Harper Talks Episode 42 - John Lawson

Harper Talks Episode 42 – John Lawson

Transcript

Harper Talks: The Harper Alumni Podcast
Show 42:  – Harper Talks — John Lawson

[00:00.350] - Brian Shelton 

I'm Brian Shelton, and you're listening to Harper Talks, a coproduction of Harper College Alumni Relations and Harper Radio. Today on Harper Talks, I'm excited to speak with Chief John Lawson. He's a 1987 graduate of Harper College, served on the Roselle Police Department for 28 years and currently serves as Chief of Police at Harper College. Chief Lawson, join me in the Harper Media Lab in the West Wing of Building D. Thanks for being here. 

[00:25.260] - John Lawson 

Thank you very much, Brian. It's an honor to be here. It's an honor to talk to fellow alumni. 

[00:30.570] - Brian Shelton 

It's an honor to have you on the show. So 1987, you were at Harper College. What brought you here? 

[00:36.980] - John Lawson 

Well, what brought me here was actually from high school. I graduated in 1980 from Saint Viator High School. Okay. And In my senior year, they had a program for criminal justice, if you're interested in criminal justice at Harper College. So I took that. And I remember being bused from Saint Viator here to Harper to take the classes. And That's what got me involved with knowing about Harper College as a criminal justice program. So that is literally where it all started. 

[01:08.120] - Brian Shelton 

That's fantastic. So after high school, you came here and then took your classes. Did you go directly into law enforcement after Harper, or was there more education from there? 

[01:17.000] - John Lawson 

Well, yes and no. There was more education, and I did go back right into law enforcement, but not as a police officer. What did you do? When I graduated in 1980, I became a community service officer with the Mount Prospect Police Department. Worked there full-time for four years, and that's when I went to Harper here part-time. I have done all my education from getting my certificate associate's degree here at Harper all the way up to getting my master's degree from Louis University as a part-time student, which is very hard because I was working full-time and then going to school part-time, but I did it. 

[01:57.260] - Brian Shelton 

I was going to ask you about that. What is the role I guess what role does the bachelor's degree and the master's degree serve in your role in law enforcement? Why were those things important for you to achieve? 

[02:09.160] - John Lawson 

Well, I knew if I ever wanted to achieve my goal, which was to be a chief of police someday, is I would need something more than probably a bachelor's degree. Going through the bachelor program, which was being taught by a lot of retired command officers, they always pushed that. After I got my bachelor's, I had a little bit of time in between. I almost did not do it, but there was a group of us from my old department. We stuck together. We said we're going to do it, and we did it. We did it. Wasn't easy, but we did it. 

[02:43.200] - Brian Shelton 

Yeah, it's a lot easier to keep going than just to stop and go back. I remember finishing my master's degree and people telling me, are you going to do your PhD? And I said no. And there's no way I could do it today. I can't imagine going back to school now. 

[02:56.150] - John Lawson 

I wanted to get my PhD, but then the wife stepped in at that point and said... 

[03:00.120] - Brian Shelton 

That's enough. (laughs) 

[03:00.860] - John Lawson 

We have kids. 

[03:01.990] - Brian Shelton 

What is the normal education path for somebody working in law enforcement? Maybe there's not a normal, but what's typical? 

[03:09.060] - John Lawson 

Well, it depends what days, when you were talking about. When I was looking to be a police officer, they started, you had to have at least an associate's degree. Then it worked its way up to a bachelor's degree. Law enforcement now, as you probably know, we are short nationwide. I don't want to say that law enforcement has lowered some of their standards, but they have in education. So right now, many departments has taken away that bachelor's degree. So it's a bachelor degree and or previous experience. So right now, a bachelor's degree is preferred, but it's not. 

[03:50.550] - Brian Shelton 

Required at most places. 

[03:51.660] - John Lawson 

Correct. 

[03:53.080] - Brian Shelton 

Okay. Good, bad? What do you think? 

[03:55.130] - John Lawson 

Well, I think because law enforcement is so short staffed now, It's getting more candidates. But I'm very proponent on education. 

[04:07.790] - Brian Shelton 

I guess I should ask, why do you think law enforcement is so short staff? Why is it hard to attract people to law enforcement right now? Maybe you don't want to answer that question, but I think a relevant question. 

[04:16.390] - John Lawson 

I answer it politically correct. It's a different time. We put our uniforms on every day not knowing if we're coming home. We feel the same way here and I feel the same way and my officers here feel the same way. Just because it's a community college, we're hoping we go home. And I think a lot of the media that's going on right now, there's a lot of people that want to get into law enforcement, but they're a little hesitant now because of not only the stress, but what law enforcement has to go through. 

[05:01.260] - Brian Shelton 

The law enforcement suicide rate is just absolutely astounding. You read about it every day in the paper, Chicago, so many officers. It's horrible. 

[05:08.910] - John Lawson 

It is. And one of the things that I brought here at Harper is, and I learned this from my time over at Roselle, was I brought a chaplain program here. So we have a chaplain that's contracted on staff, and that chaplain is there for any of our officers. Now, with a new mandate that came out with the state, we have to sit down with a counselor or a chaplain annually, and that's each sworn officer has to do that. That's statewide. 

[05:40.790] - Brian Shelton 

You were with the Roselle Police Department for 28 years? 

[05:44.310] - John Lawson 

Correct. 

[05:44.960] - Brian Shelton 

And I'm sure saw and did lots of really interesting things during that time period. But when you retired from there, you went to College of Lake County as an officer. And then after five years there, you came to Harper College. I'm just curious, you got into this a little bit here, but what's the difference between policing on a college campus, especially a community college campus, it's smaller than a large university, as opposed to policing in a large village or town, city kind of thing? What's the difference? How is it? 

[06:14.790] - John Lawson 

Well, I could tell you there is a difference in policing. However, the policing part is the same. What I mean by that is as far as officers that are here go through the same training as officers throughout the state. We have the same mandates. A matter of fact, a lot of the officers that I brought here on my staff are all former officers from different municipalities and different counties. The difference is in a municipality, you have residents that live there and you have businesses. Here we have students, staff, faculty, and we also have community members here because we are an open campus. A perfect example at the main campus here, we have an emergency treatment center on campus. We have the park district on campus. The Park district has a little gazebo where they hold bands there. We do get the same, I don't want to say the ....We get the same volume of calls, but we get the same type of calls. The difference is we have a lot of interaction with the students and staff and faculty. We do a lot of programs with them, a lot of community outreach programs. One of the things that I did when I got here, I found out that in our Harper College district, there are 21 different municipalities and police departments that come into this district. 

[07:41.060] - John Lawson 

What we do is we try to hit all 21 of those towns as far as doing community engagements. We will do Shop with the Cop with Carpentersville, which is only a small part of Carpentersville that's in our district. We do National Night Out. We've done that with different municipalities throughout the year. So we try to get out also into the community besides just our community here locally at the campus. 

[08:10.540] - Brian Shelton 

Why do you feel that's important? 

[08:11.940] - John Lawson 

I think it's important because it shows that we as the Harper College Police Department, that we're open to everybody in our district. If somebody has a doubt or a concern or maybe a safety that they're afraid of, they see that, wow, they got their own police department over there. Our police department and the people that we have here in some of our shifts are probably the same or it could be a little bit more than some of the smaller towns around here. 

[08:41.820] - Brian Shelton 

What brought you to college policing, though? You retired and then a lot of times looking for a job after retirement, that thing. But why college policing? What drew you to that? 

[08:52.010] - John Lawson 

Well, it's funny you say that because there is a story behind that. Back when I was with Roselle, the chief at that time wanted to become an accredited law enforcement agency. To do that is not easy. All right? So I was voluntold to do that, and I really enjoyed it. At Roselle at that time, we were the fifth municipal police department that became state certified as a law enforcement agency. I liked it so much that the law enforcement agency group recruited me to do assessments, which means actually going out to agencies to do this. So the first higher ed agency that was ever done in the state was University of Illinois, and I did that one. Oh, wow. And that's what triggered I may like this campus policing. So I did University of Illinois. I did Northeastern's, and I started to do all the higher Ed institutions. And then when College of Lake County opened, that position opened. When I took the interview, they started talking about accreditation. I'm like, oh, wow, this is I could really like it here. So when I got hired in College of Lake County, I spent five years there. We became nationally accredited law enforcement agency and also state accredited law enforcement agency for the College of Lake County. 

[10:20.910] - John Lawson 

So to this day, College of Lake County is the first and only community college that holds a national and state accreditation. So When I got hired here, what brought me here is when I saw this position opened up, I was like, it would be very, very personally nice to come back to where I started. Come back to those seats that I sat in the classroom and finished my career going through 40 years. I just turned my 40th year anniversary in law enforcement and ended here when I retire from here. So when I got here, of course, discussed it with my boss, and it was like, we're going to make Harper College the second community college in the state to be state accredited. And we did. So about a year and a half after I was here, almost two years after I was here, we became the second community college in the state to become accredited. 

[11:16.970] - Brian Shelton 

I remember seeing all the news and information about that. I thought that was a really cool thing that we did. 

[11:21.140] - John Lawson 

So since then, there's been a couple of our sister colleges that they want to be like us. 

[11:28.070] - Brian Shelton 

Everybody wants to be like Harper. 

[11:28.980] - John Lawson 

They are now accredited, too, which is good for law enforcement. 

[11:32.930] - Brian Shelton 

That's great. You are policing on a college campus, and you talked about how being a police officer is being a police officer. But what unique challenges are presented to policing on a college campus? 

[11:45.500] - John Lawson 

Well, I would say the challenges, which I thought would be a challenge, was we have to be prepared for the worst. We all know that students are first. The students are here. And I've always said this, and I said this through my interviews here. I want to make sure students do not leave Harper College with an arrest record. I want them to leave with a certificate or a diploma. And in order to do that, you have to get students to come and you have to have faculty feel safe. In order to do that, you have to have a police department that is out there with the faculty, staff and students. So one of the things I changed right away when I got here is I made, we call beats. We have officers that are assigned outside. We have officers that are assigned inside. And their main goal is to patrol. They interact with students, faculty, and staff and community members daily because they are walking around. They are driving around. Another thing is when you're doing that, you're actually preventing crimes. Now, you'll never be able to know what crimes you've stopped, never. 

[13:02.290] - John Lawson 

But if some bad actor is driving in and they see the squad car driving around and they see us driving our Polaris around, they're going to go somewhere else. And the same thing if they're in a building, if they start seeing officers walking around, they're going to go somewhere else. 

[13:19.580] - Brian Shelton 

Yeah, so just simply being there is preventing. 

[13:22.120] - John Lawson 

Yes. And then I think we talked offline is one of the things we did, too, to prepare for the safety of everybody that comes to Harper College is we joined several task force, multi-jurisdictional task force, which is not common in the college industry, right? Is we now belong to a multi-jurisdictional Task Force for our SWAT team. We have an officer assigned to the SWAT team. We have an officer assigned to the Mobile Field Force, which is a force for crowd control. And we also belong to what is called MCAT, it's a major case assistance team. We have somebody assigned to that. So we belong to all these jurisdictional Task Force now, just in case, it's just in case, that we are prepared for the worst. 

[14:14.930] - Brian Shelton 

Which we hope doesn't happen. 

[14:16.280] - John Lawson 

We hope it doesn't, but we are planning. 

[14:19.020] - Brian Shelton 

If you came across a Harper student today who was interested in going into law enforcement, what advice would you give them? What's the tip you would give a new student? 

[14:30.350] - John Lawson 

Be a fireman. (laughs) 

[14:31.190] - Brian Shelton 

Be a fireman. (laughs) 

[14:33.590] - John Lawson 

It's a standing joke between cops and firemen, but we love firemen. 

[14:38.510] - Brian Shelton 

Nobody ever wrote a song called F the Fire Department. 

[14:40.500] - John Lawson 

No, that's right. We love the fire guys. They feed us well at Christmas and Thanksgiving. But I guess what I would say is, first of all, make sure this is something you want to do. You do not see too many 30-year vets anymore in law enforcement. They're in it. Ten years later, they're like, I don't know if it's because the commitment is not there or it's just a different generation. But when I got into it, I didn't know what the pension was. I didn't know about the health insurance. That is stuff that this group that's coming up now for law enforcement, they're looking into that. What department offers more money, what department offers a good pension. So do your research, do your research, and you need the education. And another thing I would highly suggest is ride-alongs. To see what is this exactly what I want. Do I really want to drive around at two o'clock in the morning when it's 40 below zero? Do I really want to go to these calls where somebody is throwing blood at you? Is this something that you really want? And if it is, then I would encourage them to do it. 

[15:51.550] - John Lawson 

It's a great profession. It's a great profession. 

[15:53.480] - Brian Shelton 

It's a fantastic profession. We appreciate everything that you do here on the campus and your officers keeping us safe and keeping us well cared for. We certainly appreciate that. Chief John Lawson is the Chief of Police of Harper College, charged with keeping the campus safe. If you're enjoying Harper Talks, please subscribe. And while you're at it, rate and review us so that others might find us. Harper Talks is a coproduction of Harper College Alumni Relations and Harper Radio. Our show is produced by Shannon Hynes. This episode is edited by Coby Pozo. Our online content producer is Matt Byrne. Our theme music was created by Aiden Cashman. I'm Brian Shelton. Thanks for listening.