WILMINGTON — The Wilmington Police Department’s new chief, Ryan Zuidema, is one month into his position leading an agency recently entangled in internal struggles; he told Port City Daily he’s forward-thinking and focusing on collaborative initiatives to expand the WPD’s capacity for building a safer community.
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“Certainly one of the biggest priorities is our staffing, trying to get our staffing numbers back up, especially on our sworn side,” Zuidema said Monday.
In early September, the WPD reported having around 200 to 210 of its 280 officer positions filled. While the department has a full-time recruiter, Zuidema noted he was advocating for each officer to be the WPD’s spokesperson. Officers also receive a bonus for bringing people on.
However, the WPD has not received the most glowing reputation as of late, particularly among its own officers. In the fall of 2024, the city manager hired a third-party firm to investigate the complaints and some issues raised around bullying, harassment and intimidation; some of the reports were sustained.
Following the investigation (which the city refused to release to the public), the North Carolina Police Benevolent Association conducted a survey of 115 of the 249 officers — 73% said the environment was poor, 90% said they feared some level of retaliation from leadership when filing grievances, over 80% said the current promotion process is unfair, and over 90% said they were unsatisfied with the police department’s internal operations and executive leadership.
And while the city did increase pay and implement an up-to $25,000 sign-on bonus for lateral transfers this year, the WPD officers have been advocating for more competitive wages over the last few years. The survey showed more than three-quarters of officers said they were unhappy with pay and compensation, with 90% of officers agreeing that short-staffing threatened their safety and ability to service the community.
Chief Zuidema said he had done his research on the WPD’s recent struggles and noted it was important for him to understand in order to shape a new standard for accountability.
“The reality is, regardless of what’s happened here in the past, neither I nor anyone else can change that,” Zuidema said. “What we can do, though, is we can all focus on where we’re going to go together as a team moving forward.”
When it comes to the new standard, Port City Daily asked if Zuidema foresaw it taking a large mindset shift among officers.
“I think it’s just fine tuning more than anything and helping folks start to focus on the future and all the great things that I think we can do collectively here as a department in this community,” he said.
The chief said he structures his leadership around the ABCs — accountability, officer buy-in and collaboration. The third component is huge, Zuidema said, both internally in the form of work groups and externally with other city departments and the community at-large.
Two new collaborations Zuidema has been saddled with are tackling two hot-button issues about town — homelessness and youth violence.
The Wilmington City Council voted unanimously to approve a “social worker co-responder model” in September. Four social workers are to be embedded within the Wilmington Police Department, to be deployed on officer calls to homeless individuals.
Zuidema said the positions have been posted with the anticipation of hiring them in time for the new year.
PCD asked the chief how the WPD social workers would interact with the Getting Home initiative, a joint collaboration between city officers and New Hanover County social workers to connect people with homelessness services. As revealed in August, the county moved their social workers to a caseload model focused less on finding new clients on the street and more on navigating a current client list through the homelessness continuum of care.
Zuidema said he envisions the two groups working together.
“They’re going to end up dealing with some of the same people periodically and we don’t need to be duplicating the effort,” he said.
Zuidema said his goal would be for the WPD’s social workers to examine the “real underlying core issues” contributing to someone’s homelessness, connect them with the resource most suited to address their need and then follow-up to ensure they’re on the right path. As the chief admitted, that’s a hard task in a city without enough resources to go around.
All shelter beds and permanent supportive housing are routinely full, with homelessness providers reporting the lack of affordable homes in the city is contributing to the bottleneck of people within the homelessness continuum of care. The most recent figures show $1,427 is the average one-bedroom apartment rent in Wilmington.
However, the Wilmington City Council recently passed an ordinance banning camping, sleeping and other related activity on city property, leaving the WPD to enforce the ordinance often without the ability to give someone experiencing homelessness another place to go.
Zuidema noted most of the response to homeless individuals is going to happen because the WPD received a call, not because officers were patrolling to arrest someone.
“If we’re getting called and they’re technically in violation of something, 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,” Zuidema said.
He added the first rule he conveys to officers is to treat someone humanely. Coupled with the social workers, officers will also be able to ask someone to move and connect them with someone that can help get them in the housing system, even if shelter doesn’t come immediately.
When it comes to youth and gun violence, Zuidema said he’s also been working with the Community Justice Center as it moves to ramp up its youth violence sector.
Based on a nationwide model picked up by New Hanover Community Endowment funding, the Community Justice Center opened in September 2024 to serve victims of both youth and intimate partner/domestic violence. As reported by Port City Daily, the center has yet to fully launch its youth violence approach, though the grant has been covering three district attorney positions to focus on related cases.
The goal is to bring in youth offenders, often involved in gangs, and their families to connect them to conflict mediation, take guns out of their hands and, instead, arm them with resources to target the root cause of violence — poverty, mental health struggles, lack of opportunities. Thus, multiple services would be housed together to promote the holistic approach, including nonprofits, law enforcement and possibly even the school system.
Port City Daily asked Zuidema for his vision of the WPD’s role in the CJC; he said he hopes the earlier the group could collectively intervene, the more lives could be saved. He also hoped the CJC and the community at-large could identify positive role models for the kids at risk of being sucked into violence.
“There’s so many young men in our community that grow up without a male role model,” Zuidema said. “We’ve got to have a strong, positive role model in their lives.”
The community component of policing is key to Zuidema’s philosophy.
“Part of my role as a police chief here in Wilmington is to bring people together, both internally in the department as well as in the community,” he said. “There’s oftentimes a lot of folks that are doing great work in the community that might not be aware of other folks doing great work in the community, maybe even on some of the similar topics. And so instead of everybody kind of doing their own thing separately, we want to bring them together.”
Zuidema said he encourages people to reach out to the WPD to talk about issues important to them, crime-related or not; he also said he’s instructing officers to introduce themselves and chat with people when on patrol.
“The more we can build those one on one relationships, I think the better off we’ll be,” he said.
Tips or comments? Email journalist Brenna Flanagan at brenna@localdailymedia.com.
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