Robert George LeConte
Police officer and detective · Junior Police Academy co-founder
Robert George LeConte was a police officer and detective with the Danville, Illinois Police Department and a co-founder of the Junior Police Academy.
LeConte served with the Danville Police Department, rising to detective and working in plain clothes on criminal investigations. Department and court records place him on major cases in the late 1970s, including a 1976 homicide investigation and a 1978 shooting-death case.
In 1992, Bob and Phillip founded the Junior Police Academy. Phillip has written that he and Kelly were, in a sense, the program's first cadets — "no t-shirts, but plenty regiment" — raised in the shadow of shift work, in a home where the demands of the job were simply part of life. "I can't say that it was always easy," Phillip wrote. "It wasn't. Still, I would not trade those experiences."
The development of the program was a forerunner to ChaplainUSA — the work of bringing officers and young people together laid the foundation for the police chaplain program that followed.
His civic instincts extended past the badge. In 2000, the year he died, he arranged water relief for flooded areas of South Carolina — the kind of thing he just did.
That fundamental virtue Dad furnished Kelly and I — namely a rock-solid, uncomplicated anchor upon which we could always rely.
Phillip has said that since their father's death in 2000, he and Kelly have found solace in working with police officers across the country, because it keeps them close to what their father gave them. More than three decades on, the Junior Police Academy measures its impact in a generation of graduating cadets — citizens who understand their civic responsibilities because a Danville detective and his son believed officers and kids belonged in the same room. As Phillip wrote, "The essential quality of what happens next is part of the living legacy of Robert LeConte, our father."