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Law Enforcement’s
Guardian
An elected official who is more than just talk
n BY MITCHELL KRUGEL
For telling members of Atlantic City Local 24 that he was authorizing hiring up to 27 officers and getting them into the Academy as
soon as possible to replace the forecasted reduction in force coming
in 2016, Mayor Donald Guardian would have been worthy of being
named NJ State PBA Legislator of the Year.
But Mayor Guardian’s support of law enforcement officers doesn’t
begin there. And apparently it never ends.
“When I was elected, I met with the chief and I told him, ‘I don’t
have any expertise in law enforcement but I promise I will give you
all the support you need,” Mr. Mayor relates. “New equipment, new
cars, better use of social media – those are the things we could help
with. I wanted to do my very best to support the department.”
Easier said than done for any mayor in this day and age of municipal management. But Guardian has been there in Atlantic City now
for two years, and he’s done that.
His administration has been marked with a devotion to law
enforcement officers and Local 24 members. Local 24 State Delegate
Keith Bennett refers to Guardian as a friend. How many mayors rate
that type of accreditation in this day and age?
But Guardian has certainly done his part. When he took office, he
walked into a morass of local politicians wanting to regionalize the
police force in Atlantic County to combine eight nearby departments. Advocating a perspective of how regionalization would never
lead to reducing crime, Mayor Guardian garnered a consensus on
the city maintaining – and increasing – its home team of law
enforcement.
“There’s nothing more important than identifying where crime
occurs in your city and deploying the right resources to handle it,”
Guardian explains. “I know people have issues with being clean and
going green, but public safety is always going to be the No. 1 priority.
It’s all about things like feeling safe at the bus station at midnight,
and our officers are going to do that for you.”
Guardian prides himself on building his commitment to law
enforcement through two fundamental principles of leadership.
First, from the time he took office, he pledged to be a good listener.
“We’ve always had access to the mayor,” Bennett has said repeatedly, “and we always felt he has listened to what we had to say.”
Another path to success has been doing his homework. Guardian
has spent considerable time studying best practices in law enforcement in cities across the country that reduced their crime rate.
He noticed that in cities where law enforcement worked from a
position of strength, there was always a substantive community
policing initiative. So Guardian asked the Local to focus on the city’s
youth to build a relationship.
That has led to such achievements as strengthening PAL
programs and having law enforcement officers at all the
playgrounds in the city. Officers embraced a program to bring pizza
to fifth-graders in all of the elementary schools to have a sit-down
lunch where they talk with the kids about how to behave should you
get stopped by a cop.
LEGISLATOR OF THE YEAR
MAYOR DONALD GUARDIAN
ATLANTIC CITY
Atlantic City Mayor Donald Guardian (center) with NJ State PBA President
Pat Colligan, Executive Vice-President Marc Kovar and members of
Atlantic City Local 24, including State Delegate Keith Bennett (far right).
“When I was a kid growing up in Palisades Park, we had 25 officers
and I knew them all by name,” Guardian reports. “They were the
basketball coaches, the scout leaders and the ushers in church. People always saw them in a very good light, and that’s the type of relationship I feel we’ve been able to create in Atlantic City.”
Guardian has had to make some tough calls. He advocated for
implementing a performance evaluation for officers knowing that it
would not be favorable to the union. But he managed to sell it by
telling Local 24 members that, “it’s much better to perform properly
and bring a great credibility to the city.”
And he’s not been able to give everything he has wanted to give.
The current contract being negotiated is going to result in less pay
for officers. But Guardian gained consensus for a strategy of, “not hitting them in the pocketbook right now.” So the reduction will be
spread out over 10 years.
Perhaps his smartest move regarding support for law
enforcement has been