You look at Tom Synan and see a small man with a bit of mischief in his eyes. The police chief for a little Ohio village called Newtown wears the uniform though a lot of chiefs have abandoned such dress in favor of shirt, tie and jacket. He cruises the streets as a patrol cop when he gets the chance and he makes house calls.

Privately, Synan drives a muscle car, actually a cop car with extra power, and a motorcycle. He has 15 tattoos, including one of a honey badger "because they are tenacious" and one of the U.S. Marine Corps motto, Semper Fi. He is a huge fan of Batman.

There is no question that Synan is tough.

He took some guff while learning the ropes in the Marines. The gear he had to carry was heavier than his 110-pound frame, but he did it. Later Synan worked as a volunteer cop in Terrace Park because, forget a salary, he wanted to be a cop. And when he became a full-time police officer on March 1, 1993, at the Newtown Police Department, he remembers saying to himself, “I’m going to change the world.”

So he is.

Police Chief Synan, 50, pours his life into that little town of 3,000 people, but in just the last couple of years he has expanded his reach, traveling to much, muchlarger cities here and abroad with a goal that seems odd for an otherwise traditional cop.

He is caught in the opioid epidemic, and he wants to annihilate the practice of locking up drug-addicted people because using drugs illegally is, well, against the law.

It's kind of a David-and-Goliath thing he's got going on.

He has been quoted in national magazines including Rolling Stone and spoken on international programs including the BBC.

He calls the opioid epidemic "one of the most complex, critical health and social issues of our time.

“Addiction should not be treated as a crime but instead treated as the mental health, medical condition it is,” this lifetime law-enforcement officer says.

Again and again.

With a canny smile, he acknowledges that this is not the traditional police view.

It started with one family

It all began with the Millers of Newtown.

Mother and three sons, the whole family, had struggled with substance-use disorder, Synan says, and each one died too young and in some way was still tied to the problem.

He'd watched it unfold since he started working in Newtown back in 1993.

"It was chaos," he says.

A thick stack of Newtown police reports about calls to their Monongahela Drive home proves it: Trespass, trouble, domestic dispute, suicide threats, neighbors yelling at each other, intoxicated, noise, theft of a radio and car stereo, brothers fighting, yelling, screaming. There were investigations of nearby thefts, junk cars, burglaries, robberies and, of course, drugs and drug paraphernalia.

Sharon Berwinger Miller was mostly a single parent. Their father lived homeless in Newtown. She struggled with alcohol and prescription pill use, Synan says. She died July 4, 2006. That was just months after her youngest child, 25-year-old Josh, died from a gunshot wound over a crack cocaine buy in Cincinnati. The oldest, Jonathon, was 39 when he died of an overdose on Sept. 23, 2014, in Union Township. He left behind five children and a wife, who'd become addicted to drugs, too, her mother says.

Then, on Nov. 25, 2014, someone called 911 about a man in the family's yard jumping around and behaving wildly. “Male is now in the roadway and not breathing,” the dispatcher updated. “Male identified as Charles Miller, laying in the roadway, unconscious, blue in the face, and foaming at the mouth."

Firefighters revived him with naloxone that night but the next day, Charles, known to police in Newtown as Chuckie, died from an overdose. He was 35.

Synan sent a column about the Miller family to The Enquirer, considered pulling it back because of possible backlash, then let it publish after all.

"I knew I would open myself up to judgment, criticism and ridicule, because it is not the way we, in law enforcement, are supposed to think, and we should not speak out, champion causes," Synan says. He alerted his mayor and council with an email.

"I know that some in the community question why I bring attention about drug use in our community out in the open," he wrote. "It is my hope that we may look at an entire family lost to drug abuse, an entire generation lost and the next generation on their way and not pass judgment but instead show empathy. Empathy, in the hope that that empathy brings understanding, in that understanding, we find ways to help prevent another generation from being wiped out to drugs."

In 'Why care about another dead addict?' Synan wrote of the Miller boys' frightened eyes in his early encounters with the family. Chuckie struggled quietly, the chief says.

"Despite all he had done in the 21 years I dealt with him, I never forgot that kid. I never forgot that at one time he was a kid just like any other. The empathy I gave him as a kid and the empathy I give him now is not for the loss of a drug addict but for the loss of a kid."

It was the beginning of a mission that Synan did not see coming. "When I first wrote it I didn't have a clear direction. I was confused and at the moment unsure of what it meant."

But he was certain of one thing: "I knew that in order to make change someone has to speak up."

It started slowly. He'd talk to his council, neighbors, other cops. He was among a few Hamilton County police chiefs who pushed to create a regional organization that would include treatment advocates, elected officials, social services and public health to work together to solve the heroin epidemic: The Hamilton County Heroin Coalition.

And as the epidemic exploded, Synan stepped forward more and more as sort of an unappointed spokesman for the coalition.

Tired of talk

Synan did not ask for the spotlight. He felt awkward about it at first.

But he has had enough of telling one grieving mother after another that her child has overdosed and died.

He falls silent, tears filling his eyes, as he points to an empty space across from his desk where mothers sit to tell him about their beloved, dead, children.

He's had enough of words from politicians. He wants action.

He'd written to President Donald Trump last year, asking him to put the opioid crisis front and center and end it. Synan believes a president has that power.

True to his cop-military background, the police chief was respectful upon receiving a response from the White House. But he promised to his Facebook followers to be "a pain in the a--" to the president and administration to get the opioid crisis under control.

"President Trump is the one that stood up and declared a national health emergency. He is the one that initiated my response, which at the time was hope, but then deflation when there was no real action behind the words," Synan explains. "His letter was more words. In it he stated, 'I want the next generation of young Americans to know the blessings of a drug-free life.'"

Synan is involved with those kids already. He and his officers are trying to help ensure that the youngest Millers, Johnny Miller's 14-year-old twin daughters, stay drug-free. Hannah and Haley have lived in Newtown with their maternal grandmother, Kay Kiser, since they were toddlers, all “diapers and bottles,” she says, shaking her head.

Kiser took them in, along with their three older siblings. Her daughter, Johnny's wife, had become addicted to drugs, Kiser says, and could no longer care for the children.

More than a decade later on a sunny day in July, Hannah walks into her grandma’s home and plays with a kitten she’s adopted. Synan is on the couch with Kiser. Hannah doesn't blink. She considers him a friend. She has made him and his officers Christmas gifts, and he's had lunch with her at school.

But Synan learns in late July that the twins' oldest sister, Shelley, 24, is using heroin again.

"They are the next generation," Synan says of the Miller children.

Of Trump's desire to shield that generation?

"It's too late," Synan says. "He can come to my small town and I will introduce him to the next generation that will not know a drug-free life."

It is not about politics, Synan insists. It is about lives devastated by this epidemic.

Small-town chief gains a fandom

Synan is effective. He really does change minds. Take John Lewis, who works at Meridian Bioscience in Newtown and was a skeptic at first, with no desire to pay taxes for anyone's treatment.

Lewis started calculating costs of courts and jails and prisons and the children left behind and syringes on the streets (he's picked up a couple in Newtown) and people selling sex for more dope – that "cascading" effect of addiction, he says.

And he began to listen to his friend, "Tommy" Synan, more closely.

"As I watched his struggles, I kind of shifted and said, you know what? This isn't really working. Right now … we're in catch-and-release mode, and catch-and-release doesn't work. People, when they have their brain chemistry altered, cannot make good decisions," he says.

"You can either scream in the darkness or you can light a candle, and that's what Tommy did. He lit a candle," Lewis says. "At the time, I was thinking this is certain to fail. It is an uphill struggle. He has got society against him. The opinions of people, naturally, are all the detriments. They don't want a rehab clinic in their neighborhood. They don't want to acknowledge the problem and they certainly don't want to pay for the problem ... even when you hit them with the facts."

"I came full circle," Lewis says.

Now he carries Narcan.

Synan has grown a kind of fan club.

He's no longer surprised to receive handwritten letters from strangers.

“Thank you so much for all you do to save lifes (sic). I wouldn’t be sitting here … and a lot of people I love wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for people like you," one letter says.

Some come from parents, including this mom, who lost her daughter to addiction:

“I understand you have an uphill fight trying to curb this epidemic that is taking an entire generation and leaving another parentless. I am not currently strong enough to fight. But I want to thank you for doing it for me. For standing when I can’t.”

When the mega-potent synthetic opiates fentanyl and carfentinal (a drug that, when made legally can knock out an elephant) pummeled Hamilton County in 2016 – with 1,000 overdoses hitting emergency rooms in three months – Synan stood with Hamilton County Coroner Dr. Lakshmi Sammarco at press conferences and spoke out about these deadly drugs.

He challenged Ohio Gov. John Kasich to declare an emergency.

"We are bleeding profusely and need a tourniquet, not Band-Aids," he said.

Gaining attention

Media seek him out.

“I have talked to the BBC, France, Germany, Japan media outlets…” he ticks off. “I’m helping a college student in Pennsylvania with a documentary.”

And it isn't just media. Others fighting the epidemic ask Synan to join panels about how to end the crisis.

The coroner gently teased him on Facebook recently about his talent for talking about the epidemic: "Eloquently put, Hollywood," Sammarco wrote.

Synan captivates audiences. Here's this cop, in this uniform, from this little village, talking common sense about a terrible scourge. This guy, with a badge and a gun and all the right muscles, is saying empathy matters. People who use heroin matter. Crime is not a hard and fast definition.

"People tell me, 'You're the face of heroin,' " Synan says. "This wasn't my intention. I've had to have people encourage me to keep going."

But, he adds, "I had to."

Michael Botticelli, former National Office of Drug Control Policy director, met Synan twice on the speaking circuit, once in 2017, and earlier this year.

He counts the Midwest police chief among an evolving group officers nationwide who are trying to champion change in their role to curb the opioid epidemic.

“Those in the public health community have been so overwhelmed, in a very positive way, by the dramatic change in law enforcement and their willingness to partner with the health community," Botticelli says.

Chief's message goes global

Synan's views on solving the opioid crisis went from local to regional to state and then national venues.

Then his ideas began bouncing across the world.

One day, Cincinnati Assistant Police Chief Michael John, who’s from Wales, connected Synan with an organization called Drugaid Cymru, which needed a speaker for a May 2017 conference there.

Synan was a little unsure.

“He said he did not have a passport, but I said we'd sort that out,” said Ifor Glyn, then CEO of the organization, through email. "He asked if it would be OK for him to bring along his pistol as part of his uniform. I said that it would be very unlikely they would let him out of Heathrow Airport if he had a gun with him!”

But Glyn says the American police chief charmed the conference attendees, from Ireland, England, Spain and France.

“He showed a clear understanding and empathy towards users and their families," Glyn says. Synan also understood, says Glyn, "that current drug policies were failing.”

But Synan did not comprehend his potential impact on the world until a few months later when he joined a Clinton Foundation opioid conference at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Someone there told him to check out Twitter after he spoke. “People from all around the world were tweeting what I was saying about how we needed to stop treating addiction as a crime," Synan says. "I saw Saudi Arabia, Asia and I think around the former Soviet Union, but I couldn't understand their language."

Nobody was more surprised than Tom Synan.

Because every day, he is still the police chief of Newtown. He answers calls (often on his personal phone) from neighbors who have problems or ask advice day or night. He attends every village council meeting and any zoning meeting that involves safety. He's on the streets during floods and snowstorms. He prepares a budget and signs off on every police department purchase, oversees day-to-day operations and gives direction to his 11 officers. And, when possible, Synan jumps into a cruiser to check out the neighborhoods, to wave to or stop and chat with residents and, of course, to fight crime.

Someone asked Synan recently when he'll get off this roller coaster.

The question had never occurred to him.

He was swept up into the heroin crisis as a police chief of a small town and catapulted to center stage as he tried to break the stigma that nags people with addiction and end the epidemic.

There is no end in sight, he says.

“Once you are in the grip of heroin, even if you are not using, it is difficult to get out," he says. "You are consumed. And often you do not have a choice but to ride it out to its final conclusion with the hope that you can do some things to influence how it all ends.”

As Bruce Wayne (Batman) once said, "Everything’s impossible until somebody does it."

Synan is up front about his Batman fascination, unabashed about posting the character's images from the Dark Knight back to the original Adam West-is-Batman on Facebook.

The thing he likes best about the super hero is that he has no superpowers.

And there is this: "In the end, Batman always does what is best for the greater good in the hopes that one day, people will see that each of us has the ability to make the world we live in a better place," Synan says. "What we make as laws may not always be right, and what may be wrong isn't always immoral."

In his pursuit of institutional change to fix the opioid epidemic, the police chief, in Batman style, insists, "Break the rules."