New foundation to support Juno Beach police
JUNO BEACH — The founder of a Palm Beach Gardens charity that raises money for police equipment, training and scholarships has taken on a new task: replicating the program’s success in Juno Beach.
Retired IBM executive Tom Murphy started the Palm Beach Gardens Police Foundation 101/2 years ago and turned it over in January to new president, Irwin Edenzon, a BallenIsles resident and former president of Ingalls Shipbuilding.
Murphy is focusing his attention on growing the recently formed Juno Beach Police Foundation. The nonprofit foundation is independent of the town.
Juno Beach Police Chief Brian Smith told the Town Council that the foundation will give the department access to more new technology than his budget allows and build on the relationship police have with residents.
“We can’t do this alone. We need the support of the community to help us, tell us what’s going on in their communities, on their blocks,” Smith told the Town Council at its April 25 meeting. “I believe with the support of the foundation, that’s going to enhance it even more, if possible.”
Murphy emphasized that the foundation will not call residents to ask for donations. Instead, the foundation will send mailers asking for donations, and supporters are discussing a culinary event.
Among the items on the chief ’s wish list: new automated external defibrillators for patrol cars; license plate readers; trauma kits with special bandages; and night-vision and heat-seeking devices to find people hiding in the seagrapes or bushes.
Partnering with the foundation will enhance the training officers get for handling cyber crimes, using non-lethal techniques and using software to prevent crime, Murphy told the council.
The first priorities will be the new AEDs and supplying officers with trauma kits. Patrol cars already have AEDs, and officers have used them or CPR to save three or four lives in the past several years, but they’re reaching the end of their useful lives, Murphy said. One AED costs $1,200 to $1,500.
The trauma kits include Israeli bandages, which are extra-large, absorbent dressings, that help prevent people with gunshot or stab wounds from bleeding out. Two Palm Beach Gardens officers used one in April 2017 to save a man with a large cut on his neck.
In Palm Beach Gardens, the foundation also bought four police dogs and was ready to buy a fifth when a donor came forward. It has paid for in-house classroom and hands-on training, plus offsite training for drug identification and sexual-abuse investigation.
The foundation enabled Palm Beach Gardens police to buy software to predict where crime will occur and to plan responses to critical incidents.
It has a tuition-reimbursement program for officers who want to go back to school for college degrees and a scholarship program for young adults headed off to college for the first time.
The Juno Beach Police Foundation vice president is Lew Wheeler, husband of Town Council member Peggy Wheeler. Wheeler was instructed to recuse herself from votes related to the foundation to avoid any appearance of special benefit to the foundation from the town.
Other board members include: Joe Rooney, vice president of the Palm Beach Kennel Club and co-founder of the Rooney’s Public House restaurants; Dawn Hoffman, founder of Camp Kids Hope and wife of Alfred Hoffman, the former U.S. ambassador to Portugal; and Jon Luther, the retired chairman and CEO of Dunkin’ Donuts’ and Baskin-Robbins’ parent company Dunkin’ Brands. Luther also is the former chairman of the Culinary Institute of America.
Two board members come from TBC Corporation and Next Era Energy, the town’s big employers.
Jupiter started its police foundation last year, and West Palm Beach has had one for about two years, Murphy said.