Willingham: Israel Visit Underscores Importance of Community Ties With Police

A week after returning from a training trip to Israel, Rome Police Department Capt. Roy Willingham stressed the importance of community policing.

“One of the biggest things I’ve seen is how important it is to really be out in the community and listening to people,” he said. “We’re here to help people solve problems, but we can’t do it alone.”

That’s part of the focus of the training. GILEE is a research center within Georgia State University’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies whose focus is on the protection of civil and human rights during its development of executive leadership in policing agencies.

Willingham described Israel as a multicultural society and said he was impressed by the different police agencies’ commitments to build safer neighborhoods for minority communities in partnership with community stakeholders.

“I had a preconceived idea about the divisions in the country and it’s Israelis against Arabs, but it’s not,” Willingham said. “It’s still about the police protecting the citizens and they’re still doing community service.”

Willingham spent an intensive two weeks of public safety leadership training with the country’s top police executives for the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange’s 31st annual peer-to-peer executive education program.

The delegation included 17 Georgia police chiefs, sheriffs, and command staff along with a deputy director of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. The group toured police stations, religious centers and places of importance throughout the country.

Standing on the leveled site of the Sderot Police Station, overrun by Hamas in an attack on Oct. 7, was an especially solemn moment, Willingham said. The city of Sderot is the closest Israeli city to the Gaza border and many residents fled from the attack. In March, some of the residents began to return and rebuild their lives .

“It was an eye opener,” Willingham said.

The exchange with the Israel Police is one of several global professional exchanges GILEE hosts through the year.

“We expose our delegates to policing systems under different cultures, different legal systems and different structures to help enhance their professional leadership development,” GILEE Director Brent Cummings said. “For example, leadership dilemmas faced by Israel Police executives are relevant to leadership dilemmas our delegates face at home. They learn to recognize challenges and how to better deal with them while forming their own thoughts on how to be better leaders. Our delegates learn important lessons from their peers on how to better serve their own communities.”

The group also took time to honor the memory of J.R. Davidov, a GILEE graduate who visited Rome in November 2022 during an exchange program.

On Oct. 7, 2023, he was killed battling Hamas fighters in Kibbutz Re’im. Two weeks after the attack, the Rome City Commission read a proclamation condemning Hamas and expressing support for the defense of Israel.