As a high school football player during the 1970s, Dave Williams had the opportunity to meet legendary Cleveland Browns and Cincinnati Bengals coach Paul Brown.
“He was telling us all of the usual things like, ‘Stay on the right path,’ ” Williams said. “It was at that moment I said I’d root for the Cincinnati Bengals until they won the Super Bowl.”
Though the Bengals have not lived up to their end of the bargain, one could say Williams, currently a reserve officer with the Athens Police Department, took Brown’s speech to heart.
A member of the police force since 1985, Williams is one of 13 officers who work 20 hours per week as a part of the reserve officer unit — a group that takes charge on specialized department initiatives and assists the full-time officers during street fests.
Throughout his career with APD, Williams has been a crime prevention officer, one of the first DARE officials in Ohio, the leader of Athens’ Criminal Investigations Unit and the captain of the force. He said he has seen Athens change dramatically from when he first joined the force.
“I used to say Athens was a farming community with a little college in the middle of it, and over the years it has become a college town with a little ruralness about it,” Williams said.
As a result, the police department has had to deal with many more off-campus residents than when Williams first began working, a time when Ohio University only had about 12,000 to 14,000 students.
Reserve Commander David Malawista, who has been a reserve officer since 1974, in addition to working in the psychiatric field, said the department has changed as drastically as the city.
“When I first started here I think our total staffing was about 17 and pay rates were so low that if a full-time officer was married and had two children, on full pay they were still eligible for food stamps,” Malawista said. “That’s the kind of resources that were being put into the department.”
The reserve unit first started up in the late 1960s, when the town was dealing with Vietnam War protests and needed additional officers to work the so-called riots, Williams said.
During their time with the department, both Williams and Malawista have worked a litany of cases, such as homicides, bank robberies, drive-by shootings and hostage situations. However, one case stands out for Williams, particularly as a similar case is currently unfolding.
With the recent missing persons report involving Samuel J. Wiater of N. Lancaster Street, Williams has been reminded of a case he worked on while he was with the investigative unit involving another missing person, Keith Noble, who was found dead in the Hocking River after a lengthy search in 1998.
“We searched the complete town, just as we’re doing for this individual,” Williams said. “Unfortunately with that situation, it ended in tragedy with us finding his body in the river 12 days later. Now that we have a similar case, it has made me think back to this incident.”
While the reserve officers tend to work more on matters related to community outreach, they are all required to work during Halloween as well as the fests, Athens Police Chief Tom Pyle said. Malawista and Williams will be out with the rest of the team during High Fest on Saturday.
“When I first started, Halloween was an illegal street takeover of Court Street,” Williams said. “They would put all of the officers we had out on Court Street to prevent it from getting taken over. At about eight or nine at night, the crowd would literally take over the street and at that point we lost the street.”
He said the city and police department have made both Halloween and the fests safer since then. He added that the fests used to be held at various locations, such as the intramural fields, whereas nowadays they are limited to High, Mill and Palmer Street.
Williams and Malawista focus much of their attention on APD’s specialized programs — such as behavioral services and working with underprivileged youth — and hope their efforts help others stay on the right path, just as Brown helped Williams.
“It’s to show what the department is doing for the community,” Malawista said, “It’s not just simple law enforcement.”
@AKARL_SMITH
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