On August 19, Wilmington City Council unanimously voted to appoint Chief Zuidema as the next chief of police for the Wilmington Police Department.
Zuidema moved to the Port City after nearly 30 years with the Lynchburg Police Department in Virginia, including seven years as chief.
Back in Lynchburg, he served as an adjunct professor at Liberty University’s Helms School of Government, and served as a board member for several organizations including the Jubilee Family Development Center, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Virginia, and the Bedford County Public Schools Safety Advisory Team.
Now that he's heading up Wilmington's police department, he says his first priority in Wilmington is addressing WPD’s staffing shortage — and filling the remaining vacancies depends on the culture he wants to cultivate.
Back in 2023, the department was budgeted for 270 positions, but at the time only had 229 deployable officers. Currently, WPD has a total of about 263 sworn officers out of the 281 positions the department is authorized to have, according to reports.
“I tell all of our officers that, you know, they're, they're our best recruiters,” he said. “Because if we're doing a really good job of retention, we don't need to do as great a job of recruitment once we get our numbers back up.”
Another priority is rebuilding trust within the community — and the department.
Last year, WPD underwent an internal investigation into allegations of harassment, bullying, and intimidation brought against former police chief Donny Williams. At the time, Williams denied any wrongdoing and pushed back on his critics, but surveys and interviews indicated morale was low, and the investigation and subsequent consulting cost the city over $120,000.
Zuidema said he won’t let this blip in WPD’s history dampen the work he plans to do now.
“What I can't do is just dwell on that forever, right? And I need to help set a new standard for Wilmington PD, and help my folks make sure they understand what that is,” he said.
He plans to do that by setting a clear standard for all WPD staff, and by creating a culture of accountability, which he says doesn’t have to be a negative thing.
“We win as a team, or we lose as a team, but we're going to do it together,” he said. “We need to do an equal job of recognizing the great work our folks are doing and also holding our people accountable when, you know, they maybe don't follow our policies or our procedures or live up to our standards.”
Zuidema wants to move on so the department can address problems that vex our community the most — like homelessness.
Greater focus is placed on the homeless now that the City has passed a public camping ordinance prohibiting certain actions like sleeping and camping on city-owned property, mainly sidewalks and parking decks.
Enforcing the policy can be a double-edged sword for law enforcement, Zuidema said. It requires care since many people who are homeless may also be in need of mental health services, while at the same time prioritizing the safety and quality of life of all people who live here.
“There's certain behaviors that we certainly don't want in our community, and that's regardless of whether it's a homeless person committing them or someone who is not homeless,” Zuidema said. “And so, yeah, the fine balance there, from a police standpoint, is what we can't be is ‘the we don't know what else to do with them, so let the police deal with them.’ That's not a solution by any means.”
But Zuidema understands that the police are obligated to address disturbances no matter who commits them, he just wants to do that in the “least restrictive way possible to start.”
The goal isn’t to have officers arrest as many people as they can, Zuidema said. He wants his officers to focus on the disruptive behaviors people are committing rather than the mere fact that a person may be homeless and connect them to services as best they can.
“In many cases, we're going to ask them to move on to somewhere else if they can, especially if we're getting calls for that,” he said. “But again, I think in those situations, there's a lack of beds right at the end of the day.”
As Chief, Zuidema looks forward to broadening the agency’s relationship with the people and organizations already serving the homeless population, because he knows the police are not always going to have all the answers.
WPD has a homeless outreach team that works with these groups already, but In addition to that, the hiring process for four new social workers who will pair up with officers in the field will begin in the next month or so.
This co-responder model has had success in departments across the country. According to the Council Of State Governments, the Boston Police Department fielded over 1,000 mental health calls through their co-response team between 2011 and 2016. Of those calls, only 9 resulted in arrests.
Though Zuidema knows it’ll take the department some time to adjust to the new model, he hopes their efforts will start to chip away at the underlying causes of these types of calls.
“The idea isn't just to continue to Band Aid things,” he said. “In a true co-responder model, if my staff was dealing with you today, they provided you with some resource, you hopefully took advantage of it a day later, two days later, three days later. They're going to try and follow up with you and check, ‘Hey, did that work?’ Because the idea is to stop the recurrence of calls.”
This all ties into his overall goal of building collaboration between WPD and the community.
So far, he’s been contacted by local schools and nonprofits to start building those partnerships. One is the Community Justice Center of New Hanover County, which already connects victims of crime to a whole network of service providers, including law enforcement. Not to mention, the department’s ongoing youth outreach efforts through their Police Athletic League (PAL) program.
“Law enforcement is a unique profession that, you know, we see every corner of the city, inside and out, and some of the folks that we work with may not always see other things that are going on. So we can play kind of that role of connecting the dots,' he said.
Involvement in these partnerships are crucial to repairing trust in WPD, Zuidema said. That, along with transparent conversations with community members, despite socio-economic status or race, he said.
“We don't always do a great job of explaining the why behind what we do,” Zuidema said. “So, sometimes it's taking that little bit of time to help people understand this is why we're in your neighborhood, this is why we're doing this, and give them a little bit of context for that.”
“I think that helps with that trust piece quite a bit,” he said.
