by Mary Frances Cassidy
I sat down with Apex Police Chief Ryan Johansen to discuss his first year in command. As a retired law enforcement supervisor, my eagerness to conduct this interview was inspired by preliminary research indicating the chief appeared to be an innovative, outside-of-the-box thinker unwilling to accept conventional, outdated management practices no longer effective in today’s policing environment. Our discussion more than confirmed my first impression. He’s a dynamic leader who prioritizes the well-being of his department’s members over his own personal success. I have worked alongside police executives for many years and found Chief Johansen to be undeniably unique. He’s a visionary, possessing a vast understanding of public safety and police culture, with a proven track record of affecting positive change.
SL: As you approach one year of service as chief of the Apex Police Department, what were the greatest professional adjustments you had to make coming here from San Bruno, California?
Chief: Well, it’s a 3,000-mile move, about as far as you can move and stay within the country, to a very different culture, community and policing environment. Practically speaking, policing in North Carolina is very different. I’ve had to deal with things like jurisdictional limitations. We don’t have those in California. If you’re a police officer, you’re a police officer anywhere in the state. Here, I have to be careful about my officers going outside of Apex town limits, so there are practical difficulties.
But I think the biggest challenge has been that I’d been a police officer in California for over 20 years and I had a lot of contacts. I had been in the county I was in as chief for almost 20 years, so I had a lot of people I could call on — a trusted inner network, because as a chief, you’re not going to know the answer a lot of the time. People think you will but it’s not always the case. It’s different here where I don’t immediately have this network of folks I can call on. Frankly, I didn’t know anybody in the law enforcement circles here. So, it’s been a little bit of a challenge starting from scratch.
SL: How are you finding cooperation here with other local departments and their chiefs?
Chief: Everyone’s been very kind, gracious and eager to offer help. Many of them have reached out proactively, and anytime I’ve reached out, they’ve been really quick to help me navigate some of the pitfalls from being out of state.
SL: On a personal level, how has the adjustment been?
Chief: Honestly, the adjustment has been mostly positive. This was a deliberate move for us. I was born and raised in California, and it was very good to me and my family. But we’ve been ready to be out of California for quite some time. It seems in many ways that the state has lost its way, and mostly I’m talking about values that are important to us.
One thing my wife and I noticed right away, is that when you’re out and about in North Carolina you see multi-generational families everywhere. When you go out to eat, you see multiple families that have a small child all the way up to grandparents seated at the table eating dinner. You hardly see that at all anymore in California. The family unit being the center of the community has just eroded, and we weren’t in alignment with the values system there. So, in that respect it’s been an exceedingly positive move for us.
SL: Police work carries an emotional weight most people will never experience. From the very beginning of your tenure, you’ve been vocal about prioritizing both the physical and, specifically, the mental health of your officers. How has the department taken steps in that direction over the course of the past year?
Chief: Well, I think the heavy lift that’s hard to quantify in normal terms is the culture shift. I’m acutely aware of the fact that to bring a true focus on mental, physical, and emotional well-being in an organization, especially a policing organization, requires a culture shift. The officers were understanding of the need, but what I found very quickly was that to change the culture, you have to create a safe environment for them. And for better or worse, that’s not what this was.
We did not have cops who felt necessarily free to make mistakes, free to go out and do this very difficult job knowing they would be backed by a supportive administration that understands the job is difficult. They didn’t feel they were working in an organization focused on their development and well-being. It was more evaluative. I think they felt they were constantly being watched and the reason was to simply be caught making mistakes, and that brings their very livelihood into question.
At the end of the day, people sometimes forget that what we do is still a job in the way that we put a roof over the heads of our families and food on the table. If these officers feel threatened all day, every day, there’s no amount of emotional wellness programming that will have an impact.
They have to believe in their administration before they’ll believe that any of those programs are actually in their best interest. I think that’s been the biggest shift over this year and it actually happened faster than expected. I’ve noticed a very big change in the building where I think people here know that this administration, the town administrators, and the community support them.
So, the step I’m most proud of this past year is their willingness to embrace trusting new leadership, despite my doing a lot of things that are very unorthodox. I’m definitely not a status quo type of a police leader and I want to change the way we’re doing things. We’ve conveyed in pretty short order that if you’re an officer here, you matter most. My job is to create the best environment possible for you to be successful, not for you to make me look good, and we’ve got enough of the staff believing that to where the programs we’ve instituted are actually having an impact.
Emotional wellness is very important, but physical wellness is the foundation. If you’re in poor physical health, it’s very difficult to be in good emotional or mental health. But when exactly are these officers supposed to stay fit in the way we’re asking them? They work 12.5 hours a day. Between that and the fact that most of them can’t afford to live here — they’re all driving some distance to get home. I need them to work out while they’re here. Coming in, I made it very clear that not only was PFIT (physical fitness) time allowable, it was to be prioritized by supervision. Meaning, even if non-priority calls for service, cold paper reports, etc., need to be on hold so an officer can maintain their physical wellness, we need to make that sacrifice. Every shift, the supervisor conducting roll call coordinates when each person is going to use their PFIT time. So again, culture. If the culture prioritizes wellness, then they’ll prioritize it in their day-to-day activities. We’ve also expanded it to professional staff, and that’s had a really big impact.
The other piece, the emotional or mental health space that I hold a very strong belief in, is that existing structures don’t work for cops. And that’s really hard to explain to people who aren’t cops. When you talk to HR or the town’s administration, the view is: Well, we provide all these EAP programs; there’s tons of support for cops. And they’re right, yet the cops don’t use them. In my last jurisdiction, over a 10-year window, we had exactly zero use of any EAP programs by a police officer. Not one single time, despite all the reasons why there should have been. We had officer-involved shootings, officers go down in the line of duty, SIDS cases — all the terrible things cops should be seeking therapy for, yet not a single one did. There, we partnered with BetterHelp, a company that creates an online, completely confidential portal, with 24-7, 365-day-a-year support from a professional.
I reached out to them asking if they could set up a private portal for a police department that’s walled off from the city, human resources, and from the pension program, and create a token number for every one of my personnel to get therapy whenever they want, and I’d just pay the bill. To BetterHelp’s credit, they said yes, and we made it happen. I had no admin database to see who was using it, or how often. We went from zero uses of EAP over a 10-year window, to more than 75% of the department having actual therapy sessions within the first 60 days.
SL: That’s incredible! So, they clearly need it.
Chief: Right! And better yet, contrary to the narrative that it’s all stigmatized in policing, they knew they needed it. We just weren’t giving them an actual platform that would work for our culture. The police have their own culture. We’re deathly afraid of being labeled as a mental health risk. If I have to face the possibility of losing my job to admit I’m struggling with something on the job, I’m not admitting it, ever. Now, suddenly there’s a platform where they really understand there’s no way for it to come back and bite them, ever. You have the true privilege of a therapist and that relationship.
The general sentiment in Apex is no different as far as EAP goes, so we’ve launched the same program here. We’re only about 45 days in, but with very similar results. Many of [the officers] are using it and it’s been a complete game changer. By engaging in therapy, they’re being exposed to different ways of thinking, and a better understanding of how the cumulative traumas of the job are impacting their personal and professional lives. We’re finding it feeds all of the other programs and is creating a much healthier organization as a whole.
SL: That leads to my next question. It’s clear the department is benefitting from these programs but how do they translate into a benefit for the community? Is it safe to say that officers who are better equipped to do their job can perhaps understand their victims a little bit better, or be more empathetic in a given situation?
Chief: That’s exactly right. I’ve been doing this job for quite some time, and I don’t know that I’ve ever uncovered an act of officer misconduct that, if I had the opportunity to really dig on the cause, didn’t come back to some significant personal or emotional baggage that officer was dealing with. You don’t come to policing as a bad person. It takes a special person to say, “I’m willing to take on all of this and go help a bunch of people I don’t even know.” So, if down the road, you’re making horrible decisions and behaving poorly, it’s probably the profession that’s done that to you. It’s changed you.
Creating an environment instead where cops understand the job is really difficult and the only way for the community to expect a cop to be as perfect as we’re expected to be, is to have them at their best as often as is humanly possible. Cops aren’t robots. We have some training and I think you have some special people coming to this job because they’re very altruistic and want to help others. We’re not immune to all of the same impacts any human is, yet we put them in really difficult, complex social scenarios and expect them to perform at a very, very high level, and when they don’t, we act shocked. That’s a broken system.
Even in a place like Apex, which is a non-violent, peaceful community, there are still people suffering and the cops are directly experiencing that suffering every day. I don’t think the public always realizes that. Some people do, but in general, the thinking is, “you’re a cop; it bounces off of you.” So as far as community benefit, the only thing we can do is optimize the percentage of time an officer is spending at their best, knowing that physical fitness and emotional wellness are what impact that ability.
SL: Transparency in policing has become increasingly important, especially over the last several decades. What does transparency look like in the Apex PD?
Chief: Transparency is always a heavy topic because it’s been on the tip of our tongues for so long now, and I think it tends to become very programmatic. We stand up dashboards that show our crime stats, release statements whenever there’s significant police activity, we don’t hide from misconduct, and we have open procedures for filing complaints. All of those things are in place here, but they’re in place almost everywhere. Real transparency comes down to culture, and it starts internally. It’s interesting when we tell cops the expectation is for there to be transparency out in the community, but oftentimes inside the organization, we show very little to the cops themselves. So, we do everything we can to be very transparent internally with things like internal investigations, promotional processes, appointments, etc.
SL: How do you ensure the Apex community clearly sees those actions in practice?
Chief: I’m looking for cops to openly share what’s going on. I’ve tried to push towards releasing more public information about the police work going on in Apex. If you look at our social media presence prior to my arrival, it’s almost all wonderful stuff, but all community building, and I think there’s a huge place for that, showing we’re a part of the community — we’re not different from you. But we’re beginning to post, for instance, if you saw eight cops last night out on 64, you probably want to know why. My view is you deserve to know why, even if it’s not great news. The community has a right to know the core information about what’s going on in town. It enables them to better protect and harden themselves against becoming victims if something’s going on. So, we’re trying to be a bit more transparent, without creating alarm, about the fact that Apex has grown a lot and there is crime here.
SL: Apex is one of the fastest-growing towns in North Carolina. What are the biggest public safety challenges that come with that growth, and how is the department adapting?
Chief: The biggest public safety challenge is traffic. Numerically, there’s just no arguing that point. If you get hurt in Apex, it’s far more likely to be because you got into a vehicle collision than it is that anything happened to you violently.
It’s still a very, very safe community from a violent crime perspective. We do have some significant increases in property crime that just simply tend to work in tandem with population increase. You have more potential victims, so you have more potential crimes — mostly motor vehicle break-ins or larceny shoplifting cases associated with our shopping centers. The good news is that we have the resources and the bandwidth, because it is a pretty safe community, to take those things on directly. We work in lockstep with the loss prevention officers at our big retailers to ensure we’re communicating with them when theft is occurring and we’re putting together good cases the district attorney can prosecute. We send the message: Not here in Apex. If you’d like to do that, go elsewhere.
I will say that we’ve seen a considerable decrease in the number of motor vehicle break-ins, and I attribute that to a significant increase in proactive policing that’s occurred over this last year. When I came on, one of the data points I shared going through the interview process is that the town had seen about a 75% increase in injuries on the roadway from crashes. Not so ironically, it had also seen about a 75% decrease in proactive traffic stops by police officers during the same timeframe. But people don’t necessarily think that way.
We’ve had a very steep increase in proactivity over the last year. We’re making sure people know that improper driving is reasonably likely to exact some sort of a penalty or consequence. We’re not yet seeing the same level of decrease in injuries on the roadway, but we are seeing them slowly subside — not as much as we’d like, but we are seeing massive decreases in other crimes of opportunity.
Motor vehicle break-ins are a crime of opportunity, and they usually occur at night. If you came into Apex a year ago, at night, thinking about breaking into cars, you could probably drive in from out of town, pull into a neighborhood, break into eight or 10 cars, then go back to wherever you came from with your loot. Now, it’s going to be pretty tough for you to drive through Apex if coming from out of town and not see some blue lights. It’s a discouragement for crooks to commit crime; that’s just the way it works. The productivity is helping us to stay on top of it, but the two biggest issues that we’re encountering are petty theft and roadway injuries. It’s going to be a steep climb for Apex because we’ve seen such massive increases in traffic in a short period of time.
SL: Where do you see the biggest opportunities for growth and improvement within the department?
Chief: I think regional cooperation is going to be the holy grail of the future for the entire area. I do understand that we have some jurisdictional limitations but there are ways to work within those limitations and still address crime that we know is regional.
I’ll give you the example of auto theft: The vast majority of our crime is committed by people in stolen cars. People think cars get stolen for joyriding or chop shops, but that’s not so much the case. They get stolen so you can commit crime with relative anonymity. Say we get a series of motor vehicle break-ins tonight; they will almost certainly have been committed by someone who does not live in Apex, who came here in a stolen car. But that car wasn’t stolen here either.
If our only jurisdictional authority is in Apex, our ability to impact that crime of motor vehicle break-ins is minimal. We’d have to hope to stumble onto it right when it’s happening to catch people in the act. Whereas a regional effort to address auto theft would help us to curb all of the crime associated with auto theft throughout the entire area.
So, the greatest opportunity for rapid improvement in the public safety spectrum across the entire region would be to pool our resources a little bit better.
My observation in the first year is that you have some very, very dynamic, forward-thinking police executives here — and I will count Chief Boyce of Raleigh among them, without question — that can change the way policing is done here, because they’re open-minded and willing to share. That presents a radical opportunity.
The other opportunity for growth would be technology. We’re never going to be able to afford having enough cops to keep everything safe, but technology can multiply how much a cop can do. So, a real-time crime center for all of Wake County or even Western Wake would be a no-brainer.
SL: We’ve discussed the mental and physical health programs that you’ve established and how they benefit both your officers and the public, but what’s something about your officers or the department’s culture you wish more residents understood?
Chief: This is the easiest question ever because Apex is honestly quite unique. As a police chief, one of the things that’s really hard to do is indoctrinate police officers with an attitude of service, where they really understand it isn’t just about you being the tough guy with a badge and gun who runs in as the superhero. Service in a community like Apex means caring — a lot — about every problem the community brings you and really wanting to solve it.
Coming in, my thoughts were how do I get us there? How do I get us to this place? Well, it was completely unnecessary. This place understands service at a level I couldn’t even comprehend walking in the door. Genuinely, the people here feel very much a part of the Apex community. The cops do not see themselves as some occupying force going out, acting upon the community. I’ve had to do absolutely nothing in that regard. Your problem is a big deal to them, and they will go to the ends of the earth to try to solve it. The vast majority of officers here have blown me away with their sense of service.
It’s very special and it’s very real here. It’s in their DNA — it really is.
