Reaves is the first woman to be promoted to sergeant in the South Orange PD

Photo by Amanda Valentovic
South Orange Police Sgt. Sally Reaves

SOUTH ORANGE, NJ — Sally Reaves charged through a barrier in the South Orange Police Department when she became the department’s first female sergeant this month, after 14 years as an officer. She started as a police officer in neighboring Orange in 2003, and it was a career change. Reaves previously worked in the medical field as an anesthesia technician and an orthopedic unit clerk at St. Barnabas Hospital.

“After a while it became a little depressing for me, because I would get so attached to my patients, and they would pass away, because a lot of them were cancer patients,” Reaves said in an interview with the News-Record on June 18. “It was really taking a toll on me. So I thought, I can do law enforcement, because I can still help people, but I won’t get as attached to them.”

Reaves is a self-described people person, so transitioning from one career to another wasn’t too hard for her. Working with people is one of the things that attracted her to the police department in the first place.

“I always like to start conversations everywhere I go. When I go to dinner with my husband he’ll be like, ‘You don’t even know them!’” she joked. “But I get to know them. You never know, you could make a new friend. So I’m always meeting people and always starting conversations.”

Reaves mostly works the night shift, which makes it easier to moonlight as the “fashion police.” She spends her days making ascots, bowties and suspenders for the Sally Reaves Collection, her fashion sense a vestige of her time dressing the mannequins in the windows of a big retail store she worked at after graduating from high school.

“I would change the windows, and every time I did people would say, ‘I want that,’” she said. “I liked matching colors perfectly and putting things together in clothing. I don’t like to limit myself, so I try this and I try that. Law enforcement is definitely what I love, but I still love fashion.”

Often when she’s out on a call, Reaves ends up talking to people for a long time, to the point where other officers ask her where she is. Sometimes, she said, people just need someone to listen to them.

“I can always calm them down,” she said. “I’m always here to listen to them. Sometimes people don’t need advice, they just want to vent. I have a good ear for listening, and I go to calls when people are going through whatever it is they’re going through, and when I leave them they’re calm or will even say, ‘You know what, you’re right. I need to go and get help,’ or, ‘Can you help me get help?’ and I’ll provide that for them. I’ve done that quite a few times. That makes me feel proud, that I can make someone else feel that.”

Reaves knows she probably could have made rank earlier in Orange, which is a bigger department with more people working in it, but she moved to the SOPD because she liked the smaller town and family-oriented feel of it. She’s not the first female police officer in South Orange, and she hopes she is only the first in a long line of women to climb the department ladder.

“I hope in the future we can have more females making rank in the department,” Reaves said. “I would love to see more female officers apply for jobs and eventually be leaders in our town. We have two that just came out of the academy; one is still in training and one is on her own now and she’s doing a great job. So hopefully they come up the ladder as well and make rank, and I hope I put a positive impact on them.”