Sirens for Service: Silver Spring Township police officer builds trust through rooftop conversation about Thanksgiving

It’s no secret that the job of a first responder is anything but easy.

Taking calls can mean long hours, time away from family and PTSD. But every day hundreds of men and women in Cumberland County answer those calls.

Every week, The Sentinel’s Sirens for Service feature will aim to show the faces of these people and share their stories.

The series focuses on why they became a first responder and highlights a specific call from their service that influenced them and reminds them of why they do what they do.

Kevin Winter

Agency: Silver Spring Township Police Department

Title: Officer

Years with company: 9

Q: Why did you become a first responder?

A: I like to tell everyone I am from a small town in New Jersey. That’s where I was born and raised and when I say a small town, it’s a little over a square mile, that’s how big it was. So growing up there, everybody knew everyone’s name and who you were, so ... everybody knew the police officers. There weren’t many, but you knew them by name and as a kid that stuck with me.

We’d be out, my friends and I playing basketball, wiffleball, whatever it may be, and the officers would show up, get out of the car, play with us or chat with us [and] see how we’re doing. They would do the same thing if my dad was, say, mowing the lawn or something, they’d stop by [and] talk to him.

That put an impression on me, being “Wow, look at [the] officers.” I didn’t know much about police officers at the time but I saw these guys in uniform stopping, talking to us, wanting to know how were were doing, what’s going on, showed interest in us, and being like, “Hey if you guys see anything [or] know anything, contact us.”

I was like, “Wow this is pretty cool that these guys are like that,” and as I got older and I moved out here [and] started a family, I was like, “I want to see that same thing happen with my son, that he has that same respect, sees that police officers are they same way, they can talk to us, you can talk to them, that they’re cool people, that you can say hi. They’re going to come play with you, hopefully, and I wanted to have besides him other kids when I’m out in the streets, when I got to finally be out on my own [and] ride around, go into neighborhoods, spend time with kids, show them that hey we’re normal people too and that they shouldn’t be afraid of us.

Besides saying I want to help people, obviously, but I think that little aspect is probably what got me more wanting to do first responding than anything.

Q: Can you describe a call that has influenced you? What did that call look like and why did it impact you?

A: The call, I think it was two [or] three years ago. It was a domestic, the information we got, the daughter, I think she was about 14 years old and we were told that she was on the autism spectrum. So going into it, we knew that ... trying to communicate and you’re going to have to be careful what you say and what you do when it comes to somebody who’s on the autism spectrum because the lights, sirens, depending on how you act towards them, that could set them off.

It seemed like it might have been a little physical too, with the mom. When we showed up there, we met with the mom at the townhouse, spoke to her and the daughter was upstairs in the bedroom. You could see stuff was thrown around, they had a pretty heated argument.

I went upstairs to the bedroom. The mom came with me and we couldn’t find where the daughter was. We saw that she kicked out the screen to the second floor window, so I told the mom, “Hey can you leave and let me talk to her and see if I can help her out.”

So I went over towards the window and this was a couple stories up maybe and she was on the roof looking down, thinking that she might jump off the roof.

If she did that, I feel like she probably was going to break a leg. I mean, that’s far enough that if you land incorrectly you’re going to hurt yourself. So I had my partner go downstairs into the backyard with his flashlight [and] kind of shine it up at her to let her know hey this is how far if you jump.

So I just sat down on the window [and] had a chat with her, tried to gain a little trust. It was right around Thanksgiving, so I was trying to find out how we can connect with each other and I just asked her about her Thanksgiving, what she liked to eat and that was the connection I needed.

She started telling me about food she liked, what she wanted to eat, and I’m like, “Hey, can you please come in? I’m not going to do anything, let’s sit down and talk more about it.”

After a few minutes, she was willing to come inside, she sat down, I shut the window and then I just asked her, “What happened tonight? Why did you do this?”

She said it was because she couldn’t find her earbuds. She lost them and that set her off. Little did she know, when she looked down at her feet while we were in there, the earbuds were underneath her bed and she found them.

I left there feeling good about myself knowing that it’s tough dealing with autism and to be able to help a girl out, I didn’t want her to get hurt. To see that I could actually sit there, talk and gain trust with somebody, bring them in, listen to them and to have them want to listen to me and trust me, felt awesome.