Cpl. Dave Leonard retires from MH Police Department after 30
years
Morgan Hill – Morgan Hill Police Cpl. Dave Leonard is retiring, and it’s hard to say what his fellow officers will miss more: his calming influence, dry wit, knowledge of gangs or the overall experience, gleaned from his more than 30 years on the force.
“All that homegrown knowledge and expertise, it’s just irreplaceable,” said MHPD Sgt. Dave Myers. “With Dave, it’s the whole package: the ability to calm most situations; the ability to talk to a wide variety of people and relate to them; the skills for listening to people, and the ability to relate to them and care about them. With Dave, what you see is what you get.”
Leonard will be honored at a retirement dinner Thursday night at the Morgan Hill Community Center.
Although he has faced challenges all through his career, Leonard’s training as a negotiator was particularly put to the test this year, as Morgan Hill’s SWAT team was called out to respond to several tense situations.
“What I like about it is that the whole goal is to make sure no one gets hurt,” Leonard said. “Your job is to slow everybody down, to take everything down a notch or two. You really don’t want it to get to the point when SWAT comes in …. The strength I’ve gotten from this over the years is that I’ve calmed down.”
Leonard’s boss, MHPD Chief Bruce Cumming, said though an officer has been hired to replace Leonard, “you can’t replace that level of experience.”
“I’m sad and I’m happy to see Dave retire,” Cumming said. “I’m happy for him, of course, and to spend 30 years in law enforcement, that’s quite an accomplishment.
But he takes an enormous amount of experience with him. it’s hard to replace that.”
Leonard also has a quality, Cumming said, that “is extremely valuable for all police officers.”
“Respect is something that is paramount for me,” he said. “With Dave, it’s always there. He is respectful of other employees, people in the community and also the criminals he comes into contact with. That’s the mark of a good police officer.”
Leonard actually started with the department when he was 14 years old as a cadet. After high school – he graduated from Live Oak when it was still on what is now the Britton Middle School campus – he went into the Navy, then joined the MHPD as a reserve officer in 1971. He was sworn in as a regular officer in May of 1976.
“One of the biggest changes that I’ve seen over the years is the size of the town,” he said. “Although there’s still that small-town feel, as some people like to say, really we’ve felt all the growing pains. And the nature of the city has changed, too, from a more rural focus.”
A big problem that officers used to see regularly revolved around a certain bar, Leonard said.
“I’ll not name names, because it’s still in business today, but every weekend, at least once over the weekend if not more, we’d get a call over the radio ‘officer needs assistance.’ The folks at the bar would be drinking, and I guess they couldn’t stop drinking and go home until they had a fight, too. They wouldn’t just fight themselves, though, they’d take it out on one of us.”
Now, Leonard said, there may be more problems related to drugs and gangs. Cumming said Leonard was the department’s “gang expert,” and his leaving, particularly with the spate of gang activity this fall, would leave a hole in the department.
“To fill that hole, Dave has worked with Officer (Mindy) Zen to draw up a sort-of gang plan,” Cumming said. “We can draw on that, and on experiences others in our department have had.”
The plan, Leonard said, is “basically a strategy on how to identify gang members.”
“And hopefully some public education as well, to let people know these people do exist. You don’t have a wannabe gang member. To me, they’re either they’re a gang member or their not. I look at it like this: You have a baseball player, a guy that’s on the team, and you have a guy that wants to be on the team. The other guy, he’s established, and the guy not on the team wants to be recognized by him. The guy not on the team is as dangerous, if not more, as the established guy because he’s going to do something to get himself noticed.”
As he does with others in the community, Leonard treats gang members the way he would want a member of his family treated.
“I’ve talked to gang members, have a fairly good rapport with them. I’m not going to disrespect them. We both have a job to do. You have to operate from that aspect of it – don’t make them less then human. I treat people the way I want to be treated or my family to be treated.”
His respect for the dignity of others, along with a judicious sprinkling of patience, helps him to keep his perspective when people get upset with him as an officer.
“People think our department is run like the department on the show ‘Adam 12,'” he said. “That there’s always more officers, and if we run out, we can just get more from San Jose. They don’t know or it doesn’t sink in that we would love to have an officer for every one of those cars in the lot that people point to. Or about jurisdictions. Eighty percent of the time you see the ugly side of life, and you see people who want everything fixed now, but you can only offer a Band-aid.”
To his own son, who was thinking about going into law enforcement, Leonard said the advice he gave him was: “Be a fireman. Everybody loves a fireman.”
But his son also became an officer.
Leonard has not only had occasion to mentor his son, but many young officers on the force every year.
“Most all of us, we think we’re going to walk in and save the world, but what I learned real quick is that the world rotated a long time without you changing it,” he said. “There are things you can change, you can make a difference, and so do that. Do the best you can, you can always be honest.”
