New Richfield police chief sees no need to make wholesale changes
by Sheldon Ocker
Michael Swanson didn’t dream about catching bad guys as a kid growing up in Sagamore Hills. His father operated a small construction company, and when Swanson reached adulthood, he joined his dad and brother in the business.
One day, a deputy in the Summit County Sheriff’s Department, a customer and friend of Swanson’s, made an off-handed comment: “I think you’d make a good police officer,” he said.
“I never really thought about it,” Swanson said.
The deputy invited Swanson to ride along with him on a work shift. Soon after, another customer of the construction company, an Ohio Supreme Court justice, wrote Swanson a letter of recommendation.
“That’s what kind of got me into this,” he said.
When Swanson was hired by Peninsula for his first police job, he didn’t know where it would lead. But in August 1998 he was hired by Richfield Village, where he remains today. He spent most of his years in the detective bureau, but when Chief Keith Morgan retired, Swanson was named his successor last October.
The transition appears to have been seamless, certainly in part because Swanson is familiar with every aspect of the department.
“It was a smooth transition in leadership and continuity after Chief Morgan retired,” Swanson said. “But change is good. It creates new opportunities. We’re a small department. For years, there was just no movement, because nobody left.”
But in the past year, there have been several personnel changes. In addition to swearing in a new chief, longtime Richfield officer Paul Fister was appointed to the newly created position of assistant chief, and Kim Bonker was hired as animal control officer.
The department is mandated for 19 full-time and five part-time officers, but there are two vacancies in the part-time staff that Swanson has had difficulty filling.
“It used to be you would have stacks of applications to go through,” he said. “Now, you get very few. Maybe part of it is because the economy is good. But I’m not sure people want to do police work anymore.”
What’s the toughest thing about making the transition from detective to boss?
“It’s all the administrative stuff you have to do. There’s no police work involved in this job,” he said, chuckling.
Swanson doesn’t think he just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
“I’ve been preparing myself for this, hoping I would get the opportunity,” he said. “I went to the FBI Academy in 2010, and being a detective, I’ve worked closely with several police chiefs.”
It was in 2010 that Swanson started to view becoming chief as a career goal.
“The former chief probably pushed me in this direction,” he said.
Swanson doesn’t plan to reinvent the wheel. Departmental changes he is instituting are minimal.
“I’m going to be focused on training, not that we’re undertrained,” he said. “Our training budget was cut during the last recession, around 2008 or ’10, and was never brought back up.”
Swanson has asked village council for a $4,000 increase in the 2020 budget for training.
“We can stretch those dollars a long way,” he said.
Swanson also is equipping the department with Tasers. Village council approved the purchase of seven of the devices at a cost of about $1,500 apiece.
“We’ve had officers hurt in close encounters with combative subjects,” Swanson said. “So the Tasers probably will replace our collapsible batons and pepper spray.”
Tasers have a range of 25 feet, so officers do not have to risk close contact with belligerent individuals. Swanson will have enough Tasers to go around, because Richfield schedules three or four officers per shift.
In 2020, Swanson plans to ask residents what they think of the department.
“I want to get out a community survey, kind of get some feedback on how we’re doing,” he said.
Richfield is hardly a hotbed of crime, but miscreants, often from Cleveland and Akron, give Swanson and his department plenty to do.
“I’ve seen just about every kind of crime there is,” he said. “It’s just not as frequent as in the [bigger] cities.”
Richfield is no stranger to Internet and telephone swindles or the consequences of the opioid epidemic.
“The scams have evolved into something constant,” Swanson said. “I mean, weekly, we’re taking scam reports from people falling for a telephone scam or some sort of mail order [con]. The criminals are good at it. We’ve had some residents take some pretty big hits. Unfortunately, they target the elderly.”
A small police department isn’t equipped to solve most of these kinds of crime, many of which originate in other states or other countries. That doesn’t mean Swanson feels helpless in trying to keep Richfield safe.
“What I always liked working in a town like this is if there’s a drug problem or burglaries in a neighborhood, you can make one arrest, and it will stop,” Swanson said. “In Akron or Cleveland, you can arrest 10-12 people, and you wake up the next morning and there are 10-12 new people to take their place. “Here, if you do your job, you can make a difference.”
Feature image photo caption: The Richfield Police Department includes officers, detectives, dispatchers and animal control officers, working on different shifts. They all came together when Michael Swanson was appointed chief.
