Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
DETECTIVE RETIRES AFTER 25 YEARS
Scott Whiteside ‘has been the face of that office,’ chief says
WEST CHESTER » As if the COVID-19-drenched days of 2020 had not been challenging enough, on the morning of Dec. 28, West Chester Police Chief James Morehead received even more unwelcome news.
Sitting at his desk and ruminating over the difficulties of guiding a department with eight unfilled officer positions, Morehead looked up to see veteran Detective Corporal Scott Whiteside. He had come to the office to let Morehead know he had made the decision to retire.
“I said ‘Seriously?’” Morehead recalled in an interview in his
Borough Hall office last week, a day before Whiteside would formally take his final “walk out” of the department’s headquarters on East Gay Street, in front of well-wishing colleagues, friends, and family.
Whiteside has been a stalwart member of the department for 25 years, coming to the borough in June 1995 as a
“clean cut, polite” rookie patrol officer and growing into one of the more successful criminal investigators in the department’s history, Morehead said. Now, he would be faced with the prospect of forging ahead with not simply another empty position, but the loss of decades of the experience and resources White
side provided to the department.
“Scott has been the face of that office since (long time borough detective) Tom Yarnall retired in 2006,” Morehead told an interviewer. “I think the biggest (attribute he brings) is that he is a ‘case clearance’ guy,” meaning someone who makes arrests that allow the department to “clear” open cases.
“Some detectives will hit a wall” in their investigation of this or that crime. “Scott would bounce off that wall, find a new lead, and run with it. He doesn’t give up. He takes all the time needed to investigate a case,” the chief said.
Along the way during his 25 years, Whiteside has made arrests in dozens and dozens of newsworthy cases, but also uncounted numbers of smaller ones that provided even the most minor of crime victims a sense of closure. A few examples include the arrest of a man who swindled his former fiancé out of more than $31,000 in credit card receipts, including the cost of an engagement ring he gave her; the July 2007 murder of a borough man in his upstairs bedroom by a Coatesville man looking for drug proceeds; the 2015 shooting of a rowdy West Chester University student outside a garage rented by a convicted felon; and the apprehension of a woman who assaulted a stranger inside a West Chester bar, a suspect identified by the use of an ID card reader, technology not available when Whiteside began his career in 1995.
In an interview, Whiteside
remembered coming to the department after graduating from the Police Academy and West Chester University and spending a short time working for the Ephrata Police Department and that of his hometown, Kennett Square.
“Once I arrived, I realized it was the right choice, and I’ve stayed ever since,” he said.
Working in West Chester gave Whiteside the chance to be involved with cases of all levels, from the gruesomest homicide, to the most appalling of sexual assaults, to the simplest of burglaries.
“I knew the town from going to college, and I liked the town,” he said. “I knew it was a good place to work with good officers. It’s diverse, the kind of people you would interact with, whether its economical, racial, or whatever. I knew there was the opportunity to see a lot of different types of police activity. It wouldn’t just be little stuff. It would be little stuff and big stuff, an all around type of department that did a little bit of everything.
“One day you can be helping someone out because they were the victim of a fraud of $500,000 in the morning, and then in the afternoon you can be driving down to Philadelphia to pick up a guy you have a warrant on for shooting someone at a club,” he said. “You have to wear many hats.”
A high school athlete and gregarious sports fan, Whiteside said the borough department reminds him of a sports team, where different players take on different roles.
“Like basketball, certain guys have a certain niche; some guy is a good defender, or some guy is a good
shooter,” he said. “With us, you have to be flexible and learn to do a lot of different things. But you also grow to your strengths.
“Like anyone I have faults, but one of the things I feel comfortable with is speaking to people, all different types of people — someone’s grandmother, or someone who is involved in a gang. Everyone has their ups and downs. People are people, and they make mistakes. But I’ve seen people I’ve arrested 15 years later and they’ve turned things around.
“You have to treat people with respect, because eventually you may see that person again down the road. That’s the philosophy I brought to my work,” Whiteside said.
Watching taped recordings of interview sessions including Whiteside and a criminal suspect or victim is a study in the power of authoritative,
calm, questioning. His voice never raises to a shout, his demeanor remains placid, and little by little, the interviewee comes to divulge things they had not thought to mention — small bits of information that Whiteside and his colleagues could use to puzzle
out the mystery of a crime.
That ability to connect was noticeable from the first, said Morehead. “I watched him engage with people on the street, always courteous and soft spoken. I was impressed with the way he carried himself with the pubic. He was always friendly, and people warmed up to him because of that approach.”
As befitting his sense of modesty, Whiteside gave credit to his superiors and colleagues in the department from showing him how to develop his abilities, and for the other team members — patrol officers — whose work he said helps solve a myriad of cases.
“I have had the opportunity to work for some good police chiefs, from John Green to Scott Bohn, and now Chief Morehead,” he said. “They trust you and believe in you. I’ve had good supervisors, like Tom Yarnall, Lou DeShullo, and Ryan Collins. And I cannot stress enough how important the patrols guys have been in my career.”
But Whiteside said the time had come to retire from the department, and now looks forward to life at home with his wife, Helene, a teacher in the Avon Grove School District, and interactions with his two children — son Scott, a junior at Monmouth University in New Jersey, where he plays lacrosse, and daughter Morgan, a West Chester University graduate and soon-tobe school teacher.
Morehead’s days grappling with staff vacancies has grown less challenging with the addition this month of new officers, and he can take pride in the fact that major crime in the borough has been reduced over the past 20 years by a significant amount.
“It is a credit to everyone in the department, but Scott was definitely a significant part of that,” the chief said. “He will be missed.”