Oakland University Police Department

I'm a fourth-generation police officer. I really think the first time my dad brought his police car home is really what made me want to be a police officer and follow in his footsteps. I come from a long line of police officers and I just always knew that that's what I wanted to do. We're always here. We always have at least two patrol cars on the road and a dispatcher answering phone calls. If you're calling 9-1-1 it's going to come to us. Always driving around just kind of looking to see what's going on. Working here, every day, in a small community like this, you kind of get the feel of what belongs and what doesn't. OUPD is not here just to arrest people and to write tickets. We're here to make sure that the students, faculty, and staff are safe when they visit Oakland University. So that's our job, to provide a safe environment. Provide the feeling. Even if it is safe and if they don't feel safe we're not successful. There's a lot of things that we do for the campus community for the students that a lot of people don't know about. We have the RAD program, which is our rape aggression defense class. It's our self-defense class for women. We do visual escorts where we can watch you walk from point A to point B if you're a little nervous walking after hours when it's dark out. We also have our bike patrol, which are our officers that aren't necessarily in a patrol car, they're out on a bike. We like that bike patrol unit because they do a lot of the community policing stuff. We are teaching kids to be afraid of police officers when we want them to trust us in situations where they need help. So it's important for them to come through and see the police department, see there were normal people just wearing the uniform. We try to get down to their level. You kneel down so that you're not towering over them. You let them wear the hat you're wearing, you let them wear the badge you're wearing. We are real police officers and we can be approachable. People can just come up and ask us questions, ask us for directions. We're here to help.