Special to IFN

If you want to commit a crime and get away with it, Mooresville isn’t the place to try. That’s the reputation the Mooresville Police Department has achieved since Ron Campurciani became the town’s top cop five years ago.

But the atmosphere at MPD today is a sharp contrast to what it was when Campurciani took over as interim chief on June 17, 2019.

He recently sat down to reflect on the last five years — and he spoke candidly about where the department was when he arrived and where it is today.

LOOKING BACK

When Campurciani was home in Massachusetts and saw a post about an open interim chief position for a police department in North Carolina, he had no idea where the department was located or how desperately it needed steady, compassionate leadership.

Mooresville’s then-police chief had been suspended, and a months-long investigation into the MPD’s working environment eventually led to the demotion of two senior command staff members. Morale was low, and officers were trying to process the tragic death of one of their own, K9 Officer Jordan H. Sheldon, who was killed in the line of duty on May 4 of that same year.

Like any good first responder, Campurciani didn’t run from the chaos and turmoil in Mooresville — he ran toward it.

‘They hadn’t gotten to grieve yet’

Campurciani’s first day on the job was spent with the investigators conducting the MPD probe. On day two, he changed department policy, requiring two officers at every traffic stop, primarily in response to Officer Sheldon being alone when he was killed during a routine stop on N.C. Highway 150.

“Would Jordan still be alive with that policy in place?” Campurciani said. “Probably not. But maybe the guy who did it would have at least thought twice.”

The chief remembers the sullen look on officers’ faces during his first days in Mooresville.

“They were walking into walls, expressionless,” he said. “I quickly realized they hadn’t even gotten to grieve yet.”

Mooresville officers were sent home for a period after Officer Sheldon was killed. Other law enforcement agencies stepped in to run MPD in the meantime.

“Sending officers home is the worst thing to do,” Campurciani said. “The police department is the place they could go to be around people with similar thought processes. Instead, a guy you love dies and you’re told to stay away from your place.”

The interim chief had been in Mooresville just a couple weeks when he arranged to meet with Officer Sheldon’s family. Then he organized a get-together outside of the MPD for Mooresville officers and their spouses.

“I was here too late to help them with the grieving process, but they needed to know where I was coming from,” he said.

A 39-year law enforcement veteran, Campurciani came from West Springfield, Mass., where he was police chief and executive director of the Western Massachusetts Police Chief Association.

“I know cops,” he said, “but I didn’t know the culture down here at the time,” he said. “I remember telling everyone at the family get-together, ‘Here are the ground rules: There are no ground rules. You can throw chairs, fight and scream if you need to. But we’re gonna do it together.’”

One of the officers’ wives emailed Campurciani a day or two later, saying that night was the first time in two years her husband had slept through the night.

Last year Campurciani received the N.C. Police Executives Association’s Keith Bull Police Executive of the Year Award. Someone from MPD nominated him, and that’s what made the award special, he said.

“They trusted a guy from the north when they had no trust left, and that’s a pretty big deal. They had hope — even on the darkest days, hope is there — but trust is hard. It has to be earned. They had to figure me out, and there was no pushback,” he explained.

‘I knew I had to stay’

“By August or September, you could see an uptick in the department,” Campurciani recalled.

Still, he wasn’t Mooresville’s chief — he was only temporary until the town found a permanent replacement for the previous chief, who had resigned amid the MPD investigation. WSOC aired a report announcing that Campurciani would be leaving Mooresville in 60 days.

“The next day, everybody came into work deflated,” Campurciani remembered.

He encouraged officers, reminding them that changes he enacted in MPD promotional processes meant officers would be in a better place than they were before. “They all said, ‘But you’re leaving,’ ” Campurciani recalled. “It was so palpable, seeing all the lost faces.

“That’s when I knew I had to stay. The last thing they needed at that time was more change.”

In December, Campurciani accepted the town’s offer to become Mooresville’s police chief. He called the six months at MPD leading up to that “the honor of my lifetime.”

Organizational restructure

While still interim chief, Campurciani transformed MPD’s organizational structure from a pyramid — with a chief on top, a deputy chief and two majors underneath him — to a “flat structure” with a chief and three assistants.

“It spreads out decision-making authority,” Campurciani explained. “Before, everything had to go through the chain of command. If a person at the top isn’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing, it’s like an upside down drain — everything gets clogged.

“The tall structure wasn’t working here at all,” he said. “The department wasn’t big enough for it. We flattened everything out and pushed the decision-making down,” and now, he said, even corporals — not just top cops — make big decisions.

Technology and growth

Campurciani has embraced technology to make MPD more efficient in fighting crime. Predictive policing, for instance, uses five years of the town’s existing data and algorithms to predict crime trends.

“It’s not foolproof, but it puts us in areas where statistics show we have problems,” the chief said.

An investment in Flock Safety security cameras has yielded quick results. The cameras are placed all over town and scan license plates, immediately alerting MPD if a car or plate is stolen and if a vehicle is registered to a wanted person or if it may be tied to a missing person.

“This has been a game-changer for us,” Campurciani said, crediting Flock cameras for recently leading MPD to a group of criminals that had stolen more than 30 cars in the area.

The Flock cameras also help officers predict where a fleeing suspect will go in a chase, allowing officers to use stop sticks ahead of the vehicle.

Of the agencies that use Flock cameras across the nation, “Mooresville is in the top one to two percent of the company’s recoveries, including guns, drugs and stolen cars,” Campurciani said.

MPD also designed a Real Time Crime Center (RTCC) in its new building.

“It allows us to see on a bank of television screens all the town cameras, and if businesses and HOAs want to give us access to their cameras, we can add theirs, too,” Campurciani said. “Essentially, nothing will move in this town without us seeing it.”

The department also overhauled its body cameras and dash cams.

“We used to spend four or five hours a day downloading body and dash cam footage and burning disks to send to the DA’s office,” Campurciani said. “Now, we can send a direct link to them.

“I’m always trying to project four or five steps ahead,” he said. “We’ve had all these ideas, but we’ve had to wait for the right time, people and equipment to move them forward.”

THE FUTURE

Looking ahead, the chief said MPD is adding two detectives and a supervisor to work nights.

“We get a lot of gun calls at night, and these guys can start on crime scenes earlier and call on cases after business hours so we get more resolutions,” he said.

Campurciani also added a full-time traffic unit to MPD two years ago. “All they handle is traffic; they don’t take any other calls,” he said.

In this year’s budget, he will be adding “civilian traffic investigators,” made possible by state legislation last year that allows employed citizens to handle minor traffic incidents involving no injuries or automobile damages.

“Mooresville gets 10,000 of those minor accidents a year, and most of them happen Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.,” the chief said, adding that the new positions will free up two officers per minor incident to handle other matters.

Thanks to a COPS grant, MPD is also adding a satellite department at Mitchell Community College’s Mooresville campus. Four cops will be assigned to patrol the downtown area on foot and bikes.

“These guys will look out for the night crowd at the bars, etc.,” Campurciani said, “and then they’ll move on to outlying areas like Liberty Park.”

The future of policing

A lot has happened to policing in recent years. While law enforcement once had a mandate to handle crime and disorder, “the country as a whole has let the disorder part go, and they’ve wanted us to sit back and let it happen,” Campurciani said. “America has to decide what it wants from us.”

He said he applies a business acumen to local policing.

“People come here to buy their home or start their businesses or both,” he said. “They’ve invested their money to be here, and we need to do our part to return their investment by keeping them safe.”

Bigger cities, however, often choose to ignore lower-level crimes and give away certain areas of their cities, Campurciani said.

“Mooresville has decided what kind of community it wants to live in, and we’ve decided we don’t want to live like that — we don’t want to give sections of our town away,” he said. 

‘We’re going to disappoint you’ sometimes’

Sometimes, things go wrong, and the chief isn’t shy about admitting it.

“We’re going to disappoint you from time to time,” he said. “But when that happens, we handle it swiftly and we move on.”

Campurciani has put measures in place at MPD to intervene early if he feels something is off with an officer. An internal system tracks sick time, use-of-force issues, car wrecks and more.

“We track all of the metrics so we can jump in quick and save somebody if we need to,” he said. “We’re all human. We don’t want to lose someone solid if they’re just having a human moment.”

He has also added a mental health professional to the police department. “She devotes 10 hours a week to our guys, and the guys are going in to see her voluntarily,” he said. “It’s making a difference.”

Policing in Mooresville

Obviously, as the town grows, the number of crimes will go up, too, Campurciani said.

“That’s going to happen, but we’re not going to write off areas like bigger cities do,” he said. “I have a different philosophy, and it’s a philosophy shared by the town, the board and the manager: If you let areas go, they don’t come back. Businesses leave and don’t come back.”

Because of the pro-police sentiment in Mooresville, officers want to work at MPD.

“We’re in a good position,” the chief said about MPD’s ability to attract and retain officers during a time when other departments across the nation are struggling. “We turn away more applications than we take. We don’t have to take a warm body. We can be selective.

“I’ve never seen a place like Mooresville, where it’s firing on all cylinders,” said Campurciani. “The town board has never said no to me if we need something, and the community appreciates us — they give us cards and food,” he said, adding in jest: “Thank you for my third pair of pants since I’ve been here.”

The town manager recently appointed Campurciani as assistant town manager. While he’ll continue to serve as police chief, he now also leads E-911 communications, building, permitting and inspections and facilities and asset management.

Campurciani said he looks forward to working alongside new Town Manager Tracey Jerome, and he knows the community will benefit from her leadership.

“She is very pro-police, and she gets where we’re going and where we have to go,” he said. “She puts verbs in her sentences. She’s not just talking through it. She’s moving it forward. She knows we’ve changed the culture in that PD, and the town will catch up under her.”