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ALEXANDRIA, Va. - The photographs begin in color and end in black and white.
Fifteen framed portraits line the walls of the Alexandria Police Department's newly dedicated Chief's Conference Room — every person who has led the department since James Webster took the job in 1870. The most recent images are sharp and vivid. Travel far enough down the wall and the faces fade into photographs that look more like artifacts than records.
A 16th frame has not yet been filled.
On Tuesday, July 21, three of those leaders gathered in that room for lunch — former Chief David Baker, who served from 2006 to 2009; former Chief Don Hayes, who served as acting chief beginning in June 2021 before being officially appointed in April 2022 and serving through February 2024; and current Chief Tarrick McGuire, who was sworn in Dec. 10, 2024. The occasion: a candid conversation about what the Alexandria Police Department has been, what it is now, and what it still needs to become.
The Alexandria Brief was invited to sit in.
Coming From Outside
Baker arrived at APD having spent years with the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department. The welcome was cold.
"I would go into the break rooms and there'd be a group of Alexandria people, and they'd go like this," Baker said, miming a group falling silent. "There was a lot of anger and angst. There was an uneasiness and a lack of cohesiveness."
He had come in under Chief Charles Edward Samarra, who led the department from 1990 to 2006 and whose own arrival had met similar resistance. Officers weren't sure what an outsider was going to do to their department. Baker's instinct was to say nothing about how things were done in D.C. It doesn't play well, he said. Even if it's true.
What he and Samarra did instead was dismantle a promotion system the department already knew was broken. "We could literally tell you who was going to get promoted," Hayes said. "Because that's just the way it was. They took who they wanted, they groomed them, and they moved." The system ran top to bottom, Hayes said — unshakable because it started at the top.
Breaking it open came with a cost. Baker earned a nickname — "the axe murderer" — that he carried with enough humor to reference it twice over lunch. What replaced the old system were transparent selection processes, management reviews and open transfers. Opportunities for people who had not previously been given them.
In 2009, then-Deputy Chief Earl L. Cook became the first African American chief of police in Alexandria's history, succeeding Baker. Cook would serve until 2016.
"It was a wide swath of changes that came with resistance," Baker said. "But because of courage and great determination and people who wanted change, it became institutionalized."
Hayes inherited that foundation. He had spent more than 40 years at APD — his entire career — and when the city manager approached him in a moment of transition and asked whether he'd take the seat, he told him to talk to his wife first. Gloria said yes. So did he.
His challenges were immediate. No assistant chiefs — what had once been four positions had gone to zero. A newly formed union. A citizen review board. A command staff of friends who believed they were next in line.
"I had to balance that," Hayes said. "And doing so, I did lose some of them."
McGuire arrived from the Arlington, Texas, Police Department, where he had served as assistant chief — a genuine outsider who had barely visited Alexandria before taking the job.
"I only knew Old Town," he said. "I was kind of like a tourist."
He learned the east end and west end, the diversity of neighborhoods, the gap between what the city looked like from outside and what it actually demanded from its police department. And he came to understand something each of the men at the table had learned the same way.
"You really don't know what it's like to sit in the seat," McGuire said, "until you sit in the seat full time."
What Stays the Same
Asked by The Alexandria Brief what thread of continuity runs across all their tenures, Hayes went back to 1981.
"The Alexandria Police Department has always been an agency that will respond to calls for service, no matter what the call was," he said. He recalled working dispatch and receiving a call from a resident whose trash had not been picked up. They responded. That was the culture. Show up. Figure it out. Get the right people there if it is not yours to solve.
Baker added technology, family and wellness. McGuire tied it together with something harder to measure: pride.
"There are a couple Alexandrias in the United States," McGuire said. "I challenge people — who are we? What is APD? What do we bring to the table?"
His answer, the one he returned to throughout the afternoon, is the phrase he has made the department's throughline: One APD. One Alexandria. He described the moment it crystallized — attending a funeral as chief, watching officers, civilian staff and community members show up for one another in grief. He said he holds himself to the same standard: if an officer is seriously injured, he's getting up and going. If there's a critical call, he's going. If a family member of an officer or professional staff passes away, leadership will be there.
"When it's time to show up," he said, "we show up."
Building What Lasts
After lunch, the three chiefs posed for photos in front of the legacy wall — Baker and Hayes flanking McGuire, the portraits of their predecessors fanning out behind them. Then McGuire took them on a tour.
The walk through the building told its own story. As McGuire led his predecessors through the station, officers stopped what they were doing. Some stepped out of conference rooms mid-meeting. Others came looking, having heard through the building that the former chiefs were in. "I heard you were here," more than one said. Nobody had to explain why they came.
The updated report writing room. A renovated gym where broken racks and unstable equipment have been replaced. New lockers so officers can store gear at the station rather than hauling it home.
Baker paused in the gym. He noted, nearly as an aside, that he had helped design the building — and that it took roughly 10 years after that to get it funded. Before the current headquarters opened in 2011, APD was scattered across the city in warehouses and rental properties.
"We were decentralized," Baker said. "That didn't stay."
He designed a building he never worked in. McGuire is now renovating the inside of it.
The last stop was a freshly painted conference room on the second floor. On the wall hung a framed portrait: a woman smiling in front of an American flag and the city seal. Below it, a gold plaque read: "Paula Czarnowsky — With sincere appreciation and recognition of her 45 years of dedicated service to the Alexandria Police Department."
McGuire named the room after Czarnowsky to recognize the department's professional staff — civilian employees who, as he put it, sometimes feel left out of the identity and pride that sworn officers carry.
Hayes noted that Czarnowsky would not retire until he did. "She wouldn't leave before I left," he said.
Also on the wall in Czarnowsky's room: a black-and-white photograph of officers standing beside an old Alexandria Police cruiser. Hayes recognized it immediately. He and a colleague had been shooting a pamphlet for community policing that day. He had hair then, he noted.
Baker looked at the photograph for a long moment.
"That's amazing," he said.
The Work Ahead
Near the end of lunch, before the photos and the tour, the conversation turned to something more personal - Chief McGuire wanted to talk about officer well-being and mental health. Hayes described responding to a scene early in his career — a woman who had been killed, her skull cracked open. His partner made a joke. They both laughed. That was how you handled it then. You kept going.
"I can tell you this story today," Hayes said. "This is almost 45 years ago, and I still remember how it affected me. But we didn't have counseling, therapy, any of that. You just did it."
McGuire is trying to change what that looks like for the officers coming up now. The gym matters. A recently updated shift schedule, designed to give officers more weekends off, matters. A peer support program matters. So does the basic acknowledgment of what the job does to people over time.
"What bothers me sometimes is it's great as a talking point," McGuire said, "about the exposure that police face every day. But we have cops out here literally saving people at the last point of their death."
November will mark two years for McGuire. He said it feels like five. He is approaching the work the same way he said the men across the table from him approached it — as a sequence of building blocks, each one dependent on what came before.
"It's not whether Baker did this or Don did this," Baker said near the end of the conversation. "It's a sequence of building blocks that require buy-in from the person sitting in that chair."
The 16th portrait has not yet been taken. But the chair is occupied.
