Jeff Heffernon wasn’t the kid in grade school who dreamed of growing up to be a cop.
In the seventh grade, after his parents bought him a police scanning radio, he remembers having some interest in law enforcement, but not enough yet to make it his chosen path.
“After high school, I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” Heffernon said.
What spurred his interest was that his brother’s friend was working at a retail store in loss prevention, or “busting shoplifters,” as he put it.
Heffernon, who is from Appleton, visited Fox Valley Technical College, where the decision to go into law enforcement was as simple, he said, as pulling a brochure on the police science course out of the kiosk.
“At the time, there was only one math course required,” he said. “I thought, ‘I could get through that.’”
Heffernon said it was the law class that sealed the deal for him.
“Looking at the concepts of the Constitution and breaking down laws by statute and the application to real life events; I was hooked from there on,” he said.
Heffernon started his law enforcement career with the Grand Chute Police Department in 1986, but by the end of the year he was hired at the Shawano County Sheriff’s Department, starting out as a jailer.
He went on to dispatch and patrol before being hired at the Shawano Police Department in 1989.
Heffernon announced his retirement this week. Officially it’s effective Jan. 10, but in the meantime Heffernon will be using vacation and compensatory time he has accrued.
He said he would be taking numerous memories with him.
“Everybody in law enforcement will tell you, when you start you should write a book and keep it going,” he said. “I didn’t, but I would advocate others to try and do that.”
Heffernon’s patrol experiences ranged from the farcical to the nearly deadly serious.
The farcical side included a visit to a fog-shrouded Victorian home in the city to trap a bat.
“While it didn’t rise to the level of a police call, in Shawano, Wisconsin we are all about service,” he said.
Heffernon was working with Randy Wright — now Shawano County Sheriff — at the time.
Wright was headed up a dark, enclosed stairway with a flashlight.
Heffernon had not yet gotten that far before the home-owner — a woman Heffernon said resembled Phyllis Diller in a flowing nightgown — let out a blood-curdling scream.
A bat had just flown past Heffernon’s head and was circling the chandelier above them.
Wright turned and tumbled down the stairs, along with the flashlight, which was now illuminating Heffernon, the woman and the chandelier as the bat circled.
“We laughed about that for years,” Heffernon said.
Wright and the flashlight were uninjured. The bat escaped through an open door.
A more potentially serious incident arose when Heffernon was still working with the sheriff’s department.
Heffernon and Sgt. Staber Cook were returning from a transport detail when they pulled over a suspected drunken driver in a pickup truck.
Cook approached the driver while Heffernon came around the passenger side and pointed his flashlight into the cab.
Just as he did that he saw a .44 Magnum pistol on the driver’s hip, with the driver’s hand sliding toward it.
“I yelled, ‘gun!’” said Heffernon, who drew his own gun at this point. “I thought, ‘if this guy touches his gun he’s going to get shot.’”
Cook grabbed the driver, who was then arrested for going armed while intoxicated and drunken driving.
“That was really close,” Heffernon said.
Heffernon has been on the administrative side of things for more than 10 years, but still misses being on patrol.
“The daily contact with citizens and the variety of calls that you go to,” he said. “Some of the most innocuous calls can be the most interesting.”
In 2001-2002, Heffernon served as school liaison officer.
“It was one of the most rewarding assignments I had in law enforcement,” he said.
But school liaison officers were pretty much in rotation at the time, Heffernon said, and there was no guarantee he’d have that duty the next year. So when there was an opening posted for lieutenant, he applied.
Heffernon simultaneously went on to finish his bachelor’s degree.
“I went at night with a mortgage and two kids and a wife who was working to help pay the bills,” he said.
The kid who didn’t dream of being a cop in grade school was by now working toward some day being chief of police.
“It was my goal for the better part of 25 years,” Heffernon said. “I did a lot toward that goal. It just didn’t work out.”
Heffernon applied for the job when former chief Ed Whealon retired in April, but the post ultimately went to Mark Kohl.
Heffernon said he never considered applying for chief anywhere else.
“Shawano is my home,” he said. “My wife and I really enjoy the community - everything from raising our kids here to participating in the barn quilt and helping out with that, being part of local board for Salvation Army. Just the people in town. I have no desire to go anywhere else.”
Heffernon also said he didn’t consider running for Shawano County sheriff.
“Not for a split second,” he said.
Law enforcement has gone through a lot of change in 25 years, particularly in technology; some of which Heffernon helped implement at the Shawano Police Department.
“The administrative team here at the police department really has done a lot of work on trying to stay current,” he said. “Everything is modernized, digitized, computerized.”
Heffernon, along with Lt. Brad Rabideau and school liaison officer Jody Johnson, have been instrumental over the past year in promoting the adoption of the ALICE program in area schools. ALICE is an acronym for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate that provides options for school staff and students in responding to an active shooter.
“There is nothing more important that we’re doing in Shawano right now than the ongoing upgrading of the protection of our children,” Heffernon said.
Heffernon said the community plays an important part in the Police Department’s efforts.
He said it’s a relatively new thing that’s come into vogue in law enforcement, but it’s not new to Shawano.
“Shawano has been doing community policing since long before I arrived,” he said. “It becomes a team effort. Law enforcement without its citizens is completely and utterly ineffective.”
That team extends to local officials on the Common Council, committees and commissions he said.
“Being able to spend my administrative career interacting with a lot of those folks has almost always been a very positive experience,” he said. “Without all of them, the police could not do their job.”
Heffernon said he also wanted to thank “all of the officers that I had the proud pleasure to serve with.”
He said the fact that so many come to Shawano and spend their careers here is “a testament to the community.”
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