"In police work, as a general rule, the job is negative. Who likes to give tickets? A lot of our job is surrounded by a negative atmosphere.

"But DARE [Drug Abuse Resistance Education] is surrounded by a positive atmosphere. Parents support it, the community appreciates it, and the kids love it. When school opens, the sixth graders are already asking when DARE starts."

Sisk, who recalls that he "taught sixth grade in every school in Lincoln," was the department’s first DARE teacher.

"When I started 18 years ago, DARE was a brand-new concept out of California. I was the only DARE teacher. Today five guys are teaching it.

"Everyone thinks it’s just about drugs. It’s not. It’s about stress and how to cope. It’s about how to build self-esteem, how to stand up to peer pressure, and it’s all positive. We don’t get into negatives. There are DARE dances, DARE picnics, DARE fishing tournaments, DARE baseball, softball and basketball teams. At the DARE picnic in May, there were 400 to 500 kids. And they keep coming up with new ideas, like the DARE bowling tournament."

Sisk emphasizes that DARE teachers aren’t trying to get kids to narc (tattle) on other kids, like telling them who is using drugs. "This is about you," he would tell the kids, "not about somebody else."

Although he took the DARE classes seriously, Sisk could also have a little fun with the sixth graders.

"The kids used to ask me how old I was," he remembers. "I would always tell them I was 37. Then I would tell them I’d been with the Lincoln Police Department for 30 years.

"There would be silence. Then about 15 minutes later one kid would raise his hand and say, ‘Wait a minute, you can’t be 37.’

"I would say, ‘I started with the police department when I was 7.’"

Sisk believes DARE is here to stay.

"I’ve worked with many mayors and chiefs of police, and never did any of them ever even remotely talk about eliminating DARE," he says. "If they had, they’d probably have seen the biggest uprising in the city’s history. City Hall wouldn’t be able to hold it."

Along with DARE, Sisk also taught fifth grade VEGA (Violence Education and Gang Awareness programs). VEGA leads into DARE in sixth grade, and the program was later expanded to reach junior high and high school students.

The Illinois State Police do the DARE training, and there are yearly conferences of DARE officers. "People at the conferences started to recognize that the program needed reinforcement after fifth and sixth grades," Sisk recalls. "First they came up with the idea it needed reinforcement in junior high school, and over the years they recognized a need to reinforce it in high school.

"A lot of communities haven’t done what we are doing, teaching a short DARE curriculum in junior high and high school," he says. "The Lincoln Police Department has a consistent program from kindergarten through 12th grade, and the difference it has made is clear.

"If a police officer in uniform had gone to the high school and walked around 15 years ago, he would have felt out of place. He would have been an outsider.

"Today the kids know who we are, and they will talk to us. They relate to officers in uniform. It’s a positive thing. If they have a problem, kids feel comfortable to come to a police officer, especially DARE officers, but others too.

"It’s helped the whole police department. We have officers that go out to the high school and eat lunch with the kids. Eighteen years ago, if the chief of police had said to an officer, ‘Go out to the high school and eat lunch,’ everybody would have thought he was crazy. Now it’s part of the day.

"That’s the concept of community policing."

Sisk’s efforts to be a positive influence on Lincoln’s youth are recognized by those who have worked with him.

"He was one heck of a juvenile officer," Detective Mike Harberts says. "He related so well with kids. The kids in this town trusted Darrell and would bring him information. We solved many crimes, both juvenile and adult, because of that.

"And he was a wonderful DARE teacher. He had an innate ability to get down to their level. He was compassionate, and he could see where they were coming from. He treated each kid as an individual with a story of their own.

"He was a wonderful colleague too. Detective Bunner and I very much enjoyed working with Darrell on investigations. Any time we had a juvenile involved with any kind of crime, he was a wealth of information."

"Darrell created the Lincoln DARE program," Police Chief Rich Montcalm says. "He was the second officer in the state to be trained in DARE. He put his heart into it. His wife helped him make his own posters for the program, and the state used some of those posters in their statewide training.

"He was also instrumental getting us to proceed into the junior high and high school level. We are one of the few police departments in the state that does it.

"Everybody here still considers him part of the department. We look on him as a resource. We’re fortunate he’s still in the area and we can ask him questions."

Ron Robbins, who was police chief from 1989 to 1997, remembers that he heard nothing but high praise for Sisk from teachers, principals and superintendents. "I would hear it from Washington-Monroe School, then a month later from Northwest, then later from Central. That’s how I knew it was true.

"Darrell started the role model program. He would pick Lincoln High School students who had good personalities, were popular and had good grades. Sometimes he would get basketball and football players, because the younger kids knew who the sports stars were. Then those role models would go around with him to the grade schools and give the kids there a positive message — don’t do drugs, don’t smoke.

"Darrell is the main reason our DARE program is what it is today," Robbins adds. "As chief I sat in on some of his classes. He just had a way of working with kids that helped him get his message across. He really did care about the kids."

Dean Langdon, now assistant principal at Lincoln Community High School, worked with Darrell for six years, ever since he came to Lincoln in 1995.

"He was a great asset, and he will be missed," Langdon says. "Darrell made himself totally available to us, whether we needed help or just advice. We could reach him anytime we needed him.

"He had a great relationship with the kids, very proactive. He always wanted to prevent trouble from happening, and he was always interested in kids learning a lesson from their behavior.

"He had a nice balance between being a law enforcement officer and being an educator. He preferred to be an educator, but when needed he could take a firm stand.

"He had a post outside a certain door. Kids would come in, and it wasn’t unusual to hear them talking to him, maybe about law enforcement, maybe about fishing, maybe about their personal problems at home. He would give them advice about what they could do if they thought something bad was going to happen at home. He believed in kids’ rights to be free from abuse.

"Because of the program, there is a different attitude about police officers. The trust that Darrell built in the schools has worked to the good of the community," Langdon says.

Although he misses his role in the lives of school children, Sisk is enjoying his work with Sojourn and is looking forward to new developments.

"For the most part, I am a court advocate. I assist victims of domestic battery to get orders of protection against abusers." He doesn’t talk about details, because confidentiality is necessary for the safety of the victims.

He is looking forward to a new program. "Sojourn is in the process of putting together a curriculum to teach group sessions at Lincoln Correctional Center. Some of these people have been involved in domestic violence issues. They’re going to be released from prison some day. We can give them better skills to cope with relationships.

"I’m on a mission that’s not been done around here. It’s going to be exciting." Langdon thinks it is a natural transition for Sisk to go from working with young people to the Sojourn program.

"He has gone from helping one group of people in the community to helping another. Victims of domestic violence have kids. His expertise with children in a school context is a natural transition to working with young families. He has seen the effects of domestic violence in the schools. From there it is a natural step into the home with victims of domestic violence."

"He’ll do a wonderful job in his new career in Sojourn," Robbins agrees. "When it comes to helping someone, whether it’s a kid or an adult, he’ll do fine. He’ll see that they get the necessary help. Darrell will always be there for these people."

Today you can find him in his office in the lower level of the Logan County Courthouse, where he is a court advocate for Sojourn, an organization that gives shelter and service to victims of domestic violence.

[Darrell Sisk]

He likes the new job. "There’s a real demand for this service, even more so than I thought when I was a cop," he says. The new job keeps him on his toes, the way he had to be as a police officer. "It’s educational, challenging, demanding, and sometimes frustrating and confusing," he says.

Still, he misses the old job. He keeps in touch with what’s happening in the police department and is happy that his old friend, Rich Montcalm, now police chief, is inaugurating some new programs.

"Many of the programs Rich is putting into place are things he and I worked on while I was in the department," Sisk says. He’s especially pleased that Montcalm is establishing an Emergency Response Team that will be prepared to deal with a serious incident in any Lincoln-area school, because kids were such a big part of his life as a police officer.

[Darrell Sisk and Police Chief Rich Montcalm]

"We’ve got to have a policy to deal with a school crisis such as a shooting. We’ve got to know who’s in charge, where the phones are, what door to go in, even how to deal with the media. The first people to get to a school emergency are going to be the local police, and they need to have the training and the equipment to end the threat. That’s what the Emergency Response Team is all about."

Sisk spent almost 31 years (he’s one month shy) with the Lincoln Police Department, and for more than 20 of those years he was a juvenile officer, a DARE teacher, a VEGA teacher, and a recognized authority on juvenile investigation and crime.

He designed and wrote the Lincoln Police Department policy manual for juvenile procedures, which is still in use. He assisted in writing school discipline policies and served on many committees concerning school discipline. He organized all juvenile records for the city of Lincoln and for Logan County, helped start the teen court for juvenile offenders, which is still operating, helped coordinate community youth programs of all kinds, and more.

He grew up in Lincoln, was drafted in 1967 and spent two years in the Army, 19 months of that time in Vietnam, came back and started to work in the Sheriff’s Department as a radio dispatcher under Glenn Nichols. Shortly after that he applied for a job as a city policeman and got it.

He started as a patrolman, driving around in a squad car. The car, he remembers, had one light on top and one little hand-held radio, with the radio equipment taking up the entire car trunk.

"To use the radar unit, you had to stand outside the car and point it at someone," he recalls. "If I got into a squad car today, I’d have no idea what all that high-tech equipment is. It’s like being inside a spaceship."

He moved up to sergeant and then became a shift commander. But on May 11, 1980, his career took a sudden turn. That was the night he got shot, and, ironically, he was shot by two juveniles who had escaped from St. Charles Juvenile Detention Center, although he didn’t know that at the time.

"They were 15 and 16, the kind of kids we teach now," he says.

He saw the two youths running around the old K-Mart building at 2 a.m. and decided to see what was happening. "I got out of the car, and the next thing I knew I was lying in a flower bed. A state trooper found me."

He should have been dead; a combination of good luck and good thinking saved his life. It happened that he was wearing the only bulletproof vest available to the Lincoln Police Department at the time, and that one was a "loaner."

"Back in the old days, vests were heavy — about 30 pounds," he says. "Today you can’t tell whether an officer is wearing one or not. But in 1980 they were just coming out. The department was trying to find idiots to wear this one because it was so heavy. I volunteered because I was working nights."

When he was shot in the back, he was standing close to a steel door. He spun into the door and hit it so hard he got a concussion, but the borrowed vest stopped the bullets and saved his life, at least the first time. The concussion probably saved his life the second time.

An old friend, Detective Mike Harberts, adds some details to the story. Harberts was a patrolman then, relatively new to the department.

"It was the night before Mother’s Day. I had taken the night off, and he was checking my building," Harberts recalls. "There were a lot of flats of plants around the K-Mart. Darrell was near the double doors on the east side, walking down a row of flowers, when he was shot in the back two times. The force of the bullets hitting him drove him into the doors. He was knocked unconscious and thrown in a table full of flowers. That saved his life. If the kids hadn’t thought he was dead, they would have killed him. They were going to shoot him in the head with his own gun."

The juveniles fled south, finally killing a 23-year-old detective in Little Rock, Ark. They are now in jail in Arkansas, serving life without parole.

"They thought they killed Darrell too," Harberts says. "They told the police down there they had killed a police officer in a town between Bloomington and Springfield."

After the shooting, Sisk gave up patrolling the streets and became a juvenile officer. He didn’t know, when he took the job, that he’d been shot by juveniles. But finding that out didn’t keep him from becoming what those who worked with him call an outstanding juvenile officer, one who liked and understood the kids he was working with.

"I worked on any crime that involved a child — burglary, armed robbery, sexual abuse cases, anything. I did the investigation. I worked with the detectives on major crimes."

The most common crimes, he remembers, were fights and thefts. He recalls only one murder involving juveniles.

"I was involved in the court system, putting kids in various institutions. Back in the old days, in 1980, a police officer could put a juvenile in detention. If I picked up a kid for retail theft, I’d put him in detention. In 1980 the police could hold a kid 48 hours, then take him before a judge. Today it’s a whole different system. A juvenile probation officer has to authorize detention. That officer will be the deciding factor whether the kid is detained or released to his parents."

But Sisk would always rather find a way to keep a kid out of the juvenile justice system than a way to get him into it. To help do that, he designed a juvenile diversion and citation program, another program still in practice today.

"The largest percent of calls to the police department involved juveniles — a kid riding a bicycle through a garden, a kid throwing snowballs," he recalls. "I created a special citation. I would write everything down on the ticket, give it to the kid and tell him to take it home to his parents. If I didn’t get a call from the parents within two days, I’d write them a letter. The kids knew a letter was going to follow and they’d better tell their folks."

He also had some special techniques for the "station adjustments," when a youngster was brought to the station after doing something he shouldn’t have.

"In the early days, I used to target hair," Sisk says. "If the kid had long hair, I’d tell him the next time he got caught doing whatever he was doing, he was going to lose six inches of hair. The kid would sign a form that he agreed to that. Or if he was caught riding a minibike in the street, he’d sign a form agreeing that if he got caught doing it again, he was going to sell the bike."

However, it’s the positive, not the negative, side of his job as a juvenile officer that Sisk remembers and misses the most. He was the department’s first DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) teacher, and he still believes it’s a great program.

While teaching DARE, he was with every sixth-grade class in town once a week for 17 weeks. "I taught sixth grade in every school in Lincoln," he says. "I loved it. That’s the part I really miss."

(To be continued)

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