After more than two decades of use, electrical tape along the spine holds her Bible together.
It lived a while in her patrol car, and in her hands for even longer. She’s read every word, cover to cover - something she takes pride in.
Now, its aged binding and long-loved pages will reside more often at her desk as chief of police than on the road.
Newly sworn-in North Myrtle Beach Police Chief Dana Crowell credits her promotion and years of service in the department to the things she’s learned from her tattered Bible. She holds her aging copy dear and said she couldn’t imagine parting with it.
“My faith is how I get through everything,” Crowell said.
She joined the law enforcement field at just 22 years old and has been with the North Myrtle Beach Police Department for over two decades. She is the first woman to be in her new position.
“There’s really nothing in the department that I haven’t done or supervised,” she said.
Crowell’s favorite position she has held so far in the department was when she was in the K-9 unit. She said her partner Cindy - a Belgian Malinois from Holland - was the best partner she ever had.
During her swearing-in ceremony at city hall on Jan. 6, NMB city manager Mike Mahaney said Crowell is fit for the police chief position not only because of her array of experiences across nearly every area of the police department but because of her team spirit as well.
“We love our community and we want to do what’s right for them,” Crowell said of herself and her fellow officers. “I always say that North Myrtle Beach is special and I can’t explain it. It’s just a special little town and the citizens are special and the officers are just different.”
She graduated high school knowing she wanted to be a police officer, but her parents were not on board at first.
“Most of the time, people that wind up in law enforcement, a lot of times it’s because they have a family member or a parent and they follow in their footsteps, but I actually didn’t,” she said. “My parents didn’t think I should be a police officer, especially 20 years ago. Really, it was a money thing. My dad said, ‘You’ll make better money if you go to school for business,’ so I went for the first semester into business and I hated it and then I said, ‘I’m going to school for criminal justice. It’s just what I want to do.’”
Crowell’s same resolve that brought her into the criminal justice field also earned her the top position in the North Myrtle Beach Police Department.
“I’m just the type of person that when I put my mind to something, you’re not going to stop me from doing it,” she said. “I’m focused. I got a lot of grit. I really believe policing is a noble career and that you have to have a certain morality and integrity and that is important to me.”
Morality and integrity are qualities Crowell seeks in new hires. She has worked in hiring for the department for a while, and growing the department is one of her main goals as chief.
She hopes to hire officers who wear the badge for the right reasons.
“I am very passionate about hiring good police officers and just being a good person. You have to have standards and good officers want that. The good guys do not like working with someone who doesn't deserve to wear a badge,” she said. “What makes a good officer are human skills like being able to read body language.”
Crowell said the officers around the country who mistreat citizens and lose their badges often have a lack of training or did not come into the profession with the right intentions.
“There are mistakes of the heart and there’s mistakes of the mind,” she said. “It’s different when you’re hurting someone or you’re doing something intentional.”
For over two decades, Crowell’s intentions have been to bring positive experiences to the citizens of North Myrtle Beach.
“Early on in my career, I decided that every contact I had with someone, I was going to try to make it positive,” she said. “As police officers, we are dealing with people on their worst days. Most of the time people are calling police, it’s not for a good reason, so we’re coming to them on their worst day and even when you’re doing a traffic stop, you don’t know if the person you’re pulling over just got engaged and it’s the best day of their life, or maybe their mom just died.”
Crowell’s door is always open to her officers. She said she encourages officers to treat the citizens of North Myrtle Beach like they would want their own family member to be treated.
Empathy, bravery and respect are qualities she also seeks in her officers. She tells them to treat everyone they encounter while out on the job with kindness until they have a reason to treat them otherwise.
“There are going to be people that want to hurt you before you ever turn on the blue lights, so you need to be cautious, but there is no reason to treat anyone unfairly or hatefully and our police department just doesn’t do that,” she said.
Having grown up in Loris, Crowell loves rural life. When she isn’t wearing her badge, she is often caring for her animals or volunteering with the youth at Loris First Baptist Church.
She calls her family “blended and blessed.” She has three daughters of her own and spends a lot of time fostering her long-distance relationship with her husband, who has a few children of his own, and is an assistant police chief in Louisville, Kentucky.
“We’ve been married for two years. We’ve been together for five and we both travel a lot. He actually travels more here,” she said. “He stays busy and I stay busy but we see each other at least every other weekend but a lot of times, it’s every weekend. We have to talk and we have to communicate because we don’t see each other every day, so I think we are probably closer than most married couples just because we communicate so much.”
Crowell described a sixth sense officers often have that helps them cope with the dangers of the job. In a relationship like Crowell’s where her husband is also paid to put his life at risk for the safety of others, she said that sixth sense comes in handy and helps her know everything will be OK.
“I don’t really have fear of death because I know what comes next. I’m never really fearful of this job. I am obviously careful, but not fearful,” she said. “My spiritual gift is that I just know everything is going to be OK.”
One of her most read verses in her old dilapidated Bible is Jeremiah 29:11. Crowell remains diligent and fearless in her job because she trusts there is a plan and a purpose, as the verse says, to her life and to her career.
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