This is the third in a three part series that documents a night ride along with EMU DPS officers.
John Phillips worked for the Pittsfield Police Department for 30 years and served as Director of Public Safety, which is the same as Chief of Police, for the last 10 of those years.
“They didn’t have the title of Chief at the time,” Phillips said. “I ran both the police and the fire departments over there.”
At the end of 2008, when his contract expired with Pittsfield Township, Phillips decided to retire.
Phillips told MLive in 2008 he was grateful for the people he worked with and the opportunities the Pittsfield Police Department had offered him.
“I’m finishing a long career, and I think it’s a great place to work,” Phillips told MLive.
At that time, EMU Police Chief Greg O’Dell asked Phillips, who worked for EMU DPS in 1978, to work part-time at EMU.
“I was here, went away for 30 years and I came back,” Phillips said. “Greg said he wanted to put some temporary officers in the housing units as walking police officers, actually on foot. And I came over here and joined up with Greg O’Dell, because he asked me to be a part of that.
“He was a super guy. He was probably one of the best police officers and best administrators I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. And Greg and I worked together when he was in Ann Arbor and I was in Pittsfield. We did a lot of stuff. So when he came over here and asked me to be a part of this department as a temporary officer, man I jumped at the chance.”
Phillips said he believed in what O’Dell was doing in reorganizing the department, supplying officers with the tools needed to do their job and focusing on trust between students and the DPS.
“We had lost some of that trust, and his mission was to get it back and he did,” Phillips said.
He went on to say that he’s proud to work alongside other officers working towards that same goal.
“Because we feel like this can’t stop because Greg’s no longer with us,” he said. “I mean we’re not going to let it fall, because this is what he wanted. This is what he’s going to get, whether he’s with us or not. This is going to be the mission that we’ve got in the future. It’s been a good department to work with, even if we do it one student at a time.”
At about 6:45 p.m. a call came through saying a Toyota Matrix had rolled out of a parking space in the Oakwood South Parking Lot.
Unable to see any damage or cars out of place, Phillips said it looked like another officer had aready taken care of the problem, as another patrol unit had just left.
Phillips explained the touchscreen computer system in the patrol car, which looks like a 14-inch laptop computer mounted between the front seats.
“This is called the CAD screen, or computer-aided dispatch, and everything that we do comes over the CAD screen. We get all of our calls over this. We write all of our reports on this. We don’t have to go back to the station to write police reports. We can write them right from the car.”
The DPS CAD screen uses the Courts and Law Enforcement Management Information System, which links multiple law enforcement agency databases and enables immediate communication between officers from departments around the state.
“We’re all on the same system, and that’s a good thing,” Phillips said.
The CLEMIS website lists Genesee, Livingston, Macomb, Oakland, Washtenaw and Wayne counties
as law enforcement agencies in southeastern Michigan that have implemented the service.
Officer Phillips was able to retrieve a profile of the Toyota Matrix owner within about 10 seconds of inputting the license plate number.
Phillips said huge steps have been taken to improve campus safety, and EMU DPS has some of
the best investigators and detectives in Washtenaw County.
“We’ve got really some of the best cops that I’ve ever worked with, right here at Eastern Michigan University. And I don’t say that just because I’m a part of this thing. I mean, I’ve got no horse in the race. I don’t have any interest in promotions anymore or anything. I wanted to be a cop again,” he said.
Phillips said he wouldn’t want to be a criminal being sought by EMU DPS.
“Because you’re going to get caught,” he said. “It’s all under the premise of providing a safe learning environment for the students at Eastern Michigan University. There’s a lot of parents out there that invest heavily in this university with their kids education, and we don’t take that for granted.”
But Phillips said he also believes students should take some initiative for their own safety by remembering basic safety habits, such as walking with a partner at night, locking doors and protecting personal property.
“We got so many [students] that for the first time in their lives, they’re out on their own and they’ve got so much stuff on their mind, with their studies and their schooling and their financial aid and they forget the basics.”
At about 7:04 p.m., a call came over the radio that a resident advisor at Walton Hall reported a suspicious odor while performing door checks on the ground floor, which was believed to be marijuana.
Resident advisors go door-to-door in the resident halls to make sure students are locking their doors as a safety precaution.
“We’ll get a lot of these in the course of the evening,” Phillips said. “Not all of them do
we find, the ones we do find we’ll either issue violations, or forward them onto student conduct.”
Phillips said the DPS isn’t soft on marijuana violations, but the student’s cooperation and whether it’s possession or possession with intent to sell is taken into consideration.
While it was apparent that marijuana was present in the room, officers were not able to locate the source and had to list the report as unfounded, or closed without a suspect.
Phillips left Walton Hall and continued on foot to the Eateries, where he waved and smiled at students and stopped to talk with ones he knew and a few that he didn’t.
Phillips chuckled as he described the length to which some criminals will go, such as attempting to steal chicken nuggets by putting them in a fountain drink cup and trying to pay for a drink. Obviously the thief was caught, because he’s telling the story.
He went on to say that DPS officers spend a lot of time in the Eateries talking with students and the university even allows a small budget for officers to purchase food and drinks for students to help build a rapport.
At 7:45 p.m., after leaving the eateries on foot patrol, a female screamed outside Walton Hall, which Phillips referred to as a “chirp.” Upon walking around the corner of the building, Phillips encountered three students, one male and two female, walking together and giggling.
It was what he thought it was, nothing, but better safe than sorry.
Phillips said the DPS takes a hard-line approach on campus predators who target students and people looking to cause trouble. He said it usually doesn’t take long to identify and ban those people from campus.
Buckson said EMU does have the ability to ban people from the campus for a year and potentially longer if the infraction merits it.
