Hometown Healer

His resume reads like an ABC of police work. Or maybe an encyclopedia.

Anti-Violence Crime Unit, Baton Instructor, Criminal Investigations, Evidence Control, Hostage Negotiator, Organized Crime Division, Polygraph Examiner, Pressure Point Control Tactics, Special Operations, Spontaneous Knife Defense Instructor, Street Supervisor, Traffic Unit, Undercover Officer.

The list goes on.

Bobby L. Cummings is a graduate of the 206th session of the FBI National Academy, a member of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement, and a proud veteran of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. He has earned numerous professional awards and held positions of leadership throughout the Wilmington (Delaware) Department of Police.

“Everything that I dealt with on the street as an officer were things I had experienced in my own life … My mother had very little schooling. We were on welfare. We moved through many different areas of the city. So I understood the environment I was dealing with as an officer, and I could relate to a lot of the situations.”

For years he watched the credentials accrue, and he hung some of them on his office walls. But he always felt that there was one missing.

“I had been policing for 13 years, and I was training new recruits,” he says. “I had certificates on my wall for being a physical fitness instructor, a polygraph examiner, and a bunch of others. But I didn’t have a college degree on my wall. I said, ‘I have to finish this up.’ ”

At the urging of his wife Simone, Cummings—who by then was a lieutenant—applied to Springfield College Wilmington, completing a Bachelor of Science degree in 2002 and a master’s degree in human services with a concentration in organizational management and leadership the following year.

Those degrees opened new doors, and, in 2014, after almost 30 years on the force, Cummings was appointed chief of police in Wilmington, a city that aspires to livability but that has also been ranked among the most dangerous municipalities in the United States, a characterization Cummings disputes.

His experience at Springfield College has been one important catalyst for his success, but another critical part of Cummings’ education was informal: growing up poor in the city he now serves.

“Everything that I dealt with on the street as an officer were things I had experienced in my own life,” Cummings says. “My mother had very little schooling. We were on welfare. We moved through many different areas of the city. So I understood the environment I was dealing with as an officer, and I could relate to a lot of the situations.”

Cummings was born in Millen, Ga., in 1963. When he was three years old, he moved with his mother and siblings to Delaware, where they lived with family, including his uncle and his grandmother, who he describes as the family matriarch. They lived all over Wilmington: in Little Italy on the West Side; in the Riverside housing projects on the East Side; in the West Center City neighborhood, near where I-95 crosses the northernmost tip of Delaware on its route from Miami to Maine; and on the North Side, a few blocks from Haynes Park, where Cummings spent hours playing basketball with his friends after school.

In the summers, Cummings sometimes returned to Georgia to visit his father and other family. Through it all, he says, he respected the law—and the strict standards set by his uncle and grandmother—even as he watched friends turn to drugs and crime.

“I wasn’t someone who got in trouble,” Cummings says. “I could have ended up that way, because of the environment I was in, but I just didn’t do those things.”

“What Springfield opened my eyes to was that everything that I was doing in policing was basically being an advocate for people.”

In the frequent moves with his family, Cummings gained a deep sense of what makes Wilmington tick—and made friends all over the city. “I was always someone who smiled at people,” he says. “I got along with all different kinds of people really well.”

In high school, Cummings and many of his peers were bussed miles out of Wilmington as part of what they called “de-seg,” the federally-mandated integration of schools that previously had been segregated. There were tensions, but Cummings says he managed to avoid them.

“I was a sports guy, and I just fell right into place,” he says. “I was not an A student, but I passed my classes. I knew that [racial] issues did exist, but I just never had problems.”

Cummings also was something of an artist. He liked to draw, and he practiced, a habit that would come in handy later on when, as a homicide detective, he would sketch crime scenes.

But when he graduated from high school, police work was the last thing on his mind. He got a job as a bagger at an Acme Supermarket, and considered joining the military. He got along well with his managers and coworkers at the market, and he thought about a career at Acme. As it turned out, police officers often worked security details at the market and, sure enough, Cummings got to talking with them. They liked the athletic, affable kid with the easy smile, and they told him he’d make a good cop, and that he could earn more money that way than at the supermarket.

“Come to find out, I actually took a pay cut when I left the supermarket,” he says with a laugh. “I was pretty naïve back then.”

His ideas about the realities of police work were also pretty green.

“When I applied to the department,” he says, “I thought all you did was go down to the city, apply to be a police officer, and they give you a gun and a badge and they put you on the street. I didn’t know that you had to go through an academy, that you had to write reports, that you had to testify in court. Had I known that up front, I don’t know that I would have applied. It wasn’t that hard work scared me, I just didn’t think I expressed myself well—especially in writing.”

Cummings’ current role requires communications of all kinds.

“Springfield College put me in a position where I had to speak publicly all the time,” Cummings says. “And we had to write, to justify our opinions. Springfield made us think critically. Now I’m constantly preparing documents, looking at policy, and evaluating programs. I’ve presented to the governor, and to senators. Springfield taught me to do a lot of that.”

The tone Cummings sets with his department also aligns with his experience at Springfield, where considering others’ perspectives was part of the program. As an advocate of “community policing”—an approach endorsed by President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing—Cummings sees seeking out other voices, and fostering opportunities for them to be heard, as a big part of his job.

To that end, his department has focused on building relationships. He likes to do what he calls “park and walks,” strolling through Wilmington’s neighborhoods with other department brass, pausing to talk with residents on stoops and porches, refreshing his ties with the community and, he hopes, encouraging confidence in the police. He’s been known to hand citizens his business card, which includes his cellphone number, and to tell them to call him directly.

“We are guardians, not warriors,” Cummings says, echoing the language of Blue Courage, a federally sponsored community-policing training program he has scheduled for the Wilmington force. “And we are not separate from the community that we represent. It’s about building partnerships and building trust.”

One way he does that is by opening lines of communication with Wilmington’s citizens—and not only with traditional community leaders. Cummings meets regularly with a citizens’ advisory group he created composed of clergy, community activists, and business and political leaders. But the group also includes young people who, he says, have rarely had a voice in official city circles.

“We’re always meeting with the younger kids,” Cummings says, referring to police visits to elementary schools. “But that area in between 14 and 20 years old—we miss them a lot. So that’s why we’re trying to get more and more of them at forums where they can express themselves to us. “

The purpose of the advisory group, Cummings says, is to provide a direct link between leaders in the community and leaders on the police force, and to make sure communication is a two-way street. “It’s for them to bring issues that we need to take a look at,” he says. “How can we improve? How can we do things differently? But we also know that not every issue in the community is a police issue, and in order to get a lot of these things addressed, we all have to come to the table.”

Cummings’ work as a coalition builder is a far cry from his early years on the force, when he worked as a beat cop, went undercover to buy drugs, and performed surveillance on gangs and drug dealers. Occasionally, he says, situations could go “a little bit sideways.”