Small town police departments rarely get the luxury of a long, drawn out search when a chief walks away. In Oaklyn, a compact Camden County borough of roughly seven tenths of a square mile, that reality is now playing out in real time. Following the retirement of Chief Jayne Jones, who closed out a 27 year law enforcement career this past June as the first woman to ever lead the Oaklyn Police Department and the first to lead any police department in Camden County, the borough has turned to a familiar face rather than an outside search. Lieutenant Colby Bryszewski, a 12 year veteran of the department, has been named interim police chief and officer in charge, and he now has seven months to prove he belongs behind that desk permanently.
The appointment came by way of a resolution from the Oaklyn Borough Council, which formally installed Bryszewski as the department’s interim leader and gave him day to day command of the agency the moment Chief Jones’s retirement became official. It is a structure increasingly common in small municipal departments across New Jersey, where a promotion from within tends to be favored over a lengthy, costly outside search, particularly when the internal candidate already commands the trust of both the ranks below him and the council above him. For Oaklyn, a department with only 14 sworn members, continuity was clearly the priority, and Bryszewski’s rise through nearly every rank in the department made him the logical choice to hold the line while the borough decides on a permanent hire.
Bryszewski’s path to this moment has been a steady, unglamorous climb rather than a meteoric one, which is precisely the kind of resume small town police commissions tend to reward. He joined the Oaklyn force as a patrolman and worked his way up to sergeant before being promoted to lieutenant in 2024, a rank he held right up until Chief Jones’s departure created the vacancy at the top. Along the way, he built a reputation for community facing work that went beyond routine patrol duties, earning recognition from the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General as an “Officer of the Week” for outreach efforts that endeared him to residents well before he ever wore captain’s or chief’s insignia. That kind of grassroots visibility matters in a borough as small and tightly knit as Oaklyn, where residents are far more likely to know their patrol officers by name than in a sprawling city department, and where a chief’s credibility is built one interaction at a time rather than through a title alone.
Now that he is running the department, Bryszewski has been candid about what he intends to accomplish during his interim window, and his priorities read like a blueprint for exactly the kind of leadership a small department needs during a transition period. Chief among them is squeezing more operational value out of a 14 person roster, a staffing level that leaves almost no room for inefficiency and demands sharper scheduling, smarter deployment of patrol shifts, and a command structure that keeps officers visible in the community rather than buried in administrative overhead. For a department this size, every shift assignment carries outsized weight, and getting that balance right is often the difference between a borough that feels adequately protected and one that does not.
Just as central to his stated vision is a commitment to building a department that mirrors the community it serves, a goal that speaks to broader shifts happening across policing in small and mid sized New Jersey towns as demographics continue to change. Bryszewski has framed this not as an abstract diversity initiative but as a practical matter of trust and effectiveness, arguing that a department whose composition and outreach reflect the borough’s residents is simply better equipped to do its job well. That kind of framing tends to resonate in towns like Oaklyn, where police legitimacy is built through daily, face to face contact rather than press conferences, and where residents expect their officers to understand the neighborhoods they patrol on a personal level.
The seven month clock now running on Bryszewski’s tenure is not a formality. It functions as a genuine probationary period, one in which the borough council and residents alike will be watching to see whether his handling of scheduling, staffing, and community relations translates into a department that runs more smoothly than it did before. If it does, Bryszewski has made clear that his goal is to shed the interim label entirely and step into the full time chief’s role early next year, a natural conclusion for an officer who has spent essentially his entire career inside this one department and who has already been entrusted with command during one of its more consequential transitions. The Oaklyn Police Department’s official roster has already been updated to list him as the active commander at headquarters, a small administrative detail that nonetheless signals just how fully the reins have already changed hands.
What makes this transition worth following extends beyond Oaklyn’s borders. Camden County’s smaller municipalities have watched a wave of long tenured chiefs retire in recent years, and how each department handles that turnover, whether through promotion from within or an external search, offers a small but telling window into how suburban South Jersey policing is evolving. Chief Jones’s departure closes out a chapter defined by a genuine first for both her department and her county. Bryszewski’s interim chapter, by contrast, is really an audition, one built on efficiency, community alignment, and the kind of quiet, incremental trust building that rarely makes headlines but tends to define whether a small town police department succeeds or struggles. For Oaklyn residents, the next seven months will answer a fairly simple question with real stakes attached, which is whether the officer they have watched rise through the ranks for over a decade is ready to lead the department he has spent his career serving.
