Ravenna graduate Jake Smallfield has always been drawn to a calling where he can help people, much like his family with its decades of service in the Ravenna Fire Department. Smallfield has worked his way up the ranks in the Ravenna Police Department and has reached the top, having been sworn in as the new Chief of Police by Mayor Frank Seman on June 23.
“It is an honor to take the reins of the police department in the town that I grew up in,” Smallfield told The Weekly Villager. “They say it takes a village to raise a kid and this town helped raise me and I love to have come back to a town that helped me become the man that I am.”
Smallfield succeeds Jeff Wallis, who announced his retirement in April after serving as Ravenna’s Chief of Police for eight years.
When Wallis stepped down, the Police Department sought his replacement from within, with Smallfield being one of several officers who applied for the position. After a thorough assessment process from an outside company, Smallfield was selected by Seman to become Wallis’ successor.
The 1992 Ravenna graduate has 25 years of experience, all coming from within the Ravenna Police Department. He originally joined the Department as a patrolman shortly after he graduated from Youngstown State University and rose up the ladder, receiving several promotions before assuming the top position.
Still easing into his new role four months after being officially sworn in, Smallfield said that he has not needed to make drastic changes, as Wallis in changed the Department’s culture for the better over the last several years.
“Chief Wallis and I started on midnights together, we spent a lot of time on midnights,” he noted. “We really put this Department in the right place. We have a lot of young officers. We have one officer on the road with 20-plus years’ experience and the rest of them are under 10 years and are very young. I think the two of us have led this department in the right direction.”
For Smallfield, civil service had been the calling card of his family for the last several decades as his great-grandfather, grandfather, father and uncle all served in the Ravenna Fire Department with his great-grandfather and grandfather each having been Fire Chief.
According to Smallfield, he also wanted to continue the family legacy of being a firefighter but was drawn to the field of police work when he returned home from Youngstown State University and discovered the opportunity to become a police officer.
After playing football under Jim Tressel at Youngstown State and being a member of two national championship squads, Smallfield continued being involved with football by coaching Ravenna football and encountered an assistant coach who served as a police officer.
Upon his colleague’s recommendation, Smallfield applied for a job as a police officer and started his career at a patrolman.
Smallfield said that he took a lot of the lessons he learned from football into making him a better police officer.
“Football is a translation into life,” he said. “You have to learn to work with others. That is a team game as is being a police officer. You are always relying on your officers to watch your back and help you out and football is the same way, you count on your brothers and sisters to help you through.”
He acknowledged that it was a difficult adjustment period as he settled into his new job in his hometown, and that on several occasions he had to discipline his friends for stepping outside the law.
“Sometimes it has to be done and there are a few of them that I am still friends with,” he said. “Sometimes they recognize what they did, and it was against the law but those were growing pains and hard times when you have to put handcuffs on somebody that was your friend.”
As Smallfield worked his way up the ladder, he acknowledged that each promotion stripped him of opportunities to work in the field as each new title came with additional administrative responsibilities but also enabled him opportunities to make necessary changes. As much as he missed the daily grind of being a patrolman, he embraced the prospect of implementing changes where he saw fit and when he became a captain, he and Wallis worked in unison to create a new direction for the Department.
Now installed as the new Chief of Police, Smallfield is maintaining the changes that he and Wallis worked hard to implement over the last several years.
