Bexley's police substation has a shul for a landlord

Most people only hear about police when something goes wrong. This series is about the officers who make sure that, when something does, the call goes to someone the community already knows.

We started in Phoenix with Det. Mike Hillman and the Phoenix Police Jewish Advisory Board. This week Kol America goes national with two officers who built the bridge one handshake at a time: a small Ohio suburb whose police substation has a shul for a landlord, and a Virginia Beach officer who has spent a decade training congregations to protect themselves.

The numbers are not subtle. The FBI counted 1,528 anti-Jewish hate crimes in 2025, the third-highest year on record. Jews are roughly 2% of the American population and were the targets of 63% of all religiously motivated hate crimes and 14% of all hate crimes of any kind. That is down from 2024's record, and it is still a number most communities would treat as an emergency.

Groups that track this say the real figure is higher, because most incidents never get reported at all.

Which is the whole point of this series. A hate crime that never gets reported never gets investigated. And people report to officers they know.

Bexley is the heart of Jewish Columbus, and the Bexley Police Department has decided that is a job description, not a demographic.

Officer Clayton Adams is the department's Community Liaison Officer and Special Duty Coordinator. He coordinates security for local Jewish organizations, but he is quick to say that security is the smallest part of it.

"Chief Gary Lewis has made building and maintaining relationships with Bexley's Jewish community a priority for our department," Adams said. "But our relationship goes well beyond providing security."

Exhibit A: the Main Street Resource Center. It opened on August 5, 2026, at 2369 East Main Street, in the annex of Congregation Torat Emet. It works as a small police substation: Adams' office is there, and an upstairs office gives officers working the area a place to write reports and eat lunch without leaving the neighborhood.

Torat Emet is the Modern Orthodox "Main Street Shul," founded in 2001 by about 60 families and now home to more than 220. Its rabbi since the first Shabbos, Rabbi Howard Zack, told the Columbus Jewish News simply: "We value these partnerships."

"When you stop and think about it, having a police resource center located in a building owned by a synagogue is a pretty big deal," Adams said. "I think that says a lot about the relationship between our department and the Jewish community."

Asked which moment from the work he thinks about most, he did not hesitate. It was opening that center. "To me, it's much more than just having another place for officers to work. It shows the trust that's been built between the department and the community. We talk about building relationships and working together all the time, but here's an example of actually putting those words into action."

JewishColumbus, which helped build the partnership, put it this way when the center opened: "The new Resource Center is more than a police satellite; it's a tangible example of neighbors showing up for one another and building a safer, stronger community together."

Exhibit B: the Synagogue Auxiliary Officer program, which Bexley believes will be the first of its kind in the country. It is built and staffed, and waiting on Washington. The department has five officers lined up to cover all three of Bexley's synagogues, paid for by the $650,000 federal appropriation former Mayor Ben Kessler announced. The money has not been released yet.

"We originally hoped to have the program up and running in June, but unfortunately, that timeline came and went," Adams said. "Leave it to the feds." The department later aimed for November 15 and still has no firm start date. "The program is moving forward; it's simply a matter of getting all our ducks in a row before officially launching."

These will not be hired guards. The city's job posting requires a graduate of an accredited Ohio police academy who is eligible for certification as an Ohio peace officer, assigned to a specific synagogue as its on-site police contact and reachable for call-back in an emergency. In other words: every shul gets its own cop, and the cop knows the shul.

Exhibit C may be the most quietly radical: Judaism 101. Local rabbis come to the department and teach officers about Jewish faith, traditions and customs.

"Nobody expects us to know everything about the Jewish faith or its traditions. But taking the time to learn and ask questions goes a long way," Adams said. "I think it makes us better officers, and it shows the community that we're genuinely interested in understanding them."

That training is also Bexley's whole answer to Shabbos and Yom Tov. There is no separate procedure. Officers know that much of the community stays off phones except in emergencies, and they are trained to read the street accordingly. "Our approach is centered on awareness, understanding, and respect," Adams said.

His advice to officers in other cities is the kind you could print on a squad car visor: "Don't wait until something happens to introduce yourself. Get out there, meet with community leaders, learn about their traditions, and find out what concerns they have. And don't be afraid to ask questions. Something as simple as sitting down with a rabbi for five minutes and asking about a particular tradition or custom can teach you something you probably wouldn't have known otherwise."

And the line every chief should read twice: "Providing security and building relationships aren't two separate things. They really go hand in hand. At the end of the day, people want to feel safe, respected, and understood."

Most departments talk about community policing. Bexley rented it a room.

Master Police Officer Allen Perry of the Virginia Beach Police Department runs the city's security program for houses of worship, and he got there the way a lot of good police work starts: a supervisor who cared.

"When I was a rookie, my supervisor was the one who got me started on this journey," Perry said. "He brought up the importance of protecting our religious communities and what we could do to help."

Later, in the Crime Prevention Unit, he was trained to do security assessments for businesses and homes. "No one was really comfortable with working in religious institutions. When the unit got requests from R.I.s I started to handle them." Then came the 2015 shooting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Demand for training jumped, and Perry was asked to build a full program of outreach, training and assessments. It has run in its current form since 2015.

For Jewish congregations in Virginia Beach, that has meant in-house training for staff and members, security assessments of their buildings, and seats at the department's large-scale yearly scenario trainings and its Religious Institutions Safety & Security Academy, where congregations that would never otherwise meet end up in the same room.

What Perry learned is the thing frum readers will recognize first. "Within the Jewish faith I have found a wide range from the more orthodox to the conservative to the reform and more. Each has its own traditions and religious rights that we must respect while balancing safety and security. This has led to some creative solutions in some cases."

He came in with a head start. "I grew up with several Jewish friends. One of them is a rabbi in the Orthodox faith. I believe that faith groups are often seen as closed or insular, and that has never been my experience with any of them. I have found myself invited to community events and worship in almost every group to include our Jewish communities."

The department's case for the program is not only safety. "It builds bridges with communities and the police department," VBPD said, and "brings a positive perspective to a police department operating in an era where law enforcement faces frequent criticism."

Perry's advice for officers elsewhere: "That's simple. I would suggest that they go out there and meet the people that they serve. Connect with them. If it's a group they aren't familiar with, then all the better. The people in the Jewish community that we have met have all been open and welcoming. They are quick to offer help and add value to the community."

Every Jewish community benefits from a police department that knows it. A frum community needs it more, and for a reason most officers have never had to think about.

For 25 hours every week, and for days at a time on Yom Tov, a frum neighborhood goes quiet in a way no other neighborhood does. Phones are off. Nobody is checking a security camera app. Families walk to shul in the dark, Friday night and again after Havdalah, in groups, at hours anyone can predict. The shul is full at the same times every week, and everyone in the neighborhood knows when.

That is the window when a community is most visible and least able to pick up the phone. It is also when an officer who already knows the street, the shul, the rabbi and the gabbai is worth more than any camera.

It is why Bexley's Judaism 101 matters as much as the patrols, and why MPO Perry talks about "creative solutions" that respect the tradition while keeping people safe. An officer who knows why a man won't sign a form on Shabbos, why a family is walking instead of driving, or why nobody answered the door buzzer, is an officer who reads the situation correctly the first time.

And it is why both models point the same way. Bexley's officers will soon be standing at the shul when the doors open. Virginia Beach's congregations have already walked their own buildings with an officer and practiced what to do. Neither depends on somebody making a call they can't make.

Bexley and Virginia Beach aren't alone. Kol America went looking for every police department in the country with a formal, public bridge to its Jewish community. So far:

What surprised us is the empty space. Some of the biggest frum communities in America, including Lakewood, Teaneck, Passaic, Baltimore County, Skokie, Cleveland Heights and Southfield, have no formal liaison program we could find on the public record. Many have excellent police relationships built on Shomrim, Hatzalah and a lot of phone calls. They just aren't written down anywhere, which means they depend on who happens to be chief.

This map grows every week. If your department has a liaison, a synagogue officer or a training program we missed, email [email protected] and we'll add it.

Two very different places, an Ohio suburb and a Virginia beach town, and the same lesson from both sides of the badge: the relationship has to exist before the emergency does.

Bexley built it into brick and mortar. Virginia Beach built it into a classroom. Either way, the officer who shows up on the worst day is not a stranger.

Next week: Portland and Palm Beach County, two departments that answered our questions the same surprising way. Not with one officer's name, but with a system: a phone call made before anyone is in danger, and a deputy assigned to every shul that signs up. Departments from Los Angeles to Milwaukee have told us their answers are on the way, too.

The best security plan is a phone number you already know by heart. The second best is an officer who already knows yours.

How we reported this: Kol America sent identical written questions to police departments with significant Jewish communities nationwide beginning Oct. 28, 2026; quotes come from written answers provided by the Bexley Police Department and the Virginia Beach Police Department, edited only for length. Funding and program details for Bexley come from Officer Adams, the City of Bexley's job posting and Columbus Jewish News coverage; JewishColumbus's statement is from its Aug. 14, 2026 Friday Five; hate crime figures are from the FBI's 2025 data; map entries come from department, city and community announcements. Bexley's belief that its program will be the first in the country is the department's own description and was not independently verified. Rabbi Howard Zack of Torat Emet was contacted and had not responded by publication; his quote is from the Columbus Jewish News. This is a positive series and no agency was asked about investigations or incidents. Our publisher, Pesach Lattin, comes from a public safety family that includes deputies and a fire chief.