DATE: Sunday, April 6, 1997                 TAG: 9704040216

SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER      PAGE: 02   EDITION: FINAL 

COLUMN: RANDOM RAMBLES 

SOURCE: Tony Stein 

                                            LENGTH:   79 lines

SOUTH NORFOLK ROOTS MADE THE NEW POLICE CHIEF WHAT HE IS TODAY

On the morning of March 12, Richard Justice sat down for the first time behind the desk in the police chief's office. After five months as Chesapeake's interim chief, he had just officially been given the job.

Though the promotion capped a 31-year police career, Justice will tell you he had very mixed feelings. He was replacing Ian Shipley, the long-time colleague and good friend who died of a heart attack last October. ``Ian and I went back a long way,'' Justice says. ``It felt strange the first day I sat in his chair.''

There was something else Justice felt, too. He had been deputy chief. Now the eagles of top command were on his uniform shoulders. ``It's a cliche,'' he says, ``but all of a sudden I realized this is where the buck stops. I can't look around and see somebody else.''

There is a solidness, a directness, about Justice's voice and manner. And people who know him will tell you that what you see, what you hear, is what you get; a well-liked, well-respected police veteran with the ability to do the job right.

He's a home-town boy, too. He is, in fact, a sort of monument to some lost history of South Norfolk. That's the city that merged with old Norfolk County to form Chesapeake in 1963. Richard Arlen Justice was born at home 55 years ago in a section of South Norfolk called Jones' Switch. It was around Bainbridge Boulevard and Chesapeake Drive, and it got the name because a switcher named Jones rerouted trolley cars there.

Then there was Scuffletown, the section where Justice grew up. It was on the west side of Bainbridge along where Route 464 is now. The area earned the name ``Scuffletown,'' Justice says, because there were frequent fights.

Nevertheless, Justice, like just about everyone else who grew up in old South Norfolk, remembers a pleasant, picturesque and friendly Norman Rockwell kind of community. ``There were the stately avenues with canopies of elm trees and the trolley cars and the people who were so close-knit that everybody knew everyone else,'' Justice says.

But the tightness of the community had its occasional drawbacks. ``If you got into mischief away from home,'' Justice remembers, ``word of it would get home before you did.'' And on the subject of boyhood mischief, Chesapeake's new police chief owns up to perpetrating his share. Nothing bad, mind you, but enough so that an aunt once described him as a ``mean little kid.''

However, Justice prefers ``mischievous,'' as for instance when he and a pal tied another boy to a tree and left him there screaming and hollering. Justice got an extreme hollering from his parents about that one.

He lived with his grandparents for a while, and grandma didn't like it at all when her teen-ager started hanging out at Triangle Billiards. That was the legendary pool parlor on Poindexter Street across from the present South Norfolk library. The Triangle was run by the late Shorty Stallings who didn't allow any form of drinking, cussing or carrying on. He was friendly, generous to a fault and served hamburgers that were beef with a blessing. Mention Shorty to men who grew up in old South Norfolk and you're unlocking a whole mental trunk full of good memories.

Justice signed on with the police department in 1966 because he had friends who were already on the force. Among them were Shipley and John Newhart, now Chesapeake's sheriff. Ask Justice about his street-patrol days and he tells about the time he found himself looking down the barrel of a shotgun in the hands of a man thinking about doing bodily harm.

. And how does it feel to be face-to-face with a shotgun?

``It certainly gets your attention,'' Justice says.

But the incident ended peacefully after some fast and earnest talking. Anyway you look at it, Justice triumphed.

The new chief tells the shotgun story with a smile, but he's not smiling when he talks about serving as internal affairs officer. That's the one who investigates alleged police misconduct and the investigator tends to be as unpopular as pink slips on pay day.

``It's one of the toughest jobs you can do,'' Justice says. ``But I never felt ostracized. Most officers have no tolerance for the ones who tarnish the image.''

Looking at what's ahead for him, Justice says he wants to work hard to improve communication between the police and the broad community that Chesapeake has become. No more tight little South Norfolk and sprawling, rural Norfolk County. Instead, a big, busy semi-urban city with an increasingly transient population.

``And there's a partnership involved in the solution of problems,'' Justice says. ``The police can't do it all.''

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