By Ashley M. Casey
Staff Writer
At age 22, Mike Lefancheck was a wanted man. He had four different police agencies after him: the county sheriff, Syracuse, DeWitt and Baldwinsville.
But Lefancheck was no criminal. He had just passed the police officer exam and was looking for a job. The Baldwinsville Police Department nabbed him in 1987, and he’s been there ever since.
“I had just turned 22 in July and I was hired in September. I was a young 22,” said Lefancheck, who became police chief in 2008. “There are officers that weren’t even born yet when I started working here.”
Lefancheck had dreamed of becoming a police officer since age 4. He grew up in Liverpool, and his only dealings with B’ville in during his childhood were CYO basketball games. Liverpool and Baldwinsville were rivals.
“I could never think of a good reason to come out here,” he said.
The town of DeWitt and the village of Baldwinsville both offered Lefancheck a position on their police forces, and he chose B’ville. Now, the Liverpool native has four children who grew up here and graduated from Baker High School. The chief’s parents have even moved to Baldwinsville, and he has lunch with them every week.
“This always felt like a good fit for me and a good place for me,” Lefancheck said. “I couldn’t have asked for a better place to spend my career in law enforcement.”
When Lefancheck first started in 1987, Baldwinsville was still a sleepy little village.
“July 4 was a ghost town the first few years I was on the job,” he recalled.
Then, the village revitalized its waterways, built the Paper Mill Island Amphitheater and revamped its trails. Businesses popped up along the river and the Four Corners.
“Now you can’t come through town on July 4 because it’s a mob scene,” Lefancheck said. “Baldwinsville has become a place where people spend their time.”
With a growing populace, more businesses and greater tourist activity has come more responsibilities for the police department. B’ville cops provide extra security and traffic control for local events, and the department has increasingly dealt with the aftershocks of drug abuse in the community. In the last few years, heroin and other opioids have plagued Central New York.
“Back then when I started, the main drug that was prevalent was cocaine,” Lefancheck said. “I had seen heroin … maybe a couple times before I took over as chief.”
Prior to the Baldwinsville Central School District’s 2016 push to address mental health and substance abuse issues, Lefancheck told the Messenger, “If you’d told me eight and a half years ago that that our officers would on a daily basis be dealing with heroin … I would have questioned your logic.”
Lefancheck said the opioid crisis has become more of a public health issue than a law enforcement issue. The Baldwinsville Police Department has helped battle the epidemic through outreach in the schools and getting to know members of the community, for better or for worse, through patrols.
“Since 1972, our department has been a community-based agency, [focusing] on community policing for much longer than I’ve been a policeman,” Lefancheck said.
In fact, the community service aspect of the job is what the chief finds most rewarding. His favorite memory is teaching the DARE program in the schools. He’s even friends with some of his former students on Facebook.
“I did that for many, many years. I still have people that are married with their own children come up to me,” Lefancheck said. “That was probably the most rewarding time of my career.
“Working in a small community like this, you really have an opportunity to get to know people, become a trusted source, that you might not in a larger organization,” Lefancheck said. “It’s given me the ability to interact with a lot of different people in the community.”
Lefancheck has been offered opportunities in other departments, and he even had the chance at a chief’s job when he was still a lieutenant. But he opted to stay in Baldwinsville.
“What’s special about B’ville is the people who live here,” Lefancheck said. “People from Baldwinsville are proud that they’re from Baldwinsville. There’s families here that go back two, three, four generations, which is pretty unique.”
The chief has met friends through patrolling the neighborhoods and through community events, organizations and school activities.
“I’ve met people that I will have friendships with long after I retire,” he said.
Those friends have helped the Lefancheck family through the hardest of times. When the chief’s wife, Bridgett, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, “that spirit of community really shone through,” Lefancheck recalled. Maureen’s Hope offered support to the family during Bridgett’s illness, and their son Tom’s lacrosse team stepped up, too.
“The mothers of that team got together and cooked dinners for us. We had dinners showing up every night,” Lefancheck said. “These women were pulling out their best recipes and cooking for an army.”
Bridgett passed away in 2012. Now the youngest of the Lefanchecks, Meghan, is a sophomore in college. Her twin older brothers, Chris and Greg, are biomedical engineers, and Greg is pursuing a master’s degree in public health. The oldest Lefancheck son, Tom, has gone back to school for nursing.
“They will all call Baldwinsville their hometown,” Lefancheck said. “It goes without saying, but I will say I’m incredibly proud of all four of them.”
With 30 years under his belt in B’ville, Lefancheck said he has a “loose plan” for retirement, but isn’t ready to step down yet.
“I’m certainly much closer to the end of my career than I am to the beginning,” he said. “There’s some days when you’re like, ‘Should I put the papers in?’ But you have that whether you have 30 years or three years.”
Regardless of when he chooses to retire, Lefancheck said he is still “living [his] dream” at the B’ville Police Department.
“I hope that when I do retire, the community feels that I served them well and I helped to carry on the tradition from the 1970s of community policing,” Lefancheck said. “That’s one thing I do not plan to change as long as I’m sitting in this office.”
