By Kip Tabb | Outer Banks Voice on March 3, 2024
New Manteo Police Chief Brad Eilert takes a grassroots view of his job
With the interim label removed from his title, new Manteo Police Chief Brad Eilert is in a position to put into effect the priorities that he feels are key to an effective police force.
“My biggest thing is building upon the community police relationship,” he said in a Voice interview. “Me personally, I like to be involved in the community. And our department is very involved in the community.”
There are a number of Manteo Police Department activities that highlight the department’s involvement with the community—bicycle safety and internet safety in schools, pizza with an officer and other events.
“We don’t just want them to know us on a professional level. We want people to know us on a personal level,” he added. “Law enforcement is forming trust with the community. If you tell them the truth about what you’re going do for them…and they trust you, and that’s a big, big deal.”
That trust, he notes, extends beyond what are typically law enforcement issues. He mentions that on cold winter days, he rides around with a water tool to cut off people’s water if a pipe bursts and describes other similar calls he’s gotten.
“I’ve gone to calls where people called about a pot on their stove and asked law enforcement to turn the stove off. And we do that,” he said. “It’s that they trust in us.”
An initiative that he is hoping to begin soon is aimed at creating better relations with the town’s Hispanic Community. “I would like our officers, me included, to get up to speed on at least some conversational Spanish,” he said.
Eilert is realistic about what police work entails. While some of it is turning off a burner in someone’s home or working with families and their children on bike safety, much of it includes what Eilert describes as seeing “people at their worst.”
It can be frustrating because officers often see the same people over and over again—usually because of drugs. “You sympathize as much as you can…Addiction is a serious problem and it’s tough to overcome,” he said.
Throughout his interview with the Voice, Eilert returned a number of times to the same themes—building community trust in the Manteo Police Department by being honest about what can be done, and training his officers so that they are equipped to handle situations as they arise.
“I’ve always supported training and education, for people to get better at their jobs and to focus on things that they’re interested in and make them better at that,” he said. “If they focus on things they’re interested in, they get that attachment to ownership. Once you get that attachment to ownership, everybody’s part of the team.”
He pointed out that training is particularly important in a small department like Manteo, where they are currently short-handed. The department has nine positions, and with Eilert’s promotion there are currently eight officers on staff.
“The big thing about training is to make sure that you are trained to do someone else’s job if someone were to leave today,” Eilert said. The emphasis on training may have come from his own experience as a young police officer when he first came to the Outer Banks as a patrol officer in Nags Head in 2001.
“I’ve worked for some really good administrators that have allowed me to get my education. They sent me to all kinds of training in the things that I was interested in,” he said.
That training included attending the FBI National Academy, earning a Criminal Justice Degree from Old Dominion University and a Master’s from Arizona State University. He is also certified instructor in a number of law enforcement fields.
When Eilert first attended college in Virginia at Richard Bland Junior College in Petersburg, all instruction was in class. But by the time he was enrolled at Old Dominion in 2010, that had changed.
“Thank goodness, times had changed. I didn’t have to go in person. I could attend everything online,” he said referring to his college degrees.
The ongoing education and earning the degrees was difficult, and he emphasizes how important his wife, Becca, was in keeping him focused. “I had all kinds of support from my wife,” Eilert said. “She helped me finish my bachelor’s degree. Made sure I stayed focused on finishing that.”
Growing up in a family of law enforcement officers, Eilert knew from an early age what he was going to do.
“My father, my brother and my sister were all in law enforcement…I knew what I wanted to do at about seven years old,” he said.
He grew in Petersburg, VA, and his first law enforcement position was in Isle of Wight County, VA. His family has been visiting the Outer Banks since he was five and when a chance came to apply for the Nags Head Police Department, he moved to the Outer Banks. He was with Nags Head for 13 years, spent a few years with Southern Shores and in 2019 moved to Manteo as the Assistant Chief of Police under Chief Vance Hackett who retired at the end of October in 2023.
Eilert says he has learned, after more than 25 years in law enforcement, that patience and humor are important in police work and that “you have to realize that it will get better.”
