Announcement

Longtime Ocean Pines Police Chief Massey to retire, next month

Monday, July 13, 2020

(July 14, 2020) Ocean Pines Police Chief David Massey plans to retire as of Aug. 1, after serving the local community for 46 years, including 17 in Ocean Pines.

Lt. Leo Ehrisman, who has more than three decades of police experience, will be promoted to Chief of Police.

Massey was born in nearby Easton. His father, Marion, was an infantry sergeant with the U.S. Army during World War II and landed on Omaha Beach during the Invasion of Normandy in 1944. His mother, Armistice (Amy), was a corporal in the British Army. The couple met at a dance and had their first child overseas, in England.

“Both my mother and my brother are naturalized Americans and I’m the one who was born in the United States,” Massey said. “My mother was born in Bagalore, India, because her father was one of the chief engineers of the Kolar Gold Fields. She didn’t really come back to England until right before World War II.”

Massey’s mother served during the infamous “Blitz” bombing raid of the United Kingdom by German forces in 1940 and 1941. She was formerly engaged to a British Royal Air Force pilot who was shot down and killed during the attacks.

After the war, Massey’s father worked in the newspaper industry, often with his youngest son at his side.

“I grew up on his lap,” Massey said. “He ran a linotype and was in ads and everything. So, I always believed freedom of the press is the most precious commodity that we have in this country.”

First stop, Ocean City

Massey did not immediately go into policing, but instead attended Salisbury University, then called Salisbury State Teacher’s College. He planned to be a schoolteacher.

“We were of pretty modest and humble origins. We didn’t have a lot of money, so I went there,” he said.

After college, right around the end of the Vietnam War, Massey said full-time teaching jobs were hard to come by. Instead, he took a long-term substitute job at a private school and a summer job as a seasonal police officer in Ocean City.

Hired in 1974, Massey climbed the ranks from corporal, to lieutenant, to sergeant and captain. During that span, he helped lead several notable projects, including the introduction of computer-aided dispatch, and creation of SWAT and quick-response teams.

Sixteen years after being hired as a temporary worker, Massey became the Ocean City Chief of Police.

“I was the first chief that started as a seasonal officer and came all the way up,” he said. “Ocean City had a history of promoting chiefs from the outside, but the elected officials said, ‘We’ve trained these guys – there should be somebody from the department to take it over.’ And I was lucky enough to get selected.”

Massey compared policing in Ocean City to being “an old sheriff in the Wild West.”

“The old sheriff’s job was to keep a lid on it and that’s what it is in Ocean City – peace and disorder,” he said. “I was pretty tough as a chief, but, because of that, the first year the serious crime rate went down 10%.”

Crimes in Ocean City, at the time, ranged from assault and drunk and disorderly, to the occasional stabbing and, on rarer occasions, homicides.

“With 200 alcohol establishments in the town and 30,000-40,000 high school and college graduates coming down and being away from home for the first time, you can imagine the kinds of problems we had,” he said.

Massey led the Ocean City Police Department for just over a dozen years and was able to make steady improvements, including earning the department a second-in-the-nation ranking in reducing the availability of alcohol to minors. He also earned a master’s degree during that time and taught at nearby police academies.

Policing in Ocean Pines

With an eye on pursuing his doctorate in teaching and continuing in that profession, Massey retired from policing around the turn of the last century and “swore [he] would never get another police job.”

“Then, this job [in Ocean Pines] suddenly became vacant and it was the only place that I would go and be a chief, because of the nature of the community,” he said. “This is real community policing and it’s a great community – people wave at you and are very pro-police.”

Massey said Ocean Pines at the time (around 2003) was considered a “special police department,” meaning it did not fall under the Police Training Commission and other regulatory bodies. He quickly sought to change that.

“They were basically given limited authority on the property only and they weren’t regulated as tightly as certified police,” he said. “In 2005, I got a bill passed by the Maryland Legislature, with the help of our local representatives, to get us certified. We are now co-equal with any other police agency in the county, and that’s a matter of pride and it’s a matter of professionalism.”

He also created a criminal investigation division, for Ocean Pines Police detectives.

“We’ve worked very hard to solve any kind of major criminal activity – burglaries, assaults and things like that,” he said. “One of the reasons I believe we’ve kept crime low and the community very safe is our immediate investigation of all ‘part-one’ criminal offenses. There’s not many major crimes – assaults and domestic violence – that we haven’t solved by being proactive and going after criminals.”

The main difference between Ocean City and Ocean Pines, according to Massey, is the stable population. However, that population also comes with its own set of challenges.

“In Ocean City, 95% of the people are tourists. If we had a major crime, it could be the suspect is from Pennsylvania, the witnesses are from Delaware, and the victim is from Virginia. We had to solve crime immediately, because tomorrow they might leave town.

“Here [in Ocean Pines], you have a family that lives here year-round, we know the kids, and the officer has learned who the family is and who the troublemakers are,” he continued. “The good thing is, we don’t have the alcohol-related problems I had in Ocean City – but we have family problems.”

That often involves domestic violence.

“Domestic violence is an equation of people and we’re the largest year-round community [in Worcester County], so we’re going to have more domestic violence,” Massey said. “Our community police officers here are dealing with family issues: drugs, domestic violence, domestic disputes, and there are also a lot of mental health issues in the community, because nearly every family has someone with a serious mental health issue.”

To help combat that, Massey said Ocean Pines Police officers all receive crisis-intervention training.

“That deals with mental health, how to deal with people that are disturbed, and how to calm them down. But, there is a certain percentage of people that are not going to be calmed down. They’re either on drugs or have a history of violence, and they’re the ones we have to arrest,” he said.

Other times, he said, Ocean Pines Police are called for minor issues that many big-city police officers would avoid.

“For instance, ‘My father is here in Ocean Pines by himself and he fell out of bed.’ A police officer will go and help him back in bed. Or, ‘Someone locked my keys in the car, can you help us?’ We do little things like that, but they mean a lot to the community,” he said.

Massey said he’s long sought to build a better relationship between police and residents, starting with building a better police officer.

“Today’s police officer is generally better educated, better trained and better equipped than when I started,” he said. “And my credo to all the young officers is, treat everyone with dignity and respect.”

He said that cuts both ways, and it’s important for people in the community to also respect law enforcement.

“If you don’t teach your child to respect the law, respect your teacher, respect authority … it’s very hard for the police to come in and change someone’s opinion,” he said.

Ocean Pines traditionally ranks among the safest communities in the State of Maryland, if not the entire country. Massey said that’s partly because of favorable demographics and partly because of good policing.

“We have a good population of people that respect law and order. We also follow up religiously on criminal offenses,” he said. “We’re much better than when I started in following up and solving cases, because we’ve given our guys a lot of training. So, it’s a combination of things.

“You can judge me on the crime rate – I said that in Ocean City and I’ve said that in Ocean Pines. My job is to keep crime low and to make this an attractive place to live,” he added.

Building a legacy, literally

Among Massey’s many positive achievements in Ocean Pines, perhaps none were as important to him as the police station expansion that began last year and is set to wrap up within the next month.

For years, Massey has spoken publicly about the previous quarters, widely considered too small and too unsafe to meet the demands of a modern police force in a community of 8,542 homes.

“The old police station was not designed by criminal justice experts. So, it didn’t take into consideration some of the safety concerns of our officers,” he said. “We had a prisoner once who basically pulled his handcuffs out of the wall and ran out the back door. We later ended up catching him after a dragnet of two days.

“The facility that we’re getting ready to open – thanks for the Board of Directors and our General Manager – is state of the art, it’s going to be high security and it’s going to provide for our citizens for many, many years with a safe environment for police officers and a safe environment for them,” Massey continued. “It’s going to help our criminal investigations, and everything will meet state guidelines, which we didn’t meet before. I’m very grateful, for all of that.”

Along with helping to oversee the expansion, Massey saw no small amount of adversity during his final months as Ocean Pines Police Chief. It was a singular year, from the once-in-a-century COVID-19 pandemic, to the brutal murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis Police Department officer that played out on televisions worldwide and helped spark global protests.

“It’s been very challenging,” Massey said, first of the pandemic. “We’ve handled some minor offenses over the telephone, but we still had to go to calls. There were a lot of domestic disturbances. Because people are confined together, sometimes they have problems getting along and we’ve had to deal with that.

“People have to understand, [Ocean Pines] is a microcosm of society – we have good people and we have bad people,” he continued. “Unfortunately, we recently had an incident where the KKK came in and threw down some [racist literature], as the cowardly people that they are. But it didn’t stay in our community, because we have a very good community and our people rose to the occasion.”

Massey expects an eventual return to normal, but said police need to learn from the pandemic in order to be prepared for whatever comes next.

“Once this is solved, I think we’ll be better prepared for the next thing, just as after 9/11 police officers learned to talk to each other and communicate better. I think a lot of positives will come out of [the pandemic], because we’ll be better prepared for the next event,” he said. “Still, it’s going to require the participation of the people in honoring the guidelines and, unfortunately, we have some people refusing to do that.”

On the fallout after George Floyd, Massey said that led to a conversation with his police officers, similar to one he had just after the Rodney King incident in 1991.

“I did a training session on the use of force, from the chief of police to all the officers. And I told them these are our guidelines and, if I see any of them do anything like that, I will fire you and have you criminally prosecuted,” he said.

“Leaders need to show where they stand and what they’re willing to tolerate. When I see a lot of departments where they have bad officers I ask, ‘What is the leadership doing?’ The officers need to know what is permissible and what is not permissible, and they need to know if they violate that there are consequences,” Massey continued. “Officers are looking for leadership and consistency. And people – whether they’re African American, Caucasian, or Asian – they want to be treated equally and treated with respect. I’ve never had problems here, because I’ve treated everyone with respect.”

Time to travel

On the decision to retire now, Massey said after more than four decades of police work, it was just time.

“I’ve spent 46 years where I’ve worked every Fourth of July and every summer,” he said. “I want to go to Normandy and see where my dad landed. I’ve never been able to get out of the country long enough to do that, because I’ve always felt my responsibility was in my community.

“I plan on having a punch list, with my wife, to go visit some places around the world, to go back to England and see where my mother grew up, those kinds of things,” he added.

Massey also plans to continue writing, having already penned one police textbook, as well as to continue teaching.

“I’m going to be working part-time and on my own terms, but you just know when it’s time,” he said. “I’ve always said a chief’s job is to leave the department better than you found it. If you can say that, you did your job. And I feel like I’ve done my job.

“I originally felt that last year I was going to retire, but I wanted to fight for this new building, and I said I would stick around until it’s done. It’s just about done, so I’m punching that list too,” Massey added.

When he’s not traveling, Massey, who just turned 70, said he would stay in the area.

“I have a piece of me in Ocean City and a piece of me in Ocean Pines,” he said. “There will always be a place in my heart for the communities that I love, and I was fortunate to be in two wonderful communities.”

He has high hopes for Ehrisman, his successor, who will bring a wealth of experience to the position of chief of police.

“Lt. Leo Ehrisman has put 34 years in the community. He spent three years with me, where I sent him to every administrative school, and I tried to impart my knowledge,” he said. “He truly is one the best criminal investigators I’ve ever been exposed to in my life. So, he’ll impart that knowledge to those below him, and hopefully Leo one day will train his successor.

“One thing I must compliment Ocean Pines on, is that for the last 34 years they’ve only had two chiefs of police. And a big reason for that, is we were able to keep out of the politics,” Massey continued. “And I thank the Board of Directors and the general managers for keeping that consistent, and I pray that we continue to do that in the future.”