The Town of Nederland has been tasked with rebuilding its police department after Marshal Jennifer Fine-Loven’s resignation, along with the exodus of most of its officers, in September of 2022. The Nederland Police Department (NPD) has represented community policing, and the townspeople have clearly stated that they support having a town Marshal and officers who know and understand the Nederland community.

Town staff has been eagerly attempting to hire a new Marshal and up to five officers to successfully regrow the NPD back into an operational department. Furthermore, on November 8 the townspeople voted in support of tax increases which revenue is meant to help support the NPD and the efforts of the Town to retain staff in the department.

Town staff have selected a candidate for Town Marshal that they believe showcases the desired professional and personal qualifications needed for the position: Detective Sergeant Daniel Gledhill.

Sgt. Gledhill currently works as the Detective Sergeant in charge of the Anti-Crime Unit at the Holly Springs Police Department in Holly Springs, North Carolina. Gledhill agreed to speak with The Mountain-Ear for a formal interview before he makes a trip out here to the mountains to acquaint himself with Nederland and its people.

He describes himself as an outdoorsman who loves to hunt and fish. He conducted his interview over the phone from his home in North Carolina, where his three labradors run free and could be heard barking at the UPS man, and as his chickens began to crow from the sight of Gledhill walking outside to meet the courier.

“I have researched your community and it reminds me of where I grew up, with its character, charm, and sense of community living,” Gledhill wrote in his cover letter applying for the position. “People who have not lived in a small community can never truly appreciate the rewards you receive by being a part of a small town.”

In his interview with The Mountain- Ear, Sgt. Gledhill was asked to expand on the sentiment in his cover letter. He began by speaking excitedly and at length about growing up in rural Pennsylvania.

“I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania. There were 800 people in it. It was the smallest school district in the state,” Gledhill explained. “The whole county that I lived in up there was 14,000 people. We did not have internet service until I believe about ten years ago.

“Growing up I was a country kid. We hunted and fished and rode our bicycles everywhere. I cut a lot of firewood growing up,” Gledhill laughed. “We’d cut firewood all summer to get ready for the winter. People laugh at me when I tell them the stories but I used to have to shovel snow off the roof.”

Those laughing are Gledhill’s current fellow officers in Holly Springs, who apparently aren’t familiar with the concept of the rough winters that Gledhill had experienced back in Pennsylvania. With his home town being just two hours south of Buffalo, New York, Gledhill remarked at the time of the interview that Buffalo was experiencing more than four feet of snowfall.

While attending university in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, Gledhill was working toward becoming an attorney, when taking a criminology course piqued his interest in the many different aspects of law enforcement. He decided to transfer to the police academy and worked in Lock Haven as an officer.

“It was a blue collar town, a mile by a mile, and it was me and three other part-timers and the Chief,” he said. Gledhill spoke of the benefits to working in such an environment. “You got to know people. If you get to know the people in a small town, working by yourself isn’t a problem.”

Gledhill worked in Pennsylvania as a patrol officer from 1994 to 2000 before being convinced by some close friends to move to Durham, North Carolina. He eventually moved his wife and two kids to Durham and began working for North Carolina Central Campus Police.

Gledhill gradually moved from the city to more rural settings, going from Durham to Morrisville, North Carolina, before finding Holly Springs, which is where he’s worked since 2003.

“Holly Springs was a small town that had about 5000 people in 2003 when I started there,” Gledhill explains. “We’re over 45,000 to 50,000 now. I started with 20 officers in the department and I think we’re over 80 now.”

In his nearly 20 years of service for the Holly Springs Police Department Gledhill has been promoted to Detective, made Sergeant of a four-man Anti-Crime Unit, and has implemented the Holly Springs SWAT Team as well as the Holly Springs Drug Unit.

“When I started our SWAT team we had no money and I wrote grants to get the equipment that we needed. The federal government has a lot of free money out there for law enforcement; you’ve just got to search for it,” Gledhill said.

“I built the drug unit; we had a really bad problem with it in town. I built that team up and I stayed with that for almost eight and a half years, to 2014, and I needed a change. I did a lot of undercover work and you don’t see good in the world after a while,” Gledhill remarked on his experience dealing with drugs in his community.

“I’ll be honest with you, I feel terrible for users but I don’t have tolerance for sellers because it kills people. You have to teach the youth because this problem is not going to be solved by putting everybody in jail; we have to teach the youth and through the years just bleed this problem out.” Gledhill noted that Holly Springs sees about three overdose cases a week involving fentanyl.

“I think through education you can reach a lot of people. I don’t think parents recognize drug problems right away because they’re not educated on what somebody is going through when they’re going through an opioid problem,” Gledhill explained. “Addiction is a mental health problem because there’s some underlying reason for that person being addicted to opioids. And you can’t solve that opioid problem until you solve that overall issue that they have.”

Gledhill continued to explain his advocacy for handling those suffering from mental health problems with empathy and from a position of familiarity rather than authority.

“I think with a smaller community, if you know somebody that’s going through a mental crisis on a personal level and I can roll up to the scene and speak to that person on a first name basis, that solves a lot of the problem,” Gledhill said. “If I’ve already had that personal relationship with you and I kind of know what you’re going through, then a lot of times you can just work out the issue by talking.”

When seeking a change from his nine years as a Narcotics Detective, Gledhill found himself working as a School Resource Officer (SRO) within the Holly Springs High School. Gredhill describes his time as an SRO, and the work he did with the youth, as being the best six years of his life.

“If I were to say I did anything in law enforcement in 28 years that’s made a difference in the community, it was working there,” he added. Gledhill detailed some of the programs he had implemented working as an SRO, including a fishing program for at-risk kids.

“We got donations for the poles and the equipment and all we did was take them out and fish. When that program started out we had around 20 kids every week. It’s to the point now that we have to shut down registration because we were up to over 80 kids two days in a row. We’ve had that going since 2015, and it’s amazing the relationships that we’ve made.”

Gledhill spoke on the importance of reaching the youth on a human level, and how it’s beneficial to the community to see officers engaging in the community as a person out of uniform.

“That’s where you can solve a lot of problems. You get to know people personally, know their families. When I was at the high school I went to all the football games, baseball, drama, dances. They knew me.”

In addition to the aforementioned accreditations from Gledhill’s time at the Holly Springs Police Department, he, along with the entire department, were recently recognized in North Carolina for having completed the best homicide investigation of the year.

“I got certified as an expert witness in North Carolina for cellphone tracking. We had a homicide here and were never able to find the body. We used cellphones and were able to get the first conviction in North Carolina under a new domestic violence law. She was killed under domestic violence and we were able to get a first degree murder conviction,” Gledhill said.

Throughout his career Gledhill has received specialty training on Cell Hawk and Gray Key Operations and other tech-based law enforcement techniques. When asked if any of these technologies could be useful in Nederland, Gledhill believed that our community could benefit from the use of Licence Plate Recognition cameras (LPR) and from better community engagement through social media.

Gledhill also believes that a heightened presence from officers on foot on the streets and in the businesses will help both the officers and the townspeople get familiar and comfortable with each other, while also sending the message to potential criminals from outside our borders that Nederland is not friendly on crime.

“I don’t think you have that these days as much,” Gledhill said, referring to the concept of community policing. “Most people just want to sit in their police car and drive around. But I think with a town of 1400 people the opportunity is there to get to know everybody on a first name basis.”

Gledhill concluded the interview by stating again his belief in being a part of a community rather than serving as a faceless authority, and wished to reiterate the importance of teaching and mentoring the youth.

“If they would’ve told me that they want somebody to come in there and write tickets and take people to jail all the time…well that’s just not me,” he said of the position. “I’ve done that in my career and to a certain extent that doesn’t work. If somebody does something wrong that’s another thing, but I think you can reach more people with honey than anything else.”