May 3, 2026
Brevard Fire Chief Chase Owen (lerf) and City Manager Wilson Hooper (right) listen to Brevard Police Chief Christy Wentzell (center) review her first four months as the ‘top cop’ in the Brevard Police Department. Jonathan Rich / BrevardBeagle.com
Jonathan Rich
BrevardBeagle,com
Brevard’s newest police chief was sworn into office Jan. 5 and after four months on the job Christy Wentzell has implemented some suggestions from a $75,000 independent organizational assessment of the Brevard Police Department and added many more of her own to improve staff morale, protect the city’s residents and serve the general public with an improved Brevard Police Department that is seeking state accreditation.
In the spring of 2025 Brevard City Council contracted with the Berry Dunn accounting and consulting firm to perform an outside organizational assessment of the Brevard Police Department using in-person interviews and electronic surveys.
The initial report was produced in August 2025, but in October 2025 work was paused when Police Chief Tom Jordan retired and Jack Moorman began a three-month term as the department’s interim chief of police.
Brevard’s first female police chief Christy Wentzell (center) takes her oath of office with her son Bode (left) and daughter Heather (right) by her side in City Council Chambers on Jan. 5, 2026. City of Brevard
In late 2025, Christy Wentzell was chosen as the ‘top cop’ for Brevard’s vacancy. She has 25 years of law enforcement experience in Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina with her last job as the commander of the criminal investigations division (CID) in Apex, just outside of Raleigh.
At the city’s April 27 Public Safety Committee meeting, Chief Wentzell explained how the Berry Dunn assessment suggested the need to resolve organizational concerns, communication issues, as well as morale and procedural situations, in a positive way once she started working at 132 Commerce Street.
“They found that the department was suffering from centralized decision-making,” Wentzell explained. “Lieutenants and up did not feel comfortable being able to make a decision. They wanted to run their decisions up the chain of command and get final say-so from the chief … everything was incumbent upon whether or not it would be approved by top leadership and that in turn led to limited supervisor empowerment.”
To counteract that, Wentzell said she met with officers and staff individually to clearly define their roles, what they wanted from their work, and improve trust issues so all involved may achieve their personal and professional goals.
“In my first 30 days, I met with every single officer and every single civilian employee within the police department,’” she said. “I have met with all supervisors in the department. They have been given defined expectations for what I expect from my sergeants and what we really are trying to structure. In addition, we’ve delegated responsibilities when we look at role and clarity issues.”
The Brevard Police Department is currently budgeted for 25 sworn officer positions and there are some changes in the works. City of Brevard
That has led to some staffing changes within the Brevard Police Department.
“Currently, we are organizing all clear and primary duties for each primary job assignment and then we are clearing up who’s responsible for what extra creative assignments that they have,” the chief told members of the Public Safety Committee. “In addition to the department restructuring, one of the things that was mentioned was our police department at the time was a little top-heavy for the size of the department to have two captains and then five lieutenants. It didn’t really make sense.”
The department is currently budgeted for 25 sworn positions; however, two of those positions are temporarily frozen for the upcoming budget year. There are currently four job vacancies within the Brevard Police Department, ranging from deputy chief to a position previously occupied by a sergeant who is out on military leave.
“We are currently restructuring. We have consolidated the two captains’ positions into a deputy chief position,” Wentzell said of this new position she held a round of in-person interviews for evaluation last week.
She said there was also an open position in the criminal investigations division which is under review. “We’ve done a workload analysis to determine if it needs to be a lieutenant’s position as opposed to a sergeant and where could that lieutenant’s role be better served.”
The chief said one lieutenant took an unanticipated retirement and another officer was dismissed. “As a result of those changes, I made the decision to move my CID personnel back to the road because of staffing shortages,” Wentzell said. “We’re looking at what our investigative capabilities are and at our workload. That was the best decision to make for overall staffing.”
The department’s criminal investigations division was temporarily working some weekend patrol shifts to cover staffing shortages, but will soon be back on a traditional Monday-Friday 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. schedule.
She also now has a part-time officer working as a special events coordinator within the Police Department to schedule law enforcement coverage in advance of large downtown events like the upcoming White Squirrel Weekend, July 4th festivities, and the annual Christmas parade.
“We’re creating an incident action plan specific for law enforcement and safety that we will work with in conjunction with Sheriff Owenby in terms of where we are and what we’re doing,” Wentzell said, noting there has also been additional collaboration with the Brevard Fire Department as well as the city’s Planning Department in terms of advance planning and permitting for large groups of visitors at these public events. “We have a good security plan in place along with the Heart of Brevard for many of those things that we’re implementing.”
Another change she has instituted is regular staff, division, and individual meetings to follow up on previous concerns with plans for the future.
“I meet with my lieutenants once a month. In addition to regular communications, I meet with my admin staff once a month,” she said. “Professional staff and non-uniformed staff have a tendency to feel unsupported or not as important as the sworn members, so this is kind of a way to equalize their position within the department and reinforce that we are all interconnected and embodied with one another.”
Those meetings are sometimes informal, but the new chief said they are always followed up with written responses and usually a digital one, too.
“Any meeting that I have, they get a PowerPoint and it has all the topics of discussion on it,” Wentzell explained. ”I do that for two purposes. One, for clarity’s sake, but two, if something is not followed up on correctly or an expectation is not met they can’t tell me ‘I didn’t know’ because not only did we talk about it, but you got a PowerPoint.”
The Brevard Police Department plans to seek state and national accreditation in the next calendar year. City of Brevard
The Brevard Police Department is also seeking state performance reviews from the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies.
“It means the department is meeting industry standards across-the-board and that we’re being held accountable for best practices and industry standards in-law enforcement profession,” she explained. “Not only do you have to have the policies, you have to show the proof and it’s a pretty intensive process, so there have been significant changes to the department of policy.”
Those changes do not indicate what was happening within the department before was wrong, but that communication about issues within the department needed to be improved.
“There are things that the state requires that the department may have been doing already, it just wasn’t codified,” Wentzell said. “Now we have all this policy training and we have expectations on reading policy that we weren’t doing any effective training to do. I’m asking questions to make sure there’s clarity.”
Then, the chief said, she follows up on everything.
“Once we incorporate those changes, I send it out to my command staff and I get their input, what’s good, what’s bad, what they like, what they don’t like,” she said. “I get their feedback again to look for blind spots.”
Wentzell is still working on other ideas to improve job satisfaction, such as scheduled time for personnel to maintain physical fitness standards as part of her six-month, 12-month, and 18-month strategic plans for local law enforcement under her leadership.
Brevard Police Chief Christy Wentzell. City of Brevard
“We have had to put a deferred extension for our North Carolina state accreditation due to some concerns that we’ve had with policy, but we intend to receive state accreditation by March 2027,” she said. “We will have a preliminary in October where they will come out and do a mock assessment before we come out for final approval in March. We’ll know by October where we’re at, where our baseline is, if we’re hitting those marks that we need to hit for more accreditation in March.”
Brevard City Manager Wilson Hooper said the Berry Dunn assessment, though expensive, was necessary to give city leaders a realistic look at the Brevard Police Department and provide Wentzell an honest overview of our local law enforcement landscape.
“I thank Berry Dunn for giving us non-law enforcement folks an unbiased understanding of what life was like at BPD and what changes could improve the culture there,” Hooper said. “I’m grateful for our officers and civilian staff for participating in the process and providing candid feedback to the Berry Dunn team. Though the changes recommended in the report would’ve been implemented regardless of who occupies the chief’s chair, I’m grateful to former Interim Chief Moorman and now Chief Wentzell for taking the baton and running the next leg of this figurative race towards forming a model department.”
Brevard Mayor Maureen Copelof was likewise complimentary of Chief Wentzell’s performance the past four months.
“I am extremely impressed with how Chief Wentzell has ‘hit the deck’ running as Brevard Chief of Police. She immediately focused on listening to the members of the police department and earning their trust and respect. She is applying sound leadership principles to the challenges the department faces and has focused on instituting innovative approaches that will help us achieve our strategic goals for the BPD,” Copelof said. “Chief Wentzell has also done an excellent job establishing open communication with the diverse sectors of our community demonstrating her ability to truly listen and understand the concerns of our residents. I look forward to continuing to work with her as we build on the findings from the Barry Dunn report and continue to strengthen and build a fully accredited police department.”
More information on the Berry Dunn Report:
- BPD Future State Analysis Report.pdf
- Chief Wentzell’s presentation on organizational health assessment (April 2026).pdf
Jonathan Rich can be reached at Editor@BrevardBeagle.com.