A Real Police Woman

A Real Police Woman

Rice’s Innovative Chief of Police Steps Down
After Longtime Law Enforcement Career

BY DANA DURBIN
Rice News Staff
October 21, 1999

This month, after 21 years with the Rice police–14 as chief–Voswinkel will retire to what she expects will be a quiet life with no pager and no requirement that she be on call 24 hours a day. Her career here will be celebrated at a reception on Nov. 9 from 4 to 6 p.m. at the Cohen House.

When Voswinkel was a University of Houston student, her future seemed no different than the other women in her classes. The Houston native earned a degree in home economics and a teaching certificate as well. She could have taught elementary or secondary school, but “just wasn’t interested in doing that when it got down to the nitty gritty,” she said.

A part-time job in 1956 preparing a proposal to convert the UH security department into a force with armed officers became a full-fledged career as she transitioned from an administrative position to a police officer to assistant chief and then moved to the Rice police department.

“I got hooked on the many facets of campus policing. It was something different everyday. It was very people-oriented and I’ve always enjoyed working with people. If I had to make widgets I’d go crazy,” Voswinkel said.

Ironically, education turned out to be the crux of Voswinkel’s career after all–from her ideology that the campus department’s job is to provide a safe educational environment to her devotion to teaching crime prevention to the campus community and providing extensive officer training.

“Our philosophy has always been that we’re not here to police the students, faculty or staff,” Voswinkel said. “We’re here to keep anything from happening that might disrupt the working or studying environment.

“I see us as a part of the educational process–to teach people how, when they go out in the real world, to prepare themselves, to protect themselves against a criminal element,” she continued.

Voswinkel always tried to work in the area of crime prevention, but didn’t always have the manpower to achieve her goals. When she joined the department as assistant chief of police in 1978, the force was only 16 officers strong. It stayed that way until 1994 when the campuswide security initiative implemented by President Malcolm Gillis resulted in the hiring of additional officers. The department now consists of 26 licensed officers.

With the manpower in place, Voswinkel set about achieving a longtime goal–instituting the College Officer program.

“From about 1981 I wanted to try to establish some stations in the college areas so that people would have easy access to an officer,” she said. “When we got the manpower, we went into the program full swing. That was a careerlong goal, and it’s been very successful.”

Today, there are eight college officers and one supervising officer. Four college officers are on duty at a time, and their responsibilities include not only patrolling the colleges and parking lots, but also integrating themselves into residential college life. The officers further develop the educational process for students, Voswinkel said, through crime prevention programs at the colleges and through talks and discussion on other issues that impact students. They share meals with the students and participate in student government.

“Students think nothing of sitting down to eat with an RUPD officer at dinner or having officers attend Student Association or college government meetings,” said Anne Countiss, president of the Student Association and Hanszen College senior. “As a result, students feel more comfortable picking up the phone or stopping a college officer to request help or to report suspicious people. When a student is in crisis, it is much easier for him or her to seek help and trust an officer he or she knows.”

Students’ attitudes toward the police force have not gone unnoticed by the university’s administration, including Dean Currie, vice president for finance and administration, the division of which the RUPD is a part.

Perhaps the best indication of how students feel about the police force, according to Currie, can be seen “during a football or basketball game when officers have to wade into the crowd to help students who are having difficulty behaving themselves, and the students don’t give them a hard time. They know the officer and they know they’re there to help and that they want to cut the students as much slack as they can.”

“Students trust the officers to act in their best interest,” Currie said.

Wiess College Master John Hutchinson has seen that trust firsthand. He noted that Voswinkel always understood that students’ lives are different than other people police are used to dealing with and “did a wonderful job teaching her officers how to work in that kind of environment.”

Sgt. Terry Ryals, who has been with the RUPD for 10 years, is one officer who had to learn a new way of policing.

“I’ll tell you what she did for me. I had never been a police officer on a college campus before I came here. Because of her, I found out there are other ways to police, other ways to handle problems than just putting people in jail. We’ve learned how to take care of our own. Our role is that of a problem-solver, and that’s one thing that Chief Voswinkel taught,” Ryals said.

Voswinkel attributes much of her success in the community-oriented style of policing to her realization after many years of trying to pattern the department after a traditional municipal agency that the campus police was inherently different. “I finally woke up one day and said, ‘We’re not like that, we can’t be like that, we’re gonna quit trying.'”

She implemented what she called an entry-level assessment center to hire officers, starting with the officers that were added through Gillis’ security initiative.

She started the process by meeting with “every group on campus that would talk to me” and asking what they wanted in a campus police officer. “Almost without exception, it was that we find people to be able to solve problems, someone who was able to talk to you and be approachable, someone who was able to use other options to arrest,” she said.

“If you get someone who wants to use lights and sirens, well, that’s not going to happen, they don’t need to be here. But we had been hiring based on that for years,” she said.

By creating the assessment center, which involves faculty, staff and students in the hiring process and includes a series of police scenarios in which candidates must participate, Voswinkel was able to hire a different kind of officer.

“We’ve found that we’ve gotten a better quality of officer, we found that our retention has been better and certainly our community complaints have gone down tremendously,” she said.

Though she always placed a high priority on officer training, Voswinkel stepped up training to another level when she implemented the new hiring procedure.

“I always tried to have all my officers with at least the minimum 40 hours of classroom training,” she said, noting that most departments have less than 10 officers with that kind of training. “The reason for that is that our main responsibility is to prevent crime, and if officers don’t know what they’re doing and don’t know the problems that exist, both in terms of physical security and behavior, then you certainly can’t keep anyone from getting hurt.”

But Voswinkel also wanted her officers to be trained for dealing with a crime victim. “If we failed to prevent the crime, when we go to the victim and talk with them, then the officer is prepared to provide information to keep them from becoming a victim again,” she said.

With the new hiring practices, Voswinkel said, “I had to make sure that officers were trained even though we were not hiring on those traditional police characteristics anymore.” Sgt. Jim Baylor, the department’s crime prevention and training specialist, was hired.

Now the department is recognized for its high-quality officers, according to Neill Binford, associate vice president for finance and administration and Voswinkel’s direct supervisor.

“She’s built a department that is well trained and has become known in our part of Texas as a training ground for very good officers, particularly officers that fit in a unique niche–good, high-quality officers that at the same time know how to take care of their people. That’s been Mary’s talent, to balance those things, and it’s a very difficult thing to do,” Binford said.

While Voswinkel has a very comforting nature and a service-oriented affect, Currie noted that it is important to realize that she “is very much aware that there are bad people out there and you need a police force that isn’t just everybody’s buddy, but that is very well-trained and knows what to do when something bad happens.

“I think the hallmark of Mary’s career was that she understood Rice to be an educational process and wanted to be a part of that process,” Currie continued. “I just don’t want people in all their praise of that to overlook the fact of how highly-trained and well-disciplined her shop was as a police force.”

With such a well-trained cadre of officers, Voswinkel’s style, according to Binford, is to let the kudos go to her officers and staff. “In most cases, she always stepped back and said, ‘Let me introduce you to so and so who’s done all the work.’ But it’s been her guidance that has taken this department from a new department to a very well-recognized professional police agency in this part of Texas.”

Voswinkel’s guidance, leadership and responsiveness made an impression across campus.

SA President Countiss said she has met with Voswinkel on issues such as reducing sexual assaults, redistributing parking to the south side of campus and numerous safety concerns. The chief always responded quickly, Countiss said.

Catherine Clack, assistant dean for student affairs and director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs, worked with Voswinkel in a number of ways, but she pointed to one situation in particular when Voswinkel brought about positive change.

“Many years ago we had a serious problem with the campus police stopping and questioning black male students. Mary dealt with each complaint and concern very seriously and was effective in bringing about a change in attitude amongst the officers,” Clack said. “She has welcomed and encouraged not only my involvement in the operations of the campus police but has also made sincere efforts at getting minority students more involved in its operations.”

Carlos Garcia, Rice associate general counsel who works with the police department on legal matters, said, “All my experiences working with Mary have been completely positive. Mary’s tenure has been very good for Rice. Her calm, considered approach to things was well-suited to Rice’s environment, and she was extremely approachable. Mary has always had Rice’s welfare as her highest priority.”

Perhaps the best example of Voswinkel’s commitment to Rice was during the 1990 Economic Summit that brought world leaders to campus.

“From my perspective, her finest hour in the many years she has been here was the assistance she provided during the Economic Summit,” said Carl MacDowell, assistant to President Gillis.

Throughout the summit, Voswinkel maintained as her priority the students, faculty and staff who had to be on campus for classes and work despite the high security surrounding the event.

“This university had never before dealt with a situation that was such a disruption,” MacDowell said. “Mary was very good in dealing with the community when it lost control of the university to the Secret Service. She was instrumental in keeping everything going when the Secret Service would have just sent everyone home.”

While she gets praise from across campus, Rice police officers are quick to show their respect for Voswinkel as well.

“I think she made this department what it is today,” said Sgt. Willie Anderson, who has been with the Rice police since 1971. “She was fair, she knew what the department needed, and she knew how to work with people, no matter what capacity they were in.”