SDY Honor Roll 2005: Bernard J. Ward, The Professional

Sep 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Michael Fickes

IN 1960, following a series of scandals in the Chicago Police Department, Mayor Richard J. Daley named Orlando W. (OW) Wilson as superintendent of police. Wilson's previous experience was as a professor of police administration and as dean of the School of Criminology at the University of California. “He was a professor, and he was hired to run the Chicago PD,” says Dr. Bernard J. Ward, director of campus safety at Loyola University, Chicago. “Mayor Daley gave him a free hand to professionalize the department.”

Ward has studied Wilson's career, and now, he is, in a way, emulating it. Fascinated by Wilson's legacy as an academic and one of the first modern police administrators, Ward selected the professor-turned-police superintendent as the subject of his own doctoral dissertation.

Today, Ward is a Ph.D. and professor, hired to run the Department of Campus Safety at Loyola.

Back in 1991, Ward was a Chicago Police officer, a full-time security officer at Loyola and a newly-declared doctoral candidate. Because Loyola has a policy that the children of full-time employees may attend the college free, Ward spent his children's college years working two jobs. The Ph.D., in the field of education, was a side benefit of working at the university. Ward hoped the advanced degree would help fulfill his aspirations to a second career as an educator.

Five years later, in 1996, Ward retired from the Chicago Police after a 29-year career. He finished his Ph.D. in 2000 and began teaching at Loyola. All along the way, he continued to work as a campus security officer.

Promotion

In 2003, Father Michael J. Garanzini, the president of Loyola, decided that the university should professionalize and modernize its campus safety department. Garanzini initiated a nationwide search for a campus safety director who had experience as a police officer, had acquired a master's degree and had worked in a university campus safety program.

A few months into the search, Garanzini showed up at Ward's office and said, “Bernie, we're doing this search for a campus safety director, and you're right here. Why don't you take this job?”

Professional staff

During the years he worked as a campus security officer, Ward thought a lot about what the campus safety department should be doing. “If you had been here a couple of years ago, you would have seen a lot of problems,” Ward says. “There wasn't much professionalism.”

Ward strives to be professional in whatever tasks he sets for himself. As a youthful baseball player, he worked his way into semi-pro ball. When he took up golf, he drove his handicap down to a 13. A long time gardener, he chuckles when someone compliments his wife on her flower garden. “That's my work,” he says. “Unusual as it sounds, my wife is a woman who doesn't like flowers.”

Ward brought his enthusiasm for quality to the campus safety department at Loyola. In his first official act, he raided the Chicago Police Department for talent, hired nine officers and assigned them to the top management slots in Loyola's new campus safety department. Currently, Ward and the new management team manage a staff of 43 safety and security officers, a ratio of about five officers per manager. The ratio in campus safety is typically seven or eight to one, according to Ward.

Expanded jurisdiction

Ward has also proposed expanding his department's jurisdiction three blocks beyond campus boundaries to the north, south, east and west. The Chicago City Council planned to vote on the proposal on Sept. 11. If the measure is adopted, the department will be authorized to patrol university dormitories that have sprung up off campus in recent years. “Officers covering these areas will be specially trained; they will wear a vest; and, in some cases, they will be armed,” Ward says. “We want to build a protective umbrella around the university, a safe zone, but it is important to give the proper tools to the people we assign to these areas.”

New technology

“Good security technology and professional officers are what you want in campus security,” Ward says. “We've brought in a consultant to help us design a security technology plan for the university.”

Building by building, Ward is installing access control, closed circuit television (CCTV), and motion detectors across campus. He has put Gunnebo Security Gates in many of the building lobbies. The aesthetic gates feature retractable glass barriers operated by proximity access cards.

He has also installed an Easy Lobby visitor management system that allows faculty and staff to send the names of expected visitors to security officers stationed in building lobbies. The officers then use the system to prepare badges for the visitors.

“We recently installed the gates and the visitor management system in a large multi-use building that houses our libraries,” Ward says. “We were experiencing a lot of thefts in this building — unattended laptops and purses. Since the technology went in, thefts have gone down to virtually nothing.”

Those are the kinds of results Ward expects, but the job has also provided other rewards. For example, Loyola's newspaper, The Phoenix, recently presented Ward with a plaque praising the open door policies of Ward's department. “I'm proud of that award,” he says. “No one in the law enforcement sector of the university ever received anything like it.”

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