Officer of the year has passion for helping community

CRESTVIEW — If you’ve read anything about what the Crestview Police Department has done in the community over the last few years, you’ve probably heard the name Wanda Hulion.

Hulion is a community services officer in the department and was recently named Crestview Police Department’s officer of the year for 2017. Along with her partner, Sam Kimmons, she is involved in a number of community outreach programs.

She heads the citizen’s police academy, the youth academy and coordinates neighborhood watch groups, school zones and safety presentations. She is also heavily involved in the department’s charitable events.

“I think probably our favorite thing to do is what we call our toy run,” Hulion said. “Usually one or two days before Christmas, we load a trailer up with whatever toys we have leftover or if we have small items that have been donated, stuffed animals, things like that.

“We’ll load the trailer up and we go over into public housing and hit the sirens and the kids come out and get stuff. We love that. You’re always warm and fuzzy after that. It makes you feel real good.”

Hulion was born and raised in Crestview and has a passion for helping her community. She has spent more than a decade in law enforcement, the last five in community services.

“First and foremost, I’m a wife and a mother,” is what she tells everyone. After her children grew up and left home, she wondered what she was going to do for the next 20 years. She spoke with a former CPD officer who got her interested in law enforcement.

“I spent a year in dispatch, which I think makes you better officer,” she said. She then spent six years on patrol, which she called challenging, but said she “absolutely loved it.”

Hulion took a community services job when it came open and hasn’t looked back. She said the most rewarding part of the job is when people say thank you. Whether it’s from a low-income family receiving food donations for the holidays or a bag of goodies from a school bus driver, gestures of appreciation mean the most to Hulion.

Another important aspect of community policing, according to Hulion, is treating people with respect.

“You arrest somebody and you treat them with respect,” she said. “Yeah, you’ve got to take their freedom. You’re taking them to jail, but you treat them with the respect they deserve. Until they treat me differently, I try to give them respect.”

Hulion said the way to lift a community up is by getting involved to help change things for the better.

“Every community has got problems; Crestview’s got their problems. But as a citizen, why sit around and just gripe and complain about it if you’re not willing to step up and try to make a difference and change something?

“You don’t have to change it all, and you haven’t got to make huge changes, but if we all pull together, we all do our little bit, we can bring it up some. We can change it. We can improve it.”

This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: Officer of the year has passion for helping community