‘GIVE IT RESPECT’
HOW YEADON CHIEF WORKS TO CONNECT WITH HIS COMMUNITY DELCO FORMS TASK FORCE TO ADDRESS CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM
YEADON » Borough Police Chief Anthony “Chachi” Paparo was sitting in his car when he first saw the George Floyd video weeks ago.
“When I saw the video, I was literally in my car screaming like, ‘What are you doing?’” he said. In a letter he wrote the community, he added, “I literally got sick to my stomach.”
At that moment, Yeadon Mayor Rohan Hepkins called the chief and asked him if he was good.
“No,” Paparo responded. “I’ll be honest with you, I just watched this video. This just destroyed me as a cop.”
Paparo has spent more than 35 years as a police officer, 32 of them in the Upper Darby Police Department and the last two as Yeadon’s chief. When he arrived, he dived into learning more about his diverse community and instituting measures to better coincide with that from the establishment of the Youth Police Academy and Citizens Police Academy to Racial Intelligence and De-escalation trainings.
“I don’t tell members of the black and brown community that I truly understand their plight because no white guy could, ever,” he said. “You got to give it the respect that it deserves.”
Paparo added, “What’s going on in this world with police, with ‘Defund Police,’ it’s destroying me ... There’s so much good but ... it’s not talked about. It’s really not.”
In Yeadon, he said his 30 officer force, 20 full time and 10 part time, answer an average of 1,000 calls a month or about 12,000 a year. In Upper Darby, when he was there, they averaged 80,000 calls a year.
“So, when you average that out, the acts of what guys are doing good should outshine, but I get there has to be drastic changes,” he said. “Here’s the thing - when you’re in a fight for your life, you can’t give up things that are going to keep you living. I understand the anger and the angst ... but to a certain degree, until you’ve been out here and you’ve been involved in it, you can’t really understand it like I can’t understand their pain. I want to.”
That’s why he’s instituted racial sensitivity training and emphasized community policing.
“You’ve got to think outside the box and if you look at everybody like they’re family, then it’s so much easier to police,” Paparo said. “You can’t do it because there’s a protest going on. You’ve got to let the community know you care about them a lot sooner than that.”
That’s why he reached out to A.J. Ali and participated in his program “Walking While Black, L.O.V.E. is the Answer” last September.
“I thought, ‘Hey, this is perfect for what I’m trying to do here,’” Paparo said. “I believe I was the only municipal police department in Pennsylvania that got involved.”
He said part of the learning process is uncomfortable.
“Cops have to embrace that sometimes what you’re going to talk about is going to be difficult for both sides, but if you don’t, then you’re missing the opportunity to connect with the people you take care of,” the chief said. “If somebody’s calling because a squirrel pooped on their front lawn, that’s important to them at the time that they’re calling. Give it the respect that it deserves and I told (my officers), ‘You’ve got a chance to talk to them. If you don’t, you’re losing the opportunity to connect to people.’” He found ways to do so. He has Operation House Call where, like doctors of the past, he makes house calls.
“For me, I have a lot of older residents in Yeadon that can’t get to Coffee with a Cop so how do I interact with them?” Paparo said. “You know what? I’m going to be like a doctor in making a house call so I called it Operation House Call. I go on social media and I say, ‘Operation House Call is in effect, if you’ve got something, direct message me, I’ll come see you.’ So now, they direct message me on Next Door or Twitter and I go to their house and we have a chat.
“Those little things, they let people know that, ‘Hey, you know what, you matter. I care about you and if you can’t come see me, I’ll come to see you,’” he said.
He also invited members of the community to take a ride-along with him or any Yeadon police officer. “See for yourself the dedication and purpose we have to serve and protect this community,” he told them. “We do a lot more than you think, and we hear you, we
“This was beyond wrong. This was a homicide. This was murder.”
— Yeadon Borough Police Chief Anthony “Chachi” Paparo on the George Floyd incident
see you.”
Paparo participated in Sunday’s walk from the Lansdowne Theater to Yeadon Borough Hall ending at Kerr Field in which more than 1,000 people walked the route. It was organized by 16-year-old Penn Wood High senior Tori Monroe, who specifically thanked the Yeadon police at the beginning of the march for their support.
He was also present in a protest the week before.
“I had a cop come up to me last week,” Paparo said. “We had a protest down here. Originally, it was going to be anti-police. And, I tell you, mid-way into it, it turned into a love fest. One of my guys came up to me afterwards and he says, ‘Chief, I want to let you know thank you for making me a better man and, most of all, a better cop.’”
The chief spoke about some of the changes he’d like to see, including having the “Walking While Black, L.O.V.E. is the Answer” and Racial Intelligence training as part of the Municipal Police Officers’ Training.
“I think it’s something that every cop should get from the get go,” he said. “If you haven’t had it then you’ve got to get it at some point because we’re all bringing our personal lives with us everywhere we go. We’re all bringing our implicit biases wherever we go and it’s a matter of understanding it and recognizing it.”
In his letter to the community, he said, “(W)e cannot begin to succeed at policing until we (police) police ourselves.”
As part of that, Paparo’s written a new “Failure to Intervene” policy that applies to all of the officers in his department, including himself and pertains to persons and property.
“Regardless of the rank, if a supervisor or if I am doing something wrong, (an officer on scene) better step up and it doesn’t just mean stop what’s going on, but render aid, give him medical care,” he said. “You better act. You better act because you can’t give up your integrity, you can’t give up your honor.”
Failure to do so will result in discipline up to termination, depending on the circumstances, the chief said.
“The thing that really irritated me about Minneapolis is if you got probable cause to make an arrest, I don’t need three different
attorneys from the county, the state and the local to say, ‘Let’s look at it for four days,’” he said. “If I’ve got probable cause to lock you up, you’re getting locked up.”
He said, “Sometimes arrests are not, for a lack of a better word, they’re not pretty when you have a person that’s resisting arrest and you’re trying to take them into custody, they want to get
away and the officer wants to survive and the officer wants the person to survive.”
For him, the George Floyd incident was clear.
“This was beyond wrong,” Paparo wrote the community. “This was a homicide. This was murder.”
And, he called out the officers who failed to intervene, as well. “They failed as cops, failed at just being human,” he said. “It’s
not about being weak on the street. Strength, real strength and courage sometimes comes with stopping an officer who has lost sight of what they have taken an oath for.”
Paparo hopes to have a conversation with the community about what a citizen can do when something like this happens.
“I think one of the things police and the public need to have a real conversation
on is what safeguards can we put in place that if an officer’s losing his mind, doing the wrong thing and other cops are not intervening, what do you do?” he said.
In the meantime, he continues to connect to his community, instill training to his department of whom he’s very proud and he reaches out to a power great than himself.
“I go home at night, I sit
and I pray and I ask God, I say, ‘Please help this stop. Put us on the right path. Do something,’” he said. “This can’t be the narrative. It can’t be the narrative that cops don’t care. This is a wake-up call for good cops to start speaking up ‘cause there’s a lot of good cops out there but the problem is some good cops just aren’t vocal. But, you know what, now’s the time to start being vocal.”