Dave Murphy joined the Wyckoff Fire Department the day after his high school graduation and has spent the three decades since in the town's public safety ranks — as a volunteer firefighter for 25 years, including four as fire chief, and as a police officer who started as a dispatcher before being hired as a patrolman in 1996.[2][3] He rose to lieutenant, the department's third-ranking position by 2010, while also serving as the township's emergency management coordinator.[2] Along the way, he received several letters of merit, a pair of commendations for his responses to armed robberies at a jewelry store in 2001 and 2011, the END DWI Award twice from the state Assembly in Trenton, and the 9-11 Dana Hannon Distinguished Service Award. By 2016, Murphy had 21 years of law enforcement experience, including the past decade as a supervisor, and then-Mayor Kevin Rooney called him a "highly trained and decorated officer."[3]

Nearly ten years into the job, Murphy has already outlasted the typical tenure for a police chief. A 2022 survey of member departments by the Police Executive Research Forum put the national average length of a chief's tenure at 7.3 years, calculated from the completed terms of chiefs' immediate predecessors; currently serving chiefs surveyed averaged 4.7 years in the position. Tenure tends to run longer at smaller departments — chiefs at agencies with 50 or fewer full-time employees, the bracket that includes Wyckoff's 26-officer force, averaged 8.2 years — but Murphy has already passed that mark too, with just shy of ten years in the job.[6][7]

That career reached a turning point in 2016. Then-Chief Benjamin Fox stepped down that March after a 2014 email he had written became public, in which he wrote that officers should "check out suspicious black people in white neighborhoods."[8] The Attorney General's office appointed the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office to investigate, and it found the email violated the state's ban on racially biased policing.[9] The Township Committee demoted the former chief to patrolman and suspended him 180 days without pay that August. Murphy was named acting chief that September and formally promoted on Oct. 4, 2016, at age 42.[3][4] "Some may have chosen to look at that as a negative, but we as a department bonded together, and with the support of all our officers and township officials, we made positive strides and remained professionals during that process," Murphy said at the time. "I'm extremely proud."[4]

Murphy will mark 30 years with the department on July 29 — "if we have that date correct," Township Attorney David Becker said during his report at the July 21 Township Committee meeting, asking Murphy to stand as the committee offered its congratulations.[1] "I think he's the best police chief in the state of New Jersey," Becker said, offering it as his own opinion.[1] Mayor Roger Lane said the township plans "a little something else extra special" to mark the anniversary; as of the meeting, no details of that recognition had been announced.[5]