GOODBYE, CHIEF
Lansdale Chief of Police Bob McDyre retires after more than 3 decades with the department
The year was 1985, and Bob McDyre — an Upper Darby native nearing his 30th birthday — was beginning to sour on his job running an auto body shop in Conshohocken.
“It was encouraged in the automotive business to cheat customers and make money, and I hated it,” McDyre recalled. He got to talking to some of the Pennsylvania State Police troopers who regularly brought their vehicles in to be serviced, and soon he decided to enroll in the police academy. Later that year, he became a part-time cop in Conshohocken, and then, in July of 1986, McDyre was hired by the Lansdale Police Department as a full-time patrol officer
On Friday, McDyre, now 60, said goodbye to the department where he served for half his life, including the last seven-plus years as chief of police.
“You get to the point where you just know, and you’re at ease,” McDyre said of his decision to retire. Long known in the community for an affable demeanor to go along with his determined policework and steady leadership, McDyre’s trademark grin arrived early and stayed often as he spoke — a true sign of a man at peace with calling it a career after nearly 31 years.
“It’s time,” he said. “Sixty is old in law enforcement. And I know there’s good people to take over. There’s plenty
of people who are capable, people who are better than me who can take this job. I think we’re in really good shape, so I leave here feeling at ease that the whole crew will be fine.”
Despite a downpour on Friday morning, McDyre was still all smiles in the passenger seat of a Lansdale police SUV — driven by his longtime colleague and friend, Sgt. Dean Miller — that picked him up at his home and then led a long caravan of officers from the borough and neighboring municipalities, as well as an engine from the Fairmount Fire Company, for one last lap around Lansdale with lights and sirens activated in tribute.
Then it was back to the station for salutes both literal and vocal from scores more cops — including numerous police chiefs and other high-ranking officers from departments in North Penn and elsewhere around the county. McDyre was clearly touched by all the handshakes and the hugs, and good-natured about the ribbing from many when a picture of a younger McDyre sporting a mullet that would put Billy Ray Cyrus to shame was shown on a screen as part of a photo tribute.
In the days leading up to McDyre’s final hurrah, his accomplishments as chief of police were on the minds of many — chief among them the fact that under his watch, crime in Lansdale is down roughly 40 percent since 2009. “It is without reservation that I can say
that his service and leadership have definitely left Lansdale a better and safer place than when he found it,” said borough council President Denton Burnell.
Lansdale Mayor Andy Szekely hailed McDyre’s devotion to community policing and fostering trust and cooperation between his cops and borough residents — through his emphasis on foot and bicycle patrols, an engaging social media presence, and other means — which he believes played a big role in that crime reduction and helped shield the borough from some of the problems that have plagued other areas of the country.
“While there were troubles nationally with police and community relations, Lansdale has not had similar experiences,” Szekely said. “In fact, there has been an outpouring of support from the community in the forms of meals, cookies, signs supporting the department, and, of course, doughnuts.”
McDyre said that to get the crime numbers down when he took over the department in October of 2009, following the retirement of Chief Joseph McGuriman, his first order of business was to work with borough council to beef up the police department’s “skeleton crew” of 19 officers. That number now stands at 24, “which is what we should be,” he said. McDyre also oversaw the creation of the department’s Street Crimes Unit to primarily go after individuals dealing heroin and other opioids, particularly those who came from other locales like Philadelphia or Norristown to try to “set up shop” in the borough. “I had no problem saying, ‘If you come up to Lansdale to sell drugs, we’re gonna kick your door in, we’re going to arrest you, and we’re going to take you to jail, simple as that,’” McDyre said, at the same time stressing his empathy and compassion for drug addicts — a perspective he says is shared by the cops in his department. “I’m not sure throwing (addicts) into the criminal justice system is always the right thing. The system, it needs to focus a lot more on treatment. But we also need to cut the head off the snake. You just can’t come here and sell drugs.”
McDyre’s crime fighting efforts also included putting pressure on some of Lansdale’s most notorious nuisance bars — including the Third and Walnut Bar and the Junction House Pub; places where, he said, the local drug trade thrived and other criminal activity was based — until the owners of those establishments decided to close up shop.
“That has really made a difference,” McDyre said. “Those bars were a problem. The drugs, the fights, people would shoot at each other, there were a couple stabbings — it was absolutely unacceptable.”
Sgt. Miller concurred: “We had a persistent problem with drug activity and crime (when McDyre took over as police chief), a lot of it centered around some of the drinking establishments, and (McDyre’s) “Boots on the Ground” initiative, having more officers out and about and being proactive, he led that charge and it’s really been effective.”
McDyre was hesitant to take too much credit. “I’ll be honest,” he said, “a lot of the good ideas some from the sergeants, and they get them from the officers. I’ve always sat down with them and said, ‘ What do you think we should do?’ and then we’ve tried things.”
But he did say that he’s preached to his officers the notions of restraint and professionalism and respecting everyone with whom they come in contact, and that he was open to changing some of the old rules to achieve better results. For example, the way of thinking when he took over the department was that detectives were always supposed to wear suits and ties and
maintain an authoritarian air. “But they were telling me, you know, it’s hard to relate to informants and deal with other people when you’re like that,” McDyre said, so he relaxed the dress code, loosened up facial hair restrictions and let his investigators be more themselves. “Something as basic as that helped a lot, more than you would even think.”
Still, McD y re knew plenty about successful investigative techniques long before he became chief of police, having worked in the department’s detective division briefly in the mid1990s, then becoming detective sergeant in 2001 and running the detective division from that point until taking over from McGuriman.
Early in his career as a patrol officer, he found a mentor in Lansdale Detective Mike McCarthy, who
died last September at the age of 73, 20 years after retiring from the force. “I’d go back (into the detective’s suite) and talk to him, and he taught me so much, re-
ally inspired me,” McDyre recalled.
It was a tragic incident during his first year as a cop — an incident McDyre doesn’t often speak about —
that galvanized his careerlong dedication to combating the deadly effects of substance abuse. It was Feb. 22, 1987, and a call came in that an 8-year-old girl on a bike was struck on Cannon Avenue by what turned out to be a drunk driver.
“I’ll never forget it ,” McDyre said quietly. “I was the first one there, and I tried to do CPR...”
His voice trailed off as he held his arms in front of him like he was cradling a memory he wanted to forget and never wanted to forget, all at once.
“I can still feel it in my hands today, you know? You feel the life go out of them, the body going from warm to turning cold. I couldn’t save her. It was horrible. I found out later that her brain stem was broken and she never would have survived, but still...
“Looking back on it,” McDyre continued, “I’m glad I was there and she didn’t die alone in the street, either. I’ll tell you what — it made me do a lot of drunk driving enforcement. I made a tremendous amount of drunk driving arrests. I didn’t give drunk drivers a break after that.
I wouldn’t dare take that chance.”
Ironically, McDyre said, about seven or eight years later the driver — who had done jail time for the crime — fell down some steps in the winter while drunk, and he died. McDyre responded to that scene, too.
He was seeing his share of drug overdoses in the borough, too, and made lots of drug-related arrests during his overnight patrols. “I saw the devastation drugs, and drug dealers, can cause. I’ve gone in and found people slumped over with the needle in their arm and you try to save them and they’re already dead and there’s nothing you can do. I’ve seen the crimes (addicts) are forced to commit. I felt like I had to try to do something about that.”
So in 1989 and 1990, Mc Dy re temporarily stepped away from the Lansdale Police Department to do undercover drug investigations with Montgomery County’s Narcotics Enforcement Team (NET), which worked the Pennsylvania State Police Strike Force to take down major drug traffickers in the area.
“Everything was cocaine at that time, no heroin at all,” McDyre said. “We did some pretty big cases.”
That’s when he started growing out his hair and a big, bushy beard for the undercover work.
“The first time I ever saw him, he was undercover and he had hair down to his butt and all these earrings, and I really thought he was a perp,” laughed recently retired Lansdale patrol officer Pat McKernan, who had joined the department in 1990. “I thought to myself, ‘Someday I’m going to have to lock that guy up.’ Then one day, someone finally told me he was undercover narcotics, that he was one of our guys. I had no idea. He was great at it, just fantastic.”
McDyre came back to Lansdale, worked i n patrol, became a detective for a couple of years, then was promoted to sergeant in 1997 and was reassigned to the street. While talking about those years, Lansdale police Lt. Alex Kromdyk — McDyre’s long-time number-two officer who is now acting chief of police until a permanent chief is appointed by borough council — came into McDyre’s office and both reminisced together about working on the same squad.
“When (Chief McGuriman) told me there was an opening on (Sgt. McDyre’s) squad, I felt like I could learn a lot from him because he had an awful lot of knowledge, and I admired his work ethic and his motivation to do a good job to serve the residents the best way that he could,” Kromdyk said. “We had some bad times, you know, the terrible things that cops see and deal with, but we had a lot of good times, too.”
Both men at once brought up one of their most memorable calls together.
“This woman calls up and she says, ‘My husband’s here, he’s armed and he’s threatening me,’” McDyre said. “So we go screaming down there and the guy is outside and he’s got his
hand i n his coat and he pulls his hand out and he’s got a friggin’ gun. Other departments might have shot the guy, but we all swarmed the guy. Someone got ahold of the gun so he couldn’t pull the trigger, and then I grab the guy and I’m trying to reach for the gun, and I’m holding onto him so he can’t shoot, and then Alex comes in with his nightstick...”
“(McDyre) and another one of our guys, they got hands on him but the guy’s still fighting and he won’t drop the gun, so I wanted to take the air out of him,” Kromdyk said, picking up the story. “So I come into his side with the stick to knock the air out of him, and I hit the guy hard enough, he should have gone ‘ Ooof’ at the very least, but nothing. So then, after the call—”
“We’re back at the station,” McDyre interrupts, starting to laugh, “and my hand’s all swelled up and Alex is telling everyone, ‘I hit this guy really hard and he didn’t even...,’ and I’m like, ‘Look at my hand!’ I didn’t even feel it, I didn’t even realize (Kromdyk) hit me, I was so pumped up at the time.”
The stories and the laughter continued to flow, but during a separate conversation, Kromdyk turned serious again. “He’s always looked out for the community and the cops that work for him,” Kromdyk said. “It’s a tough job, you can’t please everybody all the time, but what he’s brought
to this job has been common sense, whether dealing with the community or (borough) council or anybody else. His approach to policing has always been pragmatic and down-toearth, and he’s been willing to engage with anybody about anything. He’s never put himself up on a pedestal, and I really admire that.”
That opinion is shared by one of Lansdale’s newest patrol cops, Officer Amanda North, who has been with the department for a year — part-time at first and full-time since November — and will go down as one of McDyre’s last hires. “I have to say, when I was applying to police departments, this is one of the top departments I was looking at, and I think it comes from how Chief has run it,” North said. “He’s been very approachable. He’s not just a chief that sat in his office with the door closed. You could go to him and have a conversation, even if it’s about your family or personal stuff. That’s one of the things I liked most about him.”
“He had the vision to take a small department and grow it into what it is today — one of the premier departments in the North Penn area,” said North’s squadmate, Officer Liam Pyskaty, a 16-year veteran of the department who also noted McDyre’s primary role in getting them a much-needed new police station. “He started this building and finished it in his tenure,” said Pyskaty. “I just think he was the right person at the right time for the job.”
Former Lansdale council member Mike Sobel, who chaired the Public Safety Committee from 2010 to 2014 and was closely involved in the creation of the new borough municipal building, which opened in 2015, said that during the planning stages, McDyre “told all of us that you have to have the police located on the first floor. If you put the police on the second floor, the doughnuts would roll down the stairs.”
“He was truly committed to making Lansdale as safe as he could....but our Public Safety Meetings for the most part were kept very lighthearted and truly fun,” Sobel continued. “Not to say we took public safety lightly, because we didn’t, but we tried not to have dull meetings...Bob has a great sense of humor, believe me.”
“I loved working with
Bob, he’s a hell of a man,” said McKernan, who despite having retired from the force can still often be found helping out in various capacities around the police station. “I have a ton of respect for that guy and I’m really gonna miss him.”
“The best cops are the ones who look at this as a calling, and Bob McDyre looked at this as his calling,” Kromdyk said. “This job takes a toll on you, on your family life. Think of all the missed meals, the missed birthdays, the missed events at your kid’s school. He and his family sacrificed a lot, But Bob has served the community the way it deserved to be served.”
Post-retirement, McDyre isn’t planning to disappear from the community — except for the occasional fishing trip. He lives in the area
and has no intention to leave. He said he was going to take a few months off to figure out his next pursuit, which could be a yet-to-bedetermined business venture. No matter what, the department to which he devoted so much of his life will never be far from his mind.
“I’ll miss everyone, and I’ll always worry about them,” he smiled. “I know all of them. I know their families. But they’ve got a new building, new cars, good policy, a great culture, the group of young cops we’ve hired are great...I think everything will be fine. I feel good.”