‘Have empathy’: New DeKalb Police Chief David Byrd talks police-related issues, how he landed in DeKalb

DeKALB – During his first several days on the job, DeKalb Police Chief David Byrd said he has been “walking the beat” and getting to know the community he will serve.

Byrd said on May 6, his fourth day on the job, that he first became familiar with the DeKalb community when Illinois State Police started helping out with Northern Illinois University homecoming events in the 1990s. He said what he’s witnessed so far was police officers acting professional when interacting with the community and he’s been impressed with the department’s already strong communication practices.

“I knew that they were an outstanding organization,” Byrd said. “But I think now, four days in, it’s confirmed.”

Byrd, now 55, said he didn’t retire as soon as he was eligible at age 50 and he wanted to try for the DeKalb police chief job after making it to the No. 2 position within Illinois State Police because of a drive to enact change. Though he made it to the rank of colonel at ISP, he still always wanted to run his own department.

Byrd took a pay cut of about $20,000 per year in accepting the DeKalb police chief job. However, he said it’s not about the money for him – especially growing up on the South Side of Chicago – and he’s grateful to finally reach the milestone of running his own department.

“It’s very exciting,” Byrd said. “Very rewarding and also still humbling for me.”

Byrd said one of the first issues he plans on addressing within the department is officer staffing.

“I can’t remember talking to any heads of any police department that will say, ‘Hey, I have enough people, don’t worry about me, don’t worry about my manpower situation, I’m fine, I have enough,’ " Byrd said. “I can’t recall having a conversation with any heads of any law enforcement department that has ever made that claim.”

Byrd said one way he plans on addressing that issue is reminding the rank and file that “every encounter is a recruiting encounter.”

“We should always look at it that way because people are seeing us do our jobs professionally,” Byrd said. “And I think that helps in recruiting.”

Lifelong aspirations

Byrd said he also doesn’t think that kind of outreach has to be limited to certain age groups. For example, he said he has always remembered law enforcement being a calling for him, even when he would throw a fit if anyone tried to take away his pretend police badge when he was five years old.

“You don’t think about it at that early of age,” Byrd said. “Of course I didn’t. I thought I was just being a kid. But it stayed with me. My mom mentioned it to me and was like, ‘Well, you know, you could continue to do this.’ ”

Byrd said he ultimately wanted to go into law enforcement because he wanted to be part of social change. He said that sense of purpose solidified after video footage surfaced of Los Angeles man Rodney King being beaten by police officers after a car chase in 1991 and the riots that followed after the involved officers were acquitted.

Byrd recalled one traffic stop where he felt racially profiled as a Black man while he was an off duty trooper in 1994.

“I didn’t think I made a violation when [the officer from a different agency] pulled me over,” Byrd said. “I looked at him and he couldn’t really tell me why he stopped me. But then I was like, ‘Well, you know, we worked together last night,’ and he’s like, ‘Oh,’ because I didn’t have on a uniform. I had on a jogging suit, an Adidas jogging suit. ... They let me go.”

Byrd said King wasn’t a perfect person and he had a criminal history, but there should have been a duty to intervene for officers at the scene.

“He still is a human being,” Byrd said. “You have him in custody, you place him in custody. At the end of the day, let the courts do it and that’s it.”

Officer’s duty

Byrd said he has always reminded law enforcement officers their job is to put the offender in custody and not administer the discipline.

“You’re not the judge,” Byrd said he would tell officers. “Do your part, do your job and you let it go from there.”

Byrd, a father of three adult children, said he never got “the talk” about how to handle and survive traffic stops with police as a boy, since his single mom didn’t have a driver’s license when he was growing up. He said he has had that talk with his two sons and his nephews and encouraged them to turn on the car cabin lights once they pull over.

“I will speak as a law enforcement officer who worked over 20 years on midnight shift – I did all my work under the cover of darkness, and I will tell you that walking up to a car with three or four people and not being able to see hands and knowing you could get a shot at any point, it’s tough,” Byrd said. “And it might not be this car and that’s fine. But you always have to think, you have to be a few steps ahead. ... A law enforcement officer is going to always be alert, but he can at least take a breath.”

Byrd said he learned it takes a certain personality to truly make a difference in the community as a police officer and to not take lightly the power law enforcement holds to take someone’s freedom away. He said there’s a sense of responsibility that should come with that power.

More specifically, Byrd said it’s important for police officers to not have a hothead temperament and to keep their emotions in check.

“You need to be able to have empathy for people that you’ve never encountered before in your life,” Byrd said. “That might be the first time at a scene of a major incident. So you have to be able to deal with your emotions accordingly but not let it stop you from showing empathy or sympathy to people who are just going through some type of serious trauma or incident.”

Byrd said that moral character and integrity has to be more inherent for people and not just be dictated by department policies – and that’s something he would be looking for while recruiting more officers.

“So when I go out and do my job, you know, there’s a policy that says, ‘Hey, you should do A, B, C, and D,’ " Byrd said. “But I know personally that my moral character says that I should be doing A, B, C or D. I don’t need the policy to tell me that.”

Training and check-ins

When it comes to officer wellness, Byrd said he is all for treatment resources for post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, being made available for officers. He said he started a program within Illinois State Police, where he made a point to make wellness calls 12 to 24 hours after an officer or officers responded to a traumatic incident.

“The incident itself is not what the call is for the call is for how you handling the incident, mentally yourself, not so much what actually occurred – we know what occurred,” Byrd said. “Let’s just say there was a fatal crash. We understand what happened. There was a crash and someone lost their life. But when you got there, was that person alive at that time? How did that affect you? If you weren’t able to actually do anything to save that person, did that affect you in any adverse way? So we want to have these open conversations on this call. In the past I’ve told them, ‘You don’t have to speak,’ because a lot of times listening can help you even more than speaking.”

Byrd said he knows some officers might feel like crying at a traumatic scene might be a sign of weakness. However, he said sometimes that’s the appropriate response to a call like that.

“Because at the end of the day, you’re releasing all the stressors that you had from that event in the first place,” Byrd said. “And there’s an old saying, that pressure bursts pipes. So this is what we’re trying to avoid, that pressure with doing your job on a daily basis.”

Byrd said he thinks those types of check-ins could even help him have a better grasp of what’s going on with officers. He pointed to the recent death of Daunte Wright, a Black man from Minnesota killed by a veteran police officer who allegedly mistook her firearm for her stun gun.

“I guess what I don’t know is what her sleeping habits are, what she was going through, what she could have been going through during that time, how stressed out she was,” Byrd said. “A lot of those things go into the factor of how you would ... instead of you pulling your taser, you pull the firearm.”

Byrd said that’s exactly what worries him about manpower and wellness. He said he believes most police officers are honorable, but the fact of the matter is police live with the reality that one wrong move can kill someone.

“With the lack of manpower, there’s collateral damage to that,” Byrd said. “Because, basically, what happens is your officers get overworked and then they get extremely tired and then you have to worry about their sleeping [habits] at home.”

DeKalb City Manager Bill Nicklas said during a Wednesday sixth ward meeting he has worked in the public sector for a long time and it’s a “rare find” to see a public figure who puts their heart into what they do everyday. He said he thinks Byrd, who was also in attendance at the meeting, is one of those people.

“I’ve known this man for just a couple of months and what you see is exactly who he is,” Nicklas said. “ ... This is the fellow that was No. 2 at Illinois State Police and he picked us. We went through a process and other people and we picked him, but before we could pick him, he had to apply and he picked us. He did his homework and he thought, ‘This is where I want to live and work and make a difference.’ "

Nicklas said he also was happy to hear that Byrd already started “walking the beat” and get the community familiar with him.

“That’s just music to my ears,” Nicklas said. “Relationships are, after all, what count in the long run. They build familiarity, which builds trust. And trust is what a good community needs. We need to trust each other, believe in each other, disagree fiercely with each other from time to time but, in the end, we believe in each other.”