HIGH PROFILE: Officer Tommy Norman

LITTLE ROCK — Officer Tommy Norman stopped by the North Little Rock Police Department on a recent Wednesday, his day off, before heading over to Park Hill Elementary to lead Star Student, a program honoring wellbehaved children.

Norman was running late, but he didn’t hesitate to offer assistance when he noticed a woman, obviously distressed as she and her two children waited to talk with someone behind a Plexiglas window. Her family’s house had burned a few days earlier, she told him. Everyone was OK, but they had nowhere to go. The Red Cross had helped with a couple of nights’ accommodations, but she wasn’t sure what they would do next.

“You call me after 1 o’clock today,” he told her, handing her a card with his cell-phone number on it. “I’ll help you get in touch with my church, and then we’ll go from there and see what we can do for you.”

Mary Ann Dawkins, vice president of marketing at Coulson Oil, saw the exchange and was not surprised. Norman seems to live for this.

Dawkins met Norman when he provided security at a Make-a-Wish event she hosted several years ago.

“He’s the most awesome person I have ever met. He’s got the biggest heart,” says Dawkins. “He made the comment earlier in the week that once he got through with Star Student he was just going to go home today and relax and just chill out. Well, now he’s going to help the people whose house has burned.”

Norman could make more money working security jobs on his days off, like the one he was doing when he met Dawkins.

“The older I get the more I want to focus on community and less on extra duty work,” he says. “As police officers, we don’t make a whole lot of money. Really, the money that you make - the good money you make, or the better money you make - is working off duty security at a high school football game, at Wal-Mart, at different events. You make better money working offduty. But I’ve learned to manage my money a little bit more and this year I have hardly done any of that.”

Norman spends his days off talking to groups in schools, day cares and elsewhere, as well as leading Star Student programs at Park Hill and Boone Park elementaries and at Immaculate Conception School. If he planned these things for when he was on the clock, he explains, he might get called away to handle an emergency. And he doesn’t want to disappoint the children who are expecting him.

“My captain, Mike Davis, he tries to slow me down a little bit because he says, ‘Tommy, you’ve got too much on your plate. You’re going to overdo it,’” says Norman. “But I don’t listen to him. I keep on going, because it’s a great feeling. I can honestly say that it’s something that I want to do until I can’t do it anymore.”

Some youngsters’ only knowledge of police officers might be through relatives who got in trouble, he says, but a kid who is befriended by a police officer is less likely to get in trouble himself because he won’t want to disappoint his role model.

“Another thing is that if a kid was on a street corner and happened to see someone kick a door in, and you pull up and they remember what you’ve done for them in the past, they’re going to tell you what that guy had on, they’re going to tell you which way he went,” says Norman.

“Kids do not lie, and they can tell when you’re genuine. If you’re being genuine, they’re going to latch on to you and you’ve got a friend you will never be able to get rid of.”

OFFERING COOL DRINKS

Norman walks the streets of the downtown North Little Rock neighborhoods he patrols, welcoming the company of children and taking the time to get to know residents. In the summer, he pops the trunk of his patrol car and offers cold drinks from an ice chest to children playing outside.

“At first some of them jumped back, some of them walked away - because what’s a police officer doing popping his trunk?” he says. “It got to the point after a few weeks, or a few months or maybe even after a few years, instead of them walking away, you can be three blocks away and they’re running to you. They want that drink.”

Shortly after he became a police officer in 1998, Norman saw a report on a national television news show about a Shop With a Cop program in Illinois, and he set out to start one in North Little Rock.

“It’s grown from maybe $3,000 or $4,000 in donations to up to $20,000 in donations this year,” he says.

Through Shop With a Cop, the children of single parents who live in North Little Rock are given gift cards to spend at Wal-Mart stores each Dec. 1, shopping alongside a North Little Rock police officer for toys and clothes for themselves plus at least one gift for a family member.

After Shop With a Cop was under way, Norman started building up another charity event - Season of Giving.

“At first we had two homes we delivered toys and food to, now we’ve grown to 15,” he says. “And it’s a parade. We meet at the Police Department at 10 a.m. a few days before Christmas. The motorcycle officers lead the way, and it’s a parade to 15 different homes.”

The adults in those households know what’s coming, but the children don’t.

“We like for it to be a surprise for the kids, make it special for them,” says Norman. “I started getting calls back in September about Shop With a Cop and Season of Giving, because we’ve developed such a reputation for giving that people know to call the North Little Rock Police Department.”

LONGTIME VOLUNTEER

Norman has been a volunteer since he was too young to be employed.

“I was around 11 or 12 years old and I saw a program on TV called Feed the Children, where they have children on TV from other countries and you can send money in and you adopt the child. They send you a picture of the child and a bio of the child,and the money you send in every month goes toward that child and feeding that child,” he says. “I was cutting grass back then and some of the money I made cutting grass, I sent off to a child.”

He began scouring the High Profile section every Sunday for volunteer opportunities.

“That’s how I found out about Big Brothers Big Sisters, that’s how I found out about United Way Paint Your Heart Out,” he explains. “And I went and painted houses, and I went and picked up some fans to deliver them to the elderly. I don’t go out, I don’t go clubbing, I don’t drink, I don’t smoke. Sports is my fix in my personal time.My fix in my professional life is doing this.”

Norman wasn’t old enough to drive when he started volunteering with Meals on Wheels. So his mother, Modena Pruss of Sherwood, drove him.

Then he volunteered through Lions World Services for the Blind. That organization called with a request from a woman in west Little Rock who needed to go to a home improvement store.

“Man, I was so happy. I picked her up and took her to Home Depot and helped her pick out a few things and brought her home and just leaving her house, it was the best feeling in the world,” he says. “I can tell you, I got hooked right away. And I’ve been hooked ever since.”

Before Norman became a police officer, he was a certified nursing assistant at Pinnacle Pointe Hospital in Little Rock. While there, he coordinated Meals on Wheels volunteer work with some of the patients.

As a rookie on the force, he kicked off a Meals on Wheels initiative through St. Patrick’s Catholic School and St. Mary’s Catholic School. For a couple of years while that program was operating, he used school vehicles to take up to 12 eighth-graders to deliver meals once a month.

MEETING AFTER ACCIDENT

Norman met retired school nurse Jean Cook when she was involved in an accident in August 2007 after a car ran a red light at McCain Boulevard and Fairway Avenue.

Cook was surprised to see Norman at her door later that day.

“He just dropped by to see how I was feeling,” she says. “Later on that afternoon, he called me and he said he was going off of duty and he lived in Maumelle and if I needed anything I should call him.”

Norman checked on her again the next day, though, and eventually Cook found out that Norman was sitting in his living room late at night to put together goody bags for Star Students.

“I offered to help him so he brought all the stuff over and told me what he had been doing and I just took it over,” she says.

Cook says Norman now calls or stops by to check on her several times a week. “He’s always glad when I have something for him to eat, too. It’s been a real nice, friendly relationship. Gosh, I’m old enough to be his grandmother. I’ve got two boys who are older than he is. I think that I was a welcome addition to his life, and I guess he was to mine, too.”

Norman is the youngest of nine children.

“I’m a twin, and I’m actually four minutes older than my twin sister, Tammy,” he explains. “So, technically, she’s the youngest.”

He is especially close to his oldest brother, Michael Mills of North Little Rock.

“He always spent time with me when my dad couldn’t or wasn’t there,” says Norman, who was in junior high school when his father, Dean Norman, and his mother divorced. “Michael took me to play basketball, bowling, took me to church, and if it wasn’t for that, for him and for my mom, I could have easily taken the wrong road in life, which would have prevented me from fulfilling my dreams today.”

Norman graduated from Ole Main High School in North Little Rock in 1990. He married shortly after graduation, but divorced in 1999. He has two children - Mitchell, 17, and Alyssa, 15 - whom he takes to and picks up from school almost every day.

Ronnie Grice has known Norman through all of that and was his roommate for a while after graduation.

“What you see is what you get. He’s very transparent,” says Grice. “We’re more like brothers than like friends. Where I get the joy out of Tommy is where I get to see him operate and shine in his gift.”

Norman was 9 the first time he met a police officer, a man who stopped while Norman was playing in the front yard of his family’s home in the Levy community in North Little Rock.

“He just asked me what I was doing and how my day was going. I had a few friends with me, and he asked howthey were doing. I got to see the badge and I got to see the officer’s face,” says Norman. “Basically, he just took the time to stop. That meant a lot to me because as a child seeing a police car and the uniform, it kind of put me in awe. You always saw them driving by but never stopping. I would say that’s what started my love affair with police work, being a child and that police officer stopping and just taking the time to talk to me and ask how I was doing.”

He doesn’t remember the name of that officer, but he was a teenager when he got to know officer Mike Shepard, now retired, who was on bike patrol back then.

A COMMUNITY FOCUS

Shepard was part of North Little Rock’s community-oriented police program, and he was still on the force when Norman became an officer.

“We’re always tickled to death whenever any of the guys from there grow up and want to go to work there. That’s always a positive sign,” says Shepard, now vice president of security at Metropolitan National Bank in Little Rock. “Tommy has always taken care of whatever neighborhood he was in, above and beyond, public contact and truly caring about the city and everybody that’s in it.”

Norman says he is the subject of some good-natured ribbing at the Police Department.

“I get teased because they know I like to keep stickers and things - my police car is full of surprises,” he says. “The first shooting I ever went to as a police officer, I was a rookie and a guy got shot in the arm. One police officer said, ‘Did you stick a police badge sticker over his wound?’ My nickname is Officer Friendly at the Police Department. I’m the butt of some jokes sometimes, but they do support me.”

In fact, some who used to drive by the bus stop where Norman spends 45 minutes to an hour each morning now stop there, too.

The bus stop at 16th and Marion streets is in his patrol area, and his initial intention was to protect the kids before school, not just by driving by but by sticking around.

“Those kids, they get a bag of chips or candy, or I have a volunteer at the substation who donates scarves and ponchos. Now when I make a stop every morning, they’re expecting something. That could make them have a good day, maybe they’ll make a good grade on the test because they feel good about themselves.”

He gets something out of the deal, too, he admits.

“It’s twofold, really,” says Norman. “It makes me feel good and it makes them feel good. I would say it makes them feel good, it makes me feel even better.”

SELF PORTRAIT Tommy Norman

DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH Aug. 22, 1972, North Little Rock.

IF I COULD PICK ONE PRESENT FOR ONE PERSON, I WOULD CHOOSE A new house for my mom.

WHEN I WANT TO RELAX, I Watch ESPN.

THE BEST TIME OF DAY FOR ME IS When I’m at work.

IF I WERE STRANDED ON A DESERT ISLAND, THE THREE THINGS I WOULD WANT TO HAVE WITH ME WOULD BE A television set and my two kids.

TO MY FANTASY DINNER PARTY, I WOULD INVITE My mom, Michael Jordan, Mother Teresa, Denzel Washington and John F. Kennedy.

MY FAVORITE CHILDHOOD MEMORY IS OF Meeting a police officer for the first time.

I LOVE IT WHEN My kids tell me they love me.

MY KIDS THINK I Don’t take enough time out for myself. They’re big on that.

IN HIGH SCHOOL, I WAS Not well known and only had a few select friends.

ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP Compassionate.