Mark Farrall was bor

By Drewe Phinny Contributing Writer

When it comes to law enforcement, Mark Farrall has pretty much done it all—from the SWAT team to Public Information Officer to Deputy City Manager to Newark Chief of Police.

All of these positions come with different skills sets that display a complex understanding of how to discover, deter or rehabilitate those who violate the rules and norms of society. On one hand, law enforcement is pretty heady stuff, while on the other, the details are just important as the concepts.

For instance, Farrall explained how traffic accidents are just as significant as high- risk arrest warrants.

“There’s a lot of science involved,” he explained. “When an officer shows up at a crash scene and there are two or three mangled cars, witnesses, etc., it’s up to the investigating officer to kind of put the pieces back together, figure out what happened and whether there’s been a violation of the law.

“Our officers in the traffic unit go to collision reconstruction school, and that is a very intensive series of three, two-week classes with lots of math and physics. They learn the ins and outs of advanced collision investigation. When they complete that class, they receive a certification in collision reconstruction. That’s just one example of the specialized training that we get.”

For Farrall, who officially became the Chief of Police of the Newark Police Department on Feb. 1, service to the community has been a family business for as long as he can remember.

“My father was fire chief at Aetna for many years and has served with the fire department for decades,” he explained. “So, from a young age, I saw his involvement in the community. My brother had worked for the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and retired several years ago, and I kind of followed in their footsteps.”

Farrall’s varied job descriptions, which could appear to be very disparate, actually were a natural progression of his accumulated skills on the job. He explained, “It wasn’t necessarily intentional. In the department, I was afforded a lot of opportunities with the promotions I had. What’s nice about our police department is that we’re small enough that everybody knows everybody and it feels like a family, but we’re large enough that we have a lot of opportunities available to our officers, which is one of the things that makes them more well-rounded.

“For example, if they go into the criminal division, they won’t stay in for the remainder of their careers. After five years, they’ll get transferred out of that unit and somebody else will be moved in. The idea is to transfer all their knowledge back from the criminal division to the patrol division. Then they can pass along what they learned to the officers on the patrol shift. That way, everybody becomes more well-rounded.”

This continuous switching of jobs in different divisions is one of the more important points of focus in the recruitment