Bethel Park in experienced hands with new police chief
Between when he left as commander of Pittsburgh police's Zone 5 station the afternoon of Feb. 23 and when he was sworn in as Bethel Park's new chief that evening, Timothy O'Connor was officially retired for five and a half hours.
That was more than enough, he said.
“I want to work. I feel like I have more productive years in me,” said O'Connor, 57, who officially took charge at Bethel Park on April 1 with the retirement of Acting Chief David Rogan. “Not only is (Bethel Park) a good, solid community, it's a busy community. I wouldn't want to just be sitting idle.”
O'Connor, who had 35 years of experience with Pittsburgh police, said he applied to Bethel Park for the chance to become a police chief without being stuck behind a desk. If the job in Bethel Park hadn't come up, he said, he'd still be working in Pittsburgh today.
“I'm a lifelong city resident, I grew up in the streets of Carrick and Allentown, and sometimes it shows,” O'Connor said. “When you grow up in these blue-collar, working neighborhoods, you get a different perspective than you would beyond city limits.”
There were about 65 applicants for the chief's job, and 12 who made it to the interview stage, said Tim Moury, Bethel Park Council president. In the end, O'Connor's experience stuck out, and his first weeks have exceeded expectations, he said.
“While we face different challenges than maybe what he's used to, his leadership skills, organizational skills and management style spoke to us,” Moury said.
O'Connor has two sons — one a junior at Carnegie Mellon University and the other a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh. He and his wife live in Lincoln Place but are seeking a home in Bethel Park.
Though he supervised nearly three times as many officers at Zone 5, O'Connor said he was drawn to Bethel Park's 30-officer force because there was enough activity to keep him busy in a municipality with 32,000 residents, lots of businesses and Library Road carrying an estimated 12,000 vehicles through town each day. His salary is $110,000.
“While there's relatively low crime, there's still a lot of calls for service,” O'Connor said. “It's similar to what officers in the city of Pittsburgh would respond to, just not the same amount of violent crime. ... I do not miss the violence.”
O'Connor rose through the ranks from a foot patrol officer along Liberty Avenue in 1980, when it was more of a red-light district than a cultural district, to posts in the East End, North Side and South Side. He arrived in Zone 5 as a lieutenant in charge of the night shift in the wake of some of the worst violence the city had ever experienced: The 2009 killings of officers Paul Sciullo, Stephen Mayhle and Eric Kelly in a Stanton Heights shootout. He was promoted to commander in June 2010, he said.
In 2014, 40 percent of all the city's nonfatal shootings and 36 percent of its homicides took place in Zone 5, which includes Homewood, Larimer, East Liberty and Lincoln-Lemington along with Highland Park, Stanton Heights, Morningside, Friendship, Garfield and Bloomfield. Despite that, O'Connor said, he and the department built strong relationships in the community, which he hopes to replicate in Bethel Park.
“I think we had a strong partnership with neighborhood groups, nonprofits, development groups and businesses,” he said. “They were instrumental in giving us information leading to arrests. ... You've got to interact with citizens, give them information and, hopefully, receive information in exchange.”
The most eventful part of O'Connor's first day as chief in Bethel Park was an incident at the Library Road Wal-Mart. Officers responding to two men trying to use stolen credit cards frightened a third, unrelated man who thought the police were there to arrest him for shoplifting, so he fled in a Ford Mustang before officers caught him a short time later, police said.
Matthew Santoni is a staff writer for Trib Total Media. He can be reached at 412-380-5625 or msantoni@tribweb.com.
