Last summer, Wilmington City Council unanimously voted to hire Ryan Zuidema as the new chief of police. Zuidema, who beat out a long list of candidates in a national search, came to Wilmington with nearly 30 years with the police department in Lynchburg, Virginia, including seven years as chief.
Back in Lynchburg, he served as an adjunct professor at Liberty University’s Helms School of Government, and sat on the board of several organizations, including the Jubilee Family Development Center, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Virginia, and the Bedford County Public Schools Safety Advisory Team.
Zuidema was hired at a challenging time for the Wilmington Police Department, which was facing internal issues with morale and staffing, and public pressure to address homelessness, downtown crime, and youth violence.
With a year at WPD under his belt, Zuidema said he felt “encouraged.”
“It's definitely been a very busy year for me, learning the people and the places and all that, but I think what I've found is it's a great community first and foremost,” he said. “A lot of really dedicated men and women serve WPD here. So I’m very encouraged by all of them and the direction the organization's going.”
Staffing
Zuidema came to Wilmington as the police department was hitting a significant staffing shortage. That’s been attributed to a host of issues, including lagging salaries, internal tensions, and a broader cultural shift that had left many officers (and potential officers) feeling unhappy with the job of being a police officer, and a fractious, even antagonistic relationship with the communities they were policing.
He said there’s been “some progress,” but acknowledged staffing is “still not where we need to be.” WPD had reduced vacancies from “somewhere in the mid-40s” last year to 32 as of this week. Zuidema credited the City of Wilmington’s “historic investment in public safety” in the recent budget. He noted that improved compensation policies have allowed the department to recruit more lateral transfers from other agencies.
“I can turn a lateral officer around a lot quicker than I can a brand new officer,” he said. “[It’s] bout a month and a half for a lateral officer versus about a year for a new person that's not done this job before. So I’m encouraged by that as well.”
The struggle to recruit and retain officers isn’t unique to Wilmington, although Zuidema did note that it takes “a different type of police officer” in an urban area, like parts of Wilmington. He also noted that WPD is “a little picky.”
“It's got to be somebody that I know that at 2:00 in the morning, when I'm asleep, that they're making the right decisions out there on the side of the road when nobody else is looking,” he said.
Youth violence and downtown safety
Over the last five years, community advocates, nonprofit leaders, and those in the criminal justice system have all discussed the evolving problem of youth violence. It’s a complex issue, and many agree it won’t be resolved by law enforcement alone. And, even when numbers are trending in the right direction, that can be cold comfort when violence claims the life of a young person – like the 14-year-old boy shot last week on Dawson Street, who later died from his injuries.
In general, Zuidema said WPD obviously plays a role, “but we have got to get engaged and involved with these kids at a much, much younger age, right? Some of these kids, by the time they're in their teens, are out involved in stuff that they shouldn't be involved in.”
He noted studies linking early childhood education to the chances of being incarcerated.
“So it's something as simple as — my mother was a librarian, and I can remember her reading to me as far back as I can,” he said. “And I'm not saying that's the only key to success in life, but studies will show you that those kids that are reading on grade level by the third grade are much more likely to stay out of the criminal justice system. So we've got to engage these young men and young women at an earlier age, and that takes a whole community, right?”
Zuidema said a good example of WPD’s preventative role is the every-other-weekend program at the MLK Center.
“A lot of these young men and women are growing up with either a parent at home or no parents at home. In many cases, we've got a grandmother who's, you know, in her 70s trying to raise two teenage boys, right? And raising kids is a young person's game for sure, having done that myself a few times,” he said.”I think we've got to come together as a community really to try and address these things before we get calls for a 14-year-old that was shot and killed.”
Discussing violence more generally, Zuidema pointed to “a couple of incidents that made [that concern] rise right to the top in a pretty short period of time.”
“There’s always what I would call the ‘error of recency,’” he said. “I would tell you overall that downtown, much like the rest of this community, is a very safe community.”
Still, he acknowledged, “one violent crime is too many.”
Downtown is a particular challenge. Not surprisingly, one major factor is alcohol.
“Some of our challenge downtown, very bluntly, is the number of ABC permitted places that we have here. If you do your research and look at it, per capita, we lead the state in the number of ABC permits per capita in this city. And many of them are congregated in a very small four- to six-block radius downtown, and when all of those places are at capacity and all dump out onto the street at 2:00 on a Friday night into Saturday morning or Saturday night into Sunday morning, it's very challenging,” he said.
Zuidema added that, with every downtown establishment at capacity, that can look like 6,000 people — many significantly intoxicated, and likely difficult to reason, within a square mile area. He said he makes an effort to actually be downtown during this frenetic and potentially dangerous time, rather than just making suggestions from his desk. That first-hand look helped cement why finding the right officers, with the right temperament, for working at last call can be tough.
And, while Zuidema said WPD puts considerable resources, along with the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office, into policing downtown, there are 51 other square miles to serve, as well.
WPD tries to work with bar owners, Zuidema said, noting recent training from ALE (the state alcohol law enforcement agency) on best practices, although it reportedly did not get much engagement.
Homelessness
Last year, the city went through a series of high-profile and sometimes tense debates about how to handle the issue of unhoused people congregating downtown. City council ultimately passed an anti-camping ordinance, seen as an ‘anti-homeless’ law by critics, and an important move to protect downtown businesses and patrons by supporters.
Council’s decision ultimately included a promise to work on a new homeless shelter, as well as adding four social workers to WPD’s staff, to help officers deal with homeless people who, in many cases, aren’t breaking the law but do need help accessing resources for substance abuse, mental health, housing, and other issues.
Zuidema said three of the four positions have been filled, and they’re working to get up to speed and figure out the best way to deploy them.
“So, trying to match work schedules with call volume, trying to educate officers on how we can best utilize them, because the reality is when our officers go to a lot of the calls they go to, many times we're not going to crimes,” he said. “We're going to nuisance-type behavior, which is very common for some of the homelessness issues we deal with. And being homeless is not a crime, contrary to what some people think.”
Zuidema added that his department would absolutely arrest homeless people if they’re committing a crime, but that the goal is to “get to the root cause of what’s going on.”
“They're either dealing with some mental health issues or some substance abuse issues, or a combination of both, right? A police officer is not going to solve that problem in 5 or 10 minutes that they talk to that person. But that goal of the social worker program is that they'll be able to hopefully kind of dig down a little bit deeper with those individuals, figure out what resources they truly need, and get them connected with those resources so that we're not coming back over and over to the same place for the same individuals,” he said.
As for the anti-camping ordinance itself, Zuidema said, “I don't know that it's had a significant impact, honestly, one way or the other. I'd have to pull numbers to see how many times that has or hasn't been enforced. Anecdotally, I will tell you that I don't know that it's been a game changer, so to speak.”
He added that, “certainly it's another option for officers to use when they've exhausted all the other options.”
Thoughts on Flock
Following intense public pressure, New Hanover County recently ended its contract with Flock Safety to provide 20 automated license plate readers, though the company is still providing other surveillance cameras — and there are still many other cameras operated by state authorities and private businesses.
WPD does not operate Flock cameras and doesn’t have formal access to the Flock network, although officers can ask other law enforcement agencies that do have a Flock subscription (or other ALPR system) if they could run a search.
Zuidema said the goal was balancing the power of the technology with guardrails.
“You know, what I'll say is this: the technology, whether it's Flock cameras, whether it's AI, whether it's a combination of any of those things, I think we'd be remiss as a police department in 2026 if we weren't exploring how we can use technology and leverage technology to be more efficient, more effective as a police department, with the caveat of having guardrails in place for that stuff before we start using it,” he said.
He also said the law was not keeping up with the ferocious rate at which the technology is evolving.
“Both the local, state, and federal laws, as well as the court systems, have not even remotely come close to keeping up with it, right, in many cases. So, I think we've got to look at any technology to leverage as long as it's being done right and it's taking into account all the concerns that people have — because, you know, people have some valid concerns,” he said. “But I'll also tell you some of that technology is incredible technology that could save someone's life. It could find a missing child or a missing elderly person, right? It could solve a homicide. It could do some great things. We just got to make sure we have the right guardrails in place before we use it.”
Department morale and public relations
Zuidema took over WPD at a tense time, on the heels of clashes between former chief Donny Williams and a number of high-ranking officers. There were strongly divergent narratives about what exactly the core issues were, but it was clear that morale had suffered. The city spent over $100,000 on third-party investigations and consulting in an attempt to get a handle on the situation. After Williams retired, at least one officer was fired, allegedly for distributing coins with the former chief’s photo and the words ‘I survived Donny Williams’ on one side, which violated WPD’s code of conduct and the city’s policies on harassment (the city confirmed the officer was fired, but wouldn’t comment on whether the coins were the reason).
To say the least, it was an open question what kind of workplace environment the next chief would inherit.
And, to be fair, there were issues that went far beyond anything unique to WPD. Officers frequently told WHQR that the relationship between the police and the community, always potentially tense, had gotten worse over the years. Some pointed to calls to abolish or defund the police following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, other at increased media scrutiny of bad actors, which they felt disproportionately misrepresented officers in general.
There are still criticisms of law enforcement, especially after shootings like the one that killed 21-year-old Edilberto Espinoza Sierra (which, following an SBI investigation, did not result in any officers being charged). More recently, the shooting of 35-year-old Rodney Wilson prompted questions; Wilson was hospitalized, and the incident is still under investigation. And there’s still media coverage holding officers accountable when they violate their policies or the law.
But, recently, some in law enforcement have said the tension has dissipated somewhat. And, overall, Zuidema said he felt morale is improving.
“You know, cops are a challenging bunch, the nature of the personalities of those of us that get into this line of work, but I would say overall morale is improving,” he said.
He again credited the city’s investment, adding that “money doesn’t solve everything,” so it was important to invest in professional development and listen to officers.
“We’re getting ready to roll out an advisory committee inside the department, where we'll have folks from across the agency, both sworn and non-sworn, and throughout the ranks, to be able to sit down with some of the senior leadership here, myself included, on a regular basis to be able to express concerns, suggestions, thoughts, things like that,” he said.
The department is also looking at uniforms. As Zuidema noted, “they were these things 12 hours a day, if not more [...] and I’ll tell you, polyester isn’t always the greatest thing for that in an environment where it's 90-plus degrees for several months at a time.”
As far as the tensions under the past administration, Zuidema said, “I think we're in the process of moving on from that.”
“You know, I'm not naive enough to think that there may not be some folks that still feel that way, but what my focus is is not on the past, because there's nothing I nor anyone else in this organization can do to change the past. Regardless of whether it was good, bad, or anywhere in between,” he said. “What I can do is focus on the present and the future, and that's where my energy and my effort are going.”
Zuidema said that he felt the profession has rebounded from the ‘defund the police’ moment.
“I think folks — regardless of political affiliation, and unfortunately a lot of times it's driven by that — realize that there is a need for law enforcement,” he said. “I think if you look around the country at some of the places that really truly did defund their police departments, they – shockingly – saw the crime rates go through the roof. Like, who could have predicted that, right?”
And, on the scale of his three-decade career, Zuidema said the relationship between the public and the police is “headed in the right direction.”
“You know, I came into the profession not long after Rodney King took place, what I would call a lower point in law enforcement. There's always going to be ups and downs,” he said, noting the surge in support for law enforcement a decade later, after 9/11, when “law enforcement was seen overnight in a very different light than it was the day before that.”
Zuidema said it remained important to be accountable, and that the department doesn’t get to “operate with anonymity.”
“We are responsible to the public. That's who gives us the trust to do this job, and we've got to be responsible and accountable to them,” he said.
