Chuck: Always an honor to be recognized by the people you work with every day, so for me personally that recognition is nice. 

Chuck: I worked for the university police for a while. I actually came to Iowa in 1982. Worked on the faculty until 1989. Had an opportunity, then…actually had quit to finish my degree, had an opportunity to work for then-Vice President Tom Teeland (Sp?) and, had always admired him and heard great things from people who’d worked with him and so when that opportunity arose I couldn’t pass it up. Worked with Tom for a period of time in student affairs. Learned a lot about the University, about students, and about the business, and ended up working with Dan Robinson as interim Vice President, worked with Tom Hale as the new Vice President, and throughout the course of that found that a lot of what I was doing to help students seemed to overlap with what the Police were doing. And students in trouble had a way of finding a way to the police, in part because they were the ones who were around late at night, after hours, or when there was some kind of emergency, so just seemed like when students were in trouble there was a police component to them that we were working with the police a lot, saw some opportunities over there to do some crime prevention, some training, we did a program with High School students, leadership development and responsibility and it set kind of a nice tone for those coming to college. Sort of slid across the street from student affairs into police work. Slid down the street from ISU police to Ames police, so here I am. 

Me: Do you mind if I ask, when you were on the faculty what was your position?

Chuck: Health Education. 

Me: Kind of a natural slide over from that…

Chuck: it really was. The hours were better as a faculty member. Summers were better as a faculty member. But great affection for Iowa State, Iowa State students, I’ve taught some other places, and worked with other universities and still really respect the kind of students who come to Iowa State and the core values they generally bring with them and the work that they do. Ames is a fun place to be and (unintelligible) bring the energy and the enthusiasm and the ideas that keep the place rolling forward.

Me: What if any thoughts do you have to share on the Veisha situation? How can that be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction?

Chuck: I’ve been involved with Veisha difficulties and Veisha issues most of my time here. The world has changed a little bit, and we have to figure out how a changing world and changing student expectations aligns with Veisha tradition. I don’t know that I have any single exciting insight to that. I think I’ve struggled with the same question that everyone else does. What should that event, what should our celebration, what should our spring look like, in light of today’s world? And I think acknowledging that we’ve had some very embarrassing and, at times, very dangerous incidents that have occurred on the unofficial side of this event. 

Me: Such things have always been popular at colleges. It’s difficult to reconcile that with a world with so many new dangers in it.

Chuck: It is. And I think we have to, we will always have to deal with spring, and young people, and alcohol, it’s a part of our culture and our community and we invest a lot of time trying to make sure that to the extent we can we keep students safe. I think we have to be careful about creating those venues that are particularly dangerous and if we need to tweak or revise or adjust or respond to that, we should do that. The community has a long history of looking at regulation of the bars and investing in campustown safety and those types of things to try to reduce the hazards. I respect the investment that people are making. There’s a lot of time being spent reading previous reports, listening to insights from various points of view, and trying to create a contemporary vision of that. So I’m one of any number of people who are scratching their heads at where do we go from here. 

Me: There’s a meeting concerning Veisha on Thursday. Are you going to lend your voice to that?

Chuck: I’m on the task force. I go to those meetings every Thursday. And we’ve been listening to the various points of view and poring over the information that’s been gathered and trying to reconcile that with the concerns that have emerged, and respond to the President’s questions. 

Chuck (I) grew up outside Madison, Wisconsin. Went to school mostly in Wisconsin. Taught for a little while up in Lacrosse, got a Bachelor’s and a Master’s at U W Lacrosse. Ended up teaching there. Love Lacrosse. Came to Iowa State from Lacrosse. Worked in the health education program here and then eventually finished my PH.d here at Iowa State.

Me: Other than the issues with Veisha, what do you find to be the biggest issue for students when they’re 18, 19 and they first come to college, basically their first introduction to the real world?

Chuck: Well, trying to keep students safe. Newfound freedoms. New friends. New activities. Social opportunities. Mom and dad aren’t here anymore. And so for some portion of the group we see some risk developing. We make it a point to have a presence in Campustown because when we look at assaults, when we look at public intoxication, they tend to be concentrated in that area, so a good portion of our incidents occur in that area, and we like to ensure we have enough police officers out to keep it as safe as possible. We do a lot of patrol work and a lot of work with the landlords to try to deter property crime. Students have valuable equipment—computers, cell phones, what have you—and there are times where they’re not very good about locking stuff up and keeping track of things. We’re also concerned, particularly in the fall of the year, about property crimes. Thefts from vehicles, thefts from apartments, many of which are unlocked. So we try to get the message through to students and if we start seeing a cluster of those thefts we try to move a patrol presence into that area and try to cut it off just as quick as we can. It’s almost an expected part of our fall. Traffic’s an issue for us. We’re concerned about cars and bikes and pedestrians mixing in busy areas, tight areas, and so at a citywide level in terms of planning, we’re very concerned about how those come together and as the campus grows we need to be doing our very best to make sure that it’s safe to bike in this community, that drivers can get where they’re going without too much frustration, that pedestrians are respected by drivers, but also do their part to try to cross safely. That’s a real balancing act and we continue to be concerned about that. We got a lot of people heading into campus at various times during the day. A lot of young kids go to school in high traffic areas. 

Me: And of course part of the unique challenge of a college town is that every year you’re going to get an influx of new people that won’t necessarily stay in the community for the long term. So in that regard it’s different than running your average small community. 

Chuck: Absolutely. Officers do a lot of outreach, a lot of presentations, a lot of one-to-one education just at parties in the fall. We try to stop in to houses that have gatherings of people and try to get them early so we can talk to them and talk about what the ordinances are in Ames, just kind of what the boundaries are in terms of keeping peace with the neighbors, and making sure that if things are getting out of hand they call us rather than waiting for something bad to happen. And quite frankly in recent years we’ve had pretty good success at that. Students make an effort to control their events and are increasingly willing to call us if their party gets invaded. And that’s a new phenomena is increasingly a part of the social culture. You have a party at your place and it’s visible from the street and five people you don’t know show up, they invite five of their friends, who invite five of their friends, pretty soon you have 200 people in your house. Laptop, cellphone, maybe some of your furniture’s going out the front door. You really have to try to respond to that. 

Me: Now lately there’s been more of a light shone on what’s a rather sensitive problem, and that’s a sexual assault on college campuses. Do you think that’s affected Iowa State and how do you respond to that?

Chuck: We’ve been concerned about sexual assaults on campus for a long time. We, as a community, formed the Sexual Assault Response Team many years ago.

Sexual assaults on campus are an important issue. It’s one that requires more dialogue. 

What the boundaries are, what the expectations are, what bystanders responsibility is, those are very important. I think the national focus will stimulate discussion of those things. 

We need to be talking about this issue.

There are times where the victim may not want to pursue prosecution, but there’s a community interest in prosecuting crimes, and sometimes there’s real tension over that. 

The world is sometimes slow to change. So we’ve got to keep working at that. 

Me: In your time as chief, what do you think you’re most proud of?

Chuck: What I’m proud of…that’s a tricky word. But one of the things that I really believe is exceptional about the Ames police department is the caliber of the people we’ve been able to assemble here. This is a great community, great place to live. 

We have community safety officer positions. They do evidence transport, they write parking tickets, they work with us in a lot of ways. And many of those CSO have career aspirations in law enforcement. 

I’m just really proud of the caliber of people we’ve been able to hire and the quality of work that they’re trying to do. 

Our supervisors are good people to work for. Our patrol officers are good people to work with. Many of them are Iowa State graduates who’ve been here their whole life.

The best jobs in the department are those that work day to day with the citizens and feel like they accomplish something. Sometimes for me it feels like one step forward and two steps back. 

Geoff Huff, Criminal Investigations Division Commander, 20 years in August

“He’s definitely a humble person. There’s people out there that like to brag about what they do and there’s people that don’t, and he would be in that category of people that don’t.”

“He is literally the smartest person I’ve ever met. I say that hands down, the smartest person I’ve ever met.”

 “When you talk to the chief, any question that you pose, he never gives you a quick answer. You can literally see him processing that question and going through all the possible scenarios and outcomes in his head before he gives you a very thoughtful answer.”

“That’s exactly the kind of person you need to be the chief of police.”

“I think the award is recognition for a lot of the behind-the-scenes work that he does day-to-day that nobody sees.”

“We’ve had riots, we’ve had officer-involved shootings, and we’ve had all this stuff happen, and he never outwardly lets you know that he is kinda upset or angry.”

“Very thoughtful. Even in the worst of times, he’s very thoughtful.”

“It wasn’t too long after things started to go south on us, he was out there. And that was a very tense situation and you wouldn’t know it by looking at him.”

Jason Tuttle, Patrol Commander, 14 years

“I think he very much understands the role that the university and the city, how they interact together.”

“I think that the chief has a very good perspective because he’s worked at the university, he knows what the university expects, and now he hears from our citizens in the community, and our officers, what we expect during Veisha.” 

“I think that’s one thing that our chief really prides our department in doing is building relationships with people in the community.”