social media to tell them what's really happening, because I can promise you that for every bad story that you hear about a police officer doing something out there in the community, there's hundreds, if not thousands, of really great stories of what they do, and so anytime we can shed a light on the good stuff, it's really, really important. 

Steve Morreale Host

53:34

Great. Thank you again. We've been talking to Ryan Zuidema. He's at Lynchburg Police Department as the chief. That's it. Another episode is in the can. I'm Steve Morreale. This is The CopDoc Podcast. Please stay tuned for more episodes. I love hearing from listeners who come up with ideas. Have a good day, a good week, stay safe. 

Intro/Outro Announcement

53:55

Thanks for listening to the CopDoc Podcast with Dr Steve Morreale. Steve is a retired law enforcement practitioner and manager, turned academic and scholar from Western State University. Please tune into the Cop Doc podcast for regular episodes of interviews with thought leaders in policing.