Hanford Insider with guest Police Chief Parker Sever: Leading with Empathy and Patience

On this episode of the Hanford Insider, rob sits down with retiring Hanford police chief, parker Sever, to talk about his career in Hanford and his future plans. This is the Hanford Insider for Monday, october 9.

Welcome to this episode of the Hanford Insider. I'm your host, rob Bentley. We've got a very special episode this week with the retiring Hanford police chief, parker Sever. Due to the length of the interview, I won't be doing a community calendar, but you can go back to last week's episode to see what all is happening this second week of October. Eric will also be back next week with a high school sports updates. We're here with Parker Sever of the Hanford Police Department. As many of you may have heard, he is moving on to Utah to be closer to his family. Welcome to the show, parker. Thank you. Hey, parker, can you tell us a little bit about? You've been in Hanford since 1997 with the police department, but what brought you to Hanford?

I was actually born in Los Angeles. I've only lived there for about a year, though, so and then my family moved up to Fresno and we lived right over by St Agnes, and we that's where I grew up was in Fresno, and we moved around a little bit, not too much. I went up on the west side of Fresno for a little bit, where we built a house and for any Clovis for a short period of time, and I eventually decided I wanted to be a police officer, and through that process I applied at different agencies around California and I actually, you know, first place it offered me a job was Hanford, and I actually I was offered a job the exact same day at Hanford and Pismo Beach, and it was a little bit tempting because I was like I'd be foggy here and I'd go over to Pismo and we'd spend the rest of the day on the beach and I was like this is kind of nice, but ultimately I stayed in Hanford. I think the main reason was was because that's where my family was my mom works here and my sister and my brothers and so we wanted to be in my wife's family as well, so we wanted to be close to them.

Yeah, that's great. What an opportunity. So you joined the department and how did you proceed up the ranks to eventually chief?

Yeah, so I think one of the interesting things that was kind of funny. I think I almost didn't get employed here. I was driving around to Hanford kind of I was a little bit familiar with it because I'd come up here for sporting events and stuff. I went to Hoover High in Fresno and so I remember going to like it's taco's El Grillo now, but it used to be a Taco Bell. I remember going to Taco Bell there. So I was a little bit familiar. I was familiar with the wonderful smelling water and so I was driving around a little bit before my interview to get acquainted with the. You know the surroundings and those lights that are downtown that are off to the side wasn't really used to those. I ran a red light and I was like I'm looking around but oh my gosh, what if I'd gotten a ticket right before my interview with Hanford Could have changed the whole course of my life. Uh, chief to cure was the one that hired me and it was kind of interesting. When I was in the interview with him in the chief's office where I'm at now. He one of his questions I still remember he goes where do you see yourself here? And um, I told him I go. Well, your seat looks pretty good. I was completely joking. I am not that arrogant, nor did I even think I was going to be the chief. I just I was just thought it was funny and we laughed about it. And then we carried on with the interview and I was eventually hired by by Hanford um, just like um all Hanford officers, I started out on patrol and then I uh was promoted to corporal in about about 2002 or so I'm probably a little off on my date, so don't don't exactly pull me on and then I was a corporal for a couple of years and, um, I put in for sergeant. Um, the first time I put in it was actually I'd only been a corporal for a short period of time and I remember I walked out of that interview as the worst interview I've ever done in my life. I did so bad, like I completely bombed the interview and uh, I was like well, wasn't ready yet. And so the the next time they they came around for interviews for a sergeant, I actually got the sergeant position and I was a sergeant for a couple of years and then I promoted to lieutenant. And I was a lieutenant for almost exactly one year before I promoted to a captain and then I was a captain for eight or nine years and then I've been the chief for eight years. So a vast majority of my time has been on the management side of things, which has been good and bad. I mean, like if I was to ultimately like look back in my career and think, you know, if I could just do it how I wanted to do it, how would it be, and that I would have been on patrol much longer, oh for sure I just. I mean, that's why I got into this line of work was because of that direct contact that we have with people and I love that and I still miss it to this day just being able to be that first responder out there and on their worst day and trying to help them through whatever problems they're having. And I still get to do that on a scale, on a smaller scale, and now but now my service is much more directed towards officers, giving them the stuff that they need to make sure that they're successful so that they provide a good quality service to the community.

Yeah, so under your term you've actually had some really good successes with programs. I think of the police activities league, some of the other things you've done for the youth and community outreach. What are some things that you're especially proud of that you've been able to tackle through your time here?

Those were huge. Um, I think we pretty much only had the um explore program prior to um, you know, for a long time. Um, and we had the dare program which Mark Dylan did, the dare program. He was super awesome at it. But every once in a while it's nice to kind of change things up a little bit, to kind of fresh in things. So when Derek, when Mark finally retired, um, we went to, uh, I think it was a great program which did well. And then, uh, we went to our Pal program, which is our police activities league, and we've kind of kept our explore program through the whole thing. And our explore program is is super awesome. They do such a fabulous job. And and I actually had the, the Boy Scouts of America call because the explorers are part of the Boy Scouts, and the local, the rep for California, called me because during COVID everything was all messed up and he goes hey, we need you back. You know on our, on our roster. And I'm like, okay, well, you know what do we got to do? And he goes man, you are the number one explorer program in California.

Yeah, I see, I've seen the trophies and all the articles.

They do a great job. They do and our officers have done an outstanding job, and so now we're prior to now we're just starting to get back into that but we've also actually been able to greatly expand the services that we're providing to the youth. Some of the things that we're doing now is we have our junior explorer program, which services a fourth and fifth graders, and those are after school programs. You know, latchkey kids, perhaps a little bit more at risk. But the school district just liked it so much that now we're expanding it for two more years as well and that'll be a great feeder into our Explorer program. And on the junior Explorer level they kind of do things. We kind of train them a little bit on what cops do, but it's obviously they're much younger kids, so we kind of make it kick Taylor towards them and we talk about drug prevention and we run them through obstacle courses and we get to meet a bunch of different officers and find out what our favorite donuts are and all of those things, and probably we'll be close to two to 300 kids that we're doing each year into that program now and then our Explorer program, obviously that we know about that we just talked about. It's much more designed towards somebody who wants to be a police officer later on in life, and so they have competitions where they do things that a police officer does out in the field. So they'll do felony car stops, They'll do sexual assault investigations, and these are all mock investigations that they perform and then when they go to the competitions, they're asked to perform those in front of tenured officers who are rating them on how they do, and they offer them. We've had numerous kids get small scholarships and laptops and besides, all the trophies that they've won, and that's been really, really successful for us. So we are probably at last count, which was a number of years ago we had I think 30 to 35 of our Explorers have went on to become police officers and that we probably have a half dozen of them at our agency right now.

Yeah, at the last city council meeting I think some of them were actually penned right.

Yeah. So it's been really successful just to bring in recruits here and then also to just helping the youth out. And then we also expanded into our boxing program and so the boxing program we've run about. I think right now we're at about 55, but we can usually hit up to about 70. And it's girls and boys. And we have the building that the city was, that we were able to purchase with city funds on the Nat Old National Guard Armory, and that building is that's pretty awesome building and we've done a lot inside. We have two boxing gyms, we have a full gym with workout equipment, we also have our canine field there, we store armored vehicles there and we have our shooting simulator and stuff for the officers. So we use it for a lot of different things and that program's been hugely successful. When we partnered with Hanford Boxing Club, they were working out of a chicken coop at the fairgrounds and so this is a huge upgrade. In fact, ruben tells me he goes he's only seen one gym in California that's better than the one in Hanford and that was sponsored by Monster Energy Drinks and had like a huge LED TVs everywhere. And I'm not sure we want to get like that. Those guys don't box, they're too posh. So it's been good and the kids love it and they're not charged for anything. One of the a really good compliment I received we were doing a boxing tournament here at Pacific. I believe it was Jason Brazil, who actually used to be a police officer here, but he was a principal at Hanford L after he retired from there From he didn't retire, sorry after he left Hanford PD to become a teacher and he said that kid right there that's boxing. Right now he goes. I came to see him. He goes until he joined your program. He's the worst kid in my school and now I don't have any problems with him and that's what we're trying to do is mentor those kids and help them. We don't charge anything for any of the services that we provide and a lot of the officers donate a lot of their own time and energies to making sure that these things are successful. One of our officers is now starting it's we had the trainers coming down October. It's gonna be the Powell Mountain biking team and so we're starting out with about 10 or 12 riders and volunteers from the PD and we're gonna go to mountain biking tournaments. It was funny when I proposed it to the city. We obviously have the kids insured and all that, but for sure they were like I don't know, that sounds really dangerous. Like well, right now I have 55 kids hitting each other in the head all day and they're like that's a fair comment. And you know, I think one of the great things is about these programs as well is it's not just the PD and the city paint. The city has super supported us, but they really don't have to contribute a lot of money now. They do contribute some, and obviously overtime for officers and some of our staff time, and they all purchase buildings and they've just redid the parking lot and so the city has invested in it as well. So they've been awesome, but the community has bought into these programs.

Yeah, they certainly have. If I could. You know, as the top cop you've had to have been administrator over an entire department of the city and I know that the police can get the headlines, both good and bad, and there's, you know, there's tragedy and some stories, and can you think of a particular challenge or a time during your tenure here that you really felt it was upon your shoulders to kind of lead the department through the particular situation?

Yeah, there, I mean there's been a lot of like critical incidents that I can think of. There were some that have you know, personally affected me, where I just it was very difficult to handle, and I think we've developed a good resources for the officers to get through those processes. And, like some of those is is our peer support program. So now we have officers that that run this peer support program, that when we have a critical incident they'll respond out and talk to the officers and we kind of pull admin out of it so that they feel more free to talk it openly. We also have the city's employee assistance program and then we have a new app that we just rolled out about a week or two ago where they can access all these resources. The officers can just from their phones and if they need, like they're having an issue with anxiety, they can click on articles about anxiety or contact our our mental health counselors for them to talk to, because I don't think it's it's. I think one of the things for me is this the our officers see a lot of bad stuff and it's not reasonable to assume that these bad things are never, are not going to affect them in their future, and we don't want officers to just be to come out of this as a damaged person. We want them to be better people when they come out. So we provide these additional resources for them to access them and so they can come out, hopefully, better people. One of the things I'm really proud of that we implemented was and probably one of the only departments that do it around here that I know of is we. Every single officer at the Hanford Police Department talks to a counselor every single year and so it's required. It's not reported back to me. They can talk about football for the guy with the counselor for an hour, and I initially, when I had this idea running through my head and I talked to my admin about it, I was a little worried. I was going to get some pushback from the officers, and I was. What I was trying to do is destigmatize that it's bad to talk to somebody, and I got I've gotten no negative comments from the officers. The only negative thing I received was our first counselor that they were talking to the psychologist. The officers were coming back saying and I love this guy to death, so if he hears it, know that I love you. They said he talks too much and we want to talk, and so that was awesome to hear. So we changed to a different provider and they seem very happy about it, and we do it from the chief on down. So I personally have been interviewed several times. Yeah, that's so important, yeah, and it's just, I think, a lot through those things, I've just learned that you just have to do your best to which I'm not always good at, and so I have to rely on my cap, stephanie and James Lutz and the other people that let me know hey, you need to look at this, these things closer, because I've been a pretty unemotional person for a lot of my career and so I can't take that's not how everybody is and so they'll tell us they're like, hey, so, and so just had to do CPR on a baby, and so we'll like, okay, then we'll run them through the different things. So it's important that all these officers work together to come up with, to help each other out and to make it through this occupations as unscathed as we possibly can. I've had to do a lot of really bad things. I mean, we had to arrest an officer once and I remember I was the one that put the handcuffs on him and that's that's not a fun thing to do, but that you have to hold people accountable. And if we believe in accountability on the criminal side, we have to believe in accountability on the police side as well. Exactly, and so you know, I think one of the toughest things I probably went through was my cancer, and although it wasn't like a crime or anything, I know it greatly affected the PD as well. And this is going to sound a little bit strange, but I have a lot of fond memories of going through cancer. I had stage four colon cancer, so I had to. I think Dr Chow well found out later. I was trying to stay away from all those stats but I had about 5% chance of living. I had seven tumors, one of my colon, six in my liver, and I had nine surgeries and chemo and I came to work most of the time. I don't think I was supposed to, but you know it was. You know the officers, just I think they kept me alive. I mean just being able to, you know, not be at home, thinking about passing away, but being at work and being able to contribute as much as I could and then knowing how much they actually cared about me and then knowing how much the community cared about me and that was huge towards my recovery and it also made me a lot more of an empathetic person prior to what I was before. And so I often think I often wish I was the type of person that I am now, prior to cancer, because right now I think I'm a more patient person, I think I'm a better father, I think I do a better job of, you know, caring about people's feelings and stuff than I did in the past. Not that I was uncaring, but I definitely. It was kind of funny throughout my career I'd get the two complaints that I was either mean or I was. Either, you know, or I was laughing all the time, and laughing is my go-to response. I was just gonna say that, yeah, that's my but. But likewise, if I was on a traffic stop and I knew I was gonna write a ticket, I wasn't mean. People could say, is that? But I didn't get into conversations with people, I just walked up to the car and I'm like you know, how are you doing? My name's Officer Savra. I pulled you over for speeding. I needed to see your license, registration, insurance and I was very professional and to the point, because I knew that if I stopped started talking to these people I would become their friends and I wouldn't write them a ticket and unfortunately our officers have to. I mean, if I told the officers, you know, we kind of frowned upon it. Yeah, it's part of their job and there's a direct correlation between writing tickets and injury accidents, and so to keep people safe, we have to write tickets and we, you know, we write about 5,000 a year. But our officers don't like write, like writing tickets. I mean, like if I told officers, hey, never worry about writing tickets again. You know how many tickets I've received the next month? Zero. And so it's just, they have a job to do and sometimes that job just isn't very fun, and so we try to make the best of it. In whatever, you know, we're dealing with different personalities, so I would either get that I was a jerk or I was laughing. I'm like what polar opposites.

So you're in the process of packing up your stuff and moving to be closer to your family and you'd tell us a little bit about this move and what you're looking forward to.

So I was set to retire, no matter what, in January, february of 2025. So just over a year from now and it could have been, you know, up and down depending on where Perz is, my retired, our retirement system and I made that commitment to my wife. She wanted to be in Utah and we'd be. So we'd been looking for a property and things and housing up there, preparing to move. In a year I've been starting to work on my house to get it ready for sale and stuff, and as we were doing that, it came across that that Hebrew city was looking for a police chief and I actually initially didn't even put in and I let it expire and in 27 years I've never applied for a single agency, not one time. So this is the only place I've worked or tried to work. And so then they extended it and my wife goes hey, they extended that position and she goes I think you should put in for this. So I ended up putting in for it and obviously I've received the position, but I told my wife I go. You know, I I love being a police officer. I don't necessarily like California politics right now I love California. I think it is the best day in the union. We have everything. We got the ocean, we got the, the mountains, we have the desert, we have the valley, we have everything here. It's just some of the politics, especially in relation to the police side of it, is very challenging and it's been difficult for us to get our heads around a little bit. And so I was like, man, if I can, you know, retire here and then go to Heber and still continue doing what I love, because I'm going to get a job there, no matter what, I'm I'm still young. So in a year from now I'm going to get a job doing something. But if I can still be a police officer for a longer period of time, I'm like, oh, that would just be awesome. And then my sister got a, her husband got a job there just a couple of weeks ago, so they're moving there and my daughter lives there, and most of my nieces and nephews, and so we were just like, yeah, that's, that's a good, a good home base for us to be. And I say home base, but, man, I, whenever I come back to Hanford, I think that's going to end up being home. S diese faire un impact. Jareis que on츠� par s'en Patrick.

Yeah well, Parker, on behalf of my listeners and on behalf of the people of Hanford, I would like to thank you for your service to the community and we wish you and your family the very best in your future endeavors.

Well, thank you. It has been a blessing for me to serve here for 27 years, or close to, and then I've just I've loved the officers I've served with and I've loved the city of Hanford. It's just been a fabulous place. I never considered leaving because I never wanted to. The city has treated me well. The community has been so supportive to me throughout the years. It's just unbelievable, and I couldn't have asked for a better place to start, an end my career.

Well, that's all the time we have for today's show. If you'd like to join the Hanford Insider email list, send a subscriber request to HanfordInsider at gmailcom. Help me get the word out about the show by liking and sharing on social media or telling a friend For more information about the show. You can find this podcast on Facebook, instagram Threads and YouTube at Hanford Insider. If you have a show idea, be sure to email me at HanfordInsider at gmailcom. Thanks for tuning in. Have a great week.