Officer Friendly Retires

Joe Avery — aka Officer Friendly to neighbors he policed and advised and informed for two decades — turned in the gun he never had to shoot on the job.

He handed in his badge, too. Tuesday was his last day of work as a city cop.

It was an emotional moment. A graduate of the police academy’s cutting-edge Class of ​‘92, Avery and his colleagues were the first recruits trained to bring community policing to New Haven. He took the philosophy to heart. As a beat cop in Fair Haven Heights and Morris Cove, he solved problems more often by getting to know people rather than arresting people. As a community services officer, he trained people all over town in how to avoid crime, from where to stash the GPS in their car to how to avoid date-rape drugs in a bar. As the department’s press spokesman, he earned the trust and appreciation (and fondness) of every reporter in town. (He even maintained his composure during this mess.)

Before checking out of 1 Union Ave. for the last time Tuesday, Avery wrote a farewell email to the neighborhood activists, journalists, and others he worked with over the years. The note reflected how a community cop sees the job.

He recalled in particular one case in which a woman on Quinnipiac Avenue paged him about an emergency. He had given her his card with his pager number. He gave just about everyone that card on his beat.

“[She] paged me to her home and jumped in the rear seat of my police car as I arrived and said, ​‘Arrest me and please get me help, Officer Avery. I just beat my kids with a belt buckle. Go inside and make sure they are OK. I am out of control,” Avery wrote.

“She trusted me not to judge her and trusted I would get her help.”

He did. He arranged for the state to take the kids temporarily. And he told the judge about the help the woman needed.

“Three months later I got a phone call from her asking me to stop by her home,” Avery’s farewell note continued. ​“When I did, I found her with her children and was thanked over and over for treating her with respect regardless of what she did at the time. It was part of a great twenty-year run.”