POLICE ASSOCIATION OF NOVA SCOTIA 17 Sgt. Dave Cheverie is ready to retire after a fulfilling run as a police officer. Sgt. Dave Cheverie set a lively tone early for his adventurous police career. Just one week into what would become nearly a 34year run with the Charlottetown Police Services, Cheverie responded to a break and enter in progress at the former Farmer’s Market on Queen Street. A suspect was spotted on the roof of the building. Cheverie enthusiastically offered to go up and nab the man. The rookie, however, was told to stay put as other officers simply coaxed the suspect down. Cheverie quickly realized from his eagerness to dive into action that he was truly keen to be a cop. The heavily decorated officer has received the Star of Courage, the Cross of Valor and five times the CJRW Red Cross Life Saving Award, among others. All the while, he has performed his duty in fascinating — and often heroic — fashion. The native of Nottingham, England was clearly not made for standing on the sidelines. After finding no satisfaction in jobs like fishing lobster and being a roughneck on the oilrigs in Alberta, he applied in 1974 to be a constable with the capital city’s municipal police force. He spent his first four years on the front line responding to a host of crimes that today, he says, “sort of blend together.’’ As one who has always tried to turn a negative into a positive, Cheverie feels he was given valuable insights early on in his career when his own home was broken into. That sense of violation allowed him to better appreciate what victims of crime experience. “It gave me the empathy to sympathize with things,’’ he said. He always makes himself available to victims of crime or to others who have lost loved ones in motor vehicle collisions “to see what I can do for them.’’ Cheverie, a restless man who needs to be on the go and constantly challenged, jumped on every opportunity possible to ensure he experienced a full and diverse career. He has taken more than 50 courses en route to becoming a standardized field sobriety test instructor, a drug recognition instructor and a collision analyst/reconstructionist. He tried his hand successfully at many levels of policing. He even found his way to Kosovo in 2001 with the United Nations Peacekeeping Mission and four years later, was deployed to the Jordan International Police Training Center in Amman to instruct Iraqi police recruits in democratic policing and anti-terrorism. However, Cheverie did not have to leave Charlottetown to find interesting work as a police officer. He spent about one year working on a joint drug unit force learning investigative techniques such as wiretaps. He took part in the massive simultaneous raid of 38 bootlegging operations in Queens County in the early 1980s — one of the biggest raids in Atlantic Canada since prohibition. Cheverie had a stint with the major crime unit tackling everything from sexual assault to major thefts. Sgt. Dave Cheverie Retires Jim Day/Guardian graphic Published on March 30, 2012 Continued on page 19
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