Host Sara Kacin speaks with academic leaders at Wayne State University to learn how they have developed their careers while empowering themselves and others.

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Episode notes

Anthony Holt is associate vice president and chief of police for the Wayne State University Police Department (WSUPD), where he's been a member of the force for more than 40 years. Using a community focused approach to policing, WSUPD officers patrol campus and the surrounding Midtown area 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Under Chief Holt's leadership, the WSUPD's work has resulted in Wayne State being named one of the 50 safest college campuses in the country. In this episode of EmpowerED to Lead, Chief Holt reflects on how the WSUPD has played an integral role in the continued growth of Wayne State and how he's seen his own leadership style transform as well.

About Anthony Holt

Anthony Holt is associate vice president and chief of police for the Wayne State University Police Department (WSUPD). A graduate of Wayne State, he joined the WSUPD as a police officer in 1977, rising through the ranks to become sergeant, lieutenant, captain and now chief of police. Chief Holt is responsible for the safety and security of Wayne State, and under his leadership, the WSUPD has implemented the use of body cameras on all 70 officers; worked with Wayne State's Center for Urban Studies on reducing crime through the CompStat program; and established the headquarters for the National De-escalation Training Center.

Additional resources

Learn more about CompStat and the National De-escalation Training Center.

Follow EmpowerED to Lead on Twitter @WSUFacSuccess.

Transcript

Narrator:

Welcome to EmpowerED to Lead, a Wayne State University podcast for academic leaders committed to empowering their community to succeed, hosted by Dr. Sara E. Kacin, director of Wayne State's Office for Teaching and Learning and assistant provost for faculty development and success.

This podcast explores the personal journeys of academic leaders, both current and emerging, to learn more about how they have developed their careers. Dr. Kacin speaks with faculty and staff about their work and how they've empowered themselves and others along the way. By doing this, we hope to empower listeners like you, as you continue on your leadership path.

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

Anthony Holt is associate vice president and chief of police for the Wayne State University Police Department. A graduate of Wayne State's criminal justice program, holt joined the WSUPD as a police officer in 1977, going on to become sergeant, lieutenant, captain, and now chief of police. Using a community focused approach to policing WSUPD officers patrol campus, and the surrounding Midtown Detroit area 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Under Holt's leadership, the WSUPD's work has resulted in Wayne State being named one of the 50 safest college campuses in the country. It is my great pleasure to welcome Chief Holt to the podcast. Welcome, Chief Holt!

Anthony Holt:

Thank you! Pleasure to be here this morning.

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

We are so glad to be having some time today to talk with you, and we are just going to get right into some questions. So you joined the WSUPD in 1977, as just mentioned, rising through the ranks as police officer to sergeant, lieutenant, captain, and now chief of police. What has been the most rewarding part of your leadership journey?

Anthony Holt:

Well, I think the most rewarding part for me, as someone who lived in the area while I was a student here in the '60s, is to watch the transformation and be able to guide the department in the direction I wanted us to be part of. I wanted a real community based police department where we interact with not only the university students, the staff, but also the surrounding community and the most rewarding part for me right now is to see that growth, how that is taking place and how we are an integral part of that growth.

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

Chief Holt, would you mind defining what does community mean to you?

Anthony Holt:

Community means, to me, that we look like the community; we are a part of the community. Basically, we feel what they feel. If I have community members who are not even associated with the university, or we get our checks on the third of the month, but we have to get together with a group to go to the bank because we have concerns of being accosted, we have concerns about being harassed, and being a part of community, I feel those same concerns that allow me to interact with those concerns. Being part of the community means, when parents call me and [say], "My daughter or my son wants to move off the dorms in the apartments in the area is he safe?" I says, "Yes, he will be, and we are sure of that." That is being part of the community to me.

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

Great. Thank you. So the WSUPD has played a key role in making Wayne State one of the nation's safest college campuses. One of the ways your department has done this is through the CompStat program, a crime-prevention system done in partnership with WSU's Center for Urban Studies. What inspired this collaboration?

Anthony Holt:

Well, what inspired it is that I realized that no one department, or no one agency, could tackle the issues in an urban environment by themselves. It has to be based on partnerships; it has to be based on collaboration and networking. So I said to myself, "What can I do to really affect the crime rate? What can I do to really make this a real walkable community where students don't run down here and go to school, then run to the car and run away? We have shops opening up; we have different entertainment venues. How do we get everybody to participate in this as a community?"

So when I first started out, I started out in my conference room with eight people, and what we do  it's a data-driven process where we look at the crime rates, what happened 14 days ago, we looked last year at this time, what took place, and we look two weeks ahead last year, what happened since September, the first two weeks. If we look at the crime data and we look at the stats from last year, to 14 days ago, to a month last year at this time, we will see data, and we will see a hotspot.

I'll give you an example: We looked at the last 14 days when we first started this process, in 2009, we showed that we had find what they call "apple pickings." People students, staff, community walking around on the telephone, someone would ride up on a bike, snatch the phone and keep going, or someone will go up to an unsuspecting citizen and [say], "I have an emergency. Can I please see your phone?" They give them the phone; they take off. So we looked at the stats, and we showed this happens every Wednesday from one to five, sometimes on a Friday, and we saw the area of three of blocks radius where it was taking place.

So with this CompStat, I have this group it was only nine people when we started and we said, "Well, what do you think?" I want to be a real participating group. I don't want to lead the discussion; I want to sit in the middle of the table and to draw people in, and I could back out. And he stated, "All right. We could do two things: We could put a lot of visibility out there, a lot of officers riding around with their purchases not safe to do this." Well, that's not good, he'll just go somewhere else where there's not a lot of police visibility. "We could do surveillance, or we could put some plainclothes officers out there." I liked both of those ideas. So what we did: I had a very young-looking female officer; we put her in front of the Starbucks on Woodward and Mack. She's talking on a cell phone, and it's five people, plainclothes officers surrounding her, sitting at the bus stop. Here comes a guy on a bicycle; he snatches the phone, he takes off, and we're very concerned with the optics of what we do I don't want the public to see six officers ganging up on a guy, snatch him off the bike because they don't know what's going on. So we follow him we followed him to a location, we set up a surveillance on a house and we knew who he was. We had his picture; we saw who he was. As soon as he came out, we arrested him and Detroit Police was part of our process. We found out that he was doing this not only [would] he do Wednesdays at Wayne State, he would do Mondays and Fridays at other locations. He was a convicted felon on parole, and that took care of that matter. We started off with seeing nine members; I had a CompStat meeting yesterday and 45 people in attendance. I have Detroit Police, Wayne County Sheriffs, FBI, Secret Service, but my CompStat is a little bit different than traditional CompStats. I have the community involved in my CompStat. I have Wayne State students come in and give their perspectives. I have the Woodbridge Community District Council. I have the New Center Council. I have every participant in the areas that we patrol and we effect, and we all join as a group.

I had the father of CompStat, former New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, who actually wrote the book on how to do CompStat. He came to one of our CompStat meetings from New York, and he contacted the Chief of Police of Detroit and says, "You need to come here and see how they do it they sort of rewrote it." And that's how we started. I think it's very, very effective right now.

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

Yes. It sounds like that partnership, and that collaboration, and that drive for participatory and hands-on [efforts] really made that most recent situation quite successful and working together. Those sound like a wonderful leadership strategies that I think our listeners would be interested in, so I'm really glad that you mentioned those.

So thinking about this year, I think it is safe to say that campus has felt pretty different during the coronavirus pandemic. So what kinds of adjustments have you and your team had to make in response to these changes?

Anthony Holt:

Well, we are affected as everyone else. We cannot work from home, and we have to be out here. I had at least 10 officers affected. So, what I had to do we have to go to what is called a mobilization. We go to 12-hour shifts, and I rotate the shifts that the officers work a week, then have a week off, but how we approach things has to still continue. Some of the things that I normally do, I had to change a little bit in terms of, we used to do a lot of escorts those factors change, but the big change is how we have to react to the public now. Because we have a pandemic, when people call for service, you can't just state, "Well, we're no longer coming." We still have to do that. What we do right now, as an emphasis I'm trying to get across, is we have to show a little more empathy to people in how we react to them. We have a lot of homeless people in the areas, and with the pandemic, the shelters are closed, so you have to be conscious of that when they're sleeping at the bus stops and they're sleeping on the sidewalks. It's no longer, "Get up, move, go to a shelter" you have to [have] a little more empathy, and we have to figure out how we react to that. We had masks that we have out. We have cleaners that we have out. We know washing stations where we can refer them to. So it's a whole new different approach to policing right now.

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

Yeah, it sounds like flexibility really has to be the key in moving forward with whatever might happen with this pandemic.

Over the last several months in particular, society has become more and more aware of the use of excessive police force. The WSUPD recently launched the National De-escalation Training Center headquarters on campus, where training focuses on exceeding traditional de-escalation methods. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Anthony Holt:

Yes. First, I want to state, this was not a result of the horrendous incident that happened in Minneapolis with George Floyd losing his life or [being] brutally murdered. This took place basically two years ago: I was approached at an event and [someone] says, "Listen, I have this great program on de-escalation." And I was skeptical because, "Well, that's basically a former Verbal Judo where one-size-fits-all, and you allow the person to vent, the you go here with your next step, whether it's use of force or salvage the situation." He says, "No, this is different. This is based on personality models, called Esoterica, where it's a subset of personalities; there's three major subsets, and from that, that's a whole other range of subsets." I said, "Well, I can't train the officers for two years in a psychology sort of basis." He says, "No, this is a two-day intensive training. We work with the Department of Defense; we work with other organizations inside threats." And he says, "Eventually the federal government, the Justice Department, before they award grants, they are going to make this mandatory to have this training." I said, "OK, well, I'm very interested. Let's see how it works." Well, the funding for it never took place, so that year it didn't take place. Then last year, in November, I met with him again and he says, "We're ready to go." So in February, I sent two officers to Texas I want them to vet this process. I want them to see how it worked, does it apply to police agencies? They came back very impressed with it, and from that, in early March, I started the first set of training for 15 officers here. It is a very intensive two-day training; the first day is learning about the subsets, how will you approach a person within a matter of seconds, you'll be able to determine their personality. Are they dominant, are they a compliant-type person? And based on that, you go forward with wherever the call was: If it is a disturbance, if it is a domestic incident. It does not negate the use of force we're not putting the officer at risk at all. And the second day is all scenario based: We really get in your face, we show you five different scenarios, we watch how you respond to it. And based on that, we feel we have you loaded up with enough de-escalation techniques that you could take this product on the road at your everyday job.

Well, we trained the first set of officers, but then what happened, of course, the pandemic set in, so with the governor's orders, with the university's procedures, we couldn't do any face-to-face [training]. So now we are still doing the virtual one-day training, and we were waiting until we restart, and we're going to bring everybody back in, and we're going to be the national headquarters for this. We are going to have a MILO, which is a set of 360 walls for screens, where we can actually set up scenarios, we could record you going through the scenarios, we can inject ourselves when you're doing the scenarios. And we are going to offer this training not only every officer in the department will be trained in utilizing this, but also so other agencies. I have already had calls from Southfield Police, Wayne County Community District Police … And we are going to be the headquarters here, and we know everybody is not coming here for training the budgets won't allow it and we're setting up regional training centers. The key with these regional training centers, we're all going to be on the same page. Typical de-escalation is one-size-fits-all. Ours is completely different because we are looking at the individual, and I think what is really crucial here, it's not just what we're saying we're doing: We're going to bring the community in to vet this and get their input of how we do this de-escalation. Some of the groups out here protesting right now about defund the police, eliminate the police, we're going to invite someone else groups in and say, "This is the product we're putting out. We want to get your take on this." And this is where we're at. I'm very excited about this. I think this is all part of community policing, how we will react.

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

Yeah, I certainly agree. So, as you were explaining that, which was an innovative idea two years ago when that started, and then we had just even so many changes in the last six months, what have you learned about your own leadership style in walking through, I would say, the last year or so?

Anthony Holt:

I think I had to change my leadership style just a little bit. Police basically is a paramilitary organization you give an order at the top, and you make sure it's followed through. There is not much flexibility. If I say, "This is what we are going to do from 9 to 10," I expect that that is what is going to be done from 9 to 10. But what I really learned, not only in the last year: Everything starts at the top, but it is not by directions and order it is by buy-in. If you want to be successful, the organization has to buy in to your goals, and your objectives and where you want to move forward, so that's the big difference. I don't want the briefing now we brief the offers and said, "This is where I want you to patrol. This is what I want you to do." I think it's now more of an explanation now. "We need to do this because, this is what the community are saying, how can we as a group shape what we do a little bit differently?" I have to explain now the optics of what we do is very, very important. When we are in a chase and we make an arrest, do I need seven cars standing around with the subject in the back of the car? We're all high-fiving each other because you did such a great job that's not the good optic that the public want to see. We need to do it differently. I think you have to take all into consideration I think that's what I learned in the last year, how to get buy-in not only from my department, but from the people we interact with.

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

So with civil rights and social justice playing a critical role this year especially, we have seen a lot of people protesting in Detroit you just referenced how you are going to invite them in to have conversations as we move forward. What advice would you give to those who might be looking to raise their voice in a safe, responsible way?

Anthony Holt:

I think we have been very lucky in the protests in Detroit. All the protests in Detroit, even though a lot of it is defund the police, they want the police chief to resign, the police have been an integral part of their protests, blocking traffic, making sure there's no interference … and this is a movement that is going to be around for quite a while. We're going to see a whole new different set of theories in terms of how we police, who we police and it is going to be more community involvement. When they say, "Defund the police," or "Reform the police," I don't think they are talking about eliminating you. They want a different reaction. I get calls from parents saying, "We live in Bloomfield. We're coming downtown to protest will we be safe?" You have to look, well, you want to protest against the police, but you're calling to see if it is safe to come down. We say, "Absolutely."

Really, if you look at the history of this country, especially for certain segments of the population, things only change through protest. When I was a student here in '60s, we're in the middle of the mall, every day was protests about the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King was here, H. Rap Brown was here that's part of the change. When the Black students took over one of our buildings to protest and they want a bigger creation of the Black Studies program, I thought it was great. I'm working at the door, blocking the door and supposed to make sure they don't come in, but at the same time, I thought it was a great protest that is how things change and take place. Right now, I think it's needed, and I don't have an issue with it whatsoever. I think it's safe to come down. We haven't had what other cities have had because I think we're responding to it in the correct way.

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

Certainly, certainly. So can you tell us a little bit about your officers and how you mentor them, and just share with our listeners who is on your team?

Anthony Holt:

Yeah, we were probably the second the police department when were formed in 1966 that required a bachelor's degree; to even be considered for the department, you have to have a bachelor's degree. You have to be academically eligible for a master's degree. So, we go through really a very intense process of interviewing. We interviewed the officers that is one of the [processes] I'm changing now in our interview process, I'm going to invite the university community to be part of that process. When I select that officer, before actually giving them an offer, I'm going to ask a certain segment of the university, whether it's staff, student, faculty or a combination of both, to meet with this candidate and give me their input what they think about this candidate. It is not where I'm going to have a candidate or offer a job and then I'm bringing them in front of this panel and [say], "This is a new officer." No, I want you to be part of the process of the selection. Once I have the officer and usually right now, to be very honest, we were only the second department in the country at that time to require a degree. So we weren't really getting a lot of diversity and so forth, but things have changed right now. We get people who finish the criminal justice program they'll apply for 20 different departments. They will all say, "I want to work at Wayne State." What they're telling every department they interview, "I want to work for you." So, really, they are taking the first job that comes along, and we have a good understanding of that, but once we have them here, we send them to an academy a police academy. They finish the police academy. Once they finish the academy, I swear them in as a Wayne State Police Officer. I then take them to Detroit and they are sworn in as a Detroit Police Officer with full qualifications, no restrictions. From that, we put them through very intense in-house training program here, so weekly tests, they go through scenarios, they work all the different shifts, and then we put them on the road to work.

I don't have a traditional department where an officer comes here and he does 25, 30 years and retire. I'm not really looking for that officer who says, "For 30 years, I want to be a patrolman and ride around at a certain area." I'm looking for an officer who says, "I want to come here, I want to get an advanced degree, I want to get a lot of training and I want to move on in a different direction … perhaps a bigger department, become a chief, I'll work administrations." I have a board outside of my office with probably have over 500, maybe almost 1,000 different pitches where people who left here, where they work. We have officers who are chiefs of police. When we had President Obama come here several years ago, the lead Secret Service agent came up to me and says, "Chief Holt, you don't remember me I was a cadet for you here." And now this guy is the lead Secret Service agent for the presidential detail. Those sort of things say, "Well, this is really good." We actually had an officer who just got his doctorate degree in education. I hired this one female officer who is now a supervisor with ATF, and when I hired her, and she walked across the stage, graduating from the academy. I stated to her, "Well, this is Monday; next week, I expect you to be enrolled in a master's program, and if you're here for five years, I'm going to find a way to get rid of you." And she did exactly five years within ATF, and now she's a supervisory agent with them.

This is what we have here. I want a very highly motivated group of officers. I want an officer who has the diversity that they will be responding to a fight at a bar, they will be chasing a stolen car and then they will get a call from a professor at two in the morning: "I left the coffee pot on in my office I need someone to go in there and make sure it's unplugged." I want them to be able to switch gears. I want them to be able to talk to a medical professor, a faculty member, a student at the same time, show that same sort of respect and empathy to someone sprawled on the sidewalk in the area. That's what I'm looking for.

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

Yeah. I love that approach. I think that's going to be so helpful for listeners here to know that it's really OK to have different perspectives about who's on your team and helping them to achieve their goals, so we have our goals for our unit or our department, but we also are trying to help them meet their goals I think that's amazing.

So what would you say to encourage youth who want to be a police officer? What are some words that you might say to them if someone came up and said, "I'd like to be a police officer?"

Anthony Holt:

I tell everybody, take a deep, hard, introspective look at what you want to do. I interview officers who leave other departments, and I say, "You know, you really need to be sure because it's so easy to wake up 20 years later and say, 'I really don't want to do this that long.'" So you really need to explore the department you're going to, what aspect of police work that you really like. Things that you see on television, probably you'll never do. My department, I want it to be a service-orientated department; I want officers where they see someone walking down the street, it's 10 below zero, I want them to say, "Well, how far are you going?" I want them to see if across the street from the station, we have a bus stop: If I see a group out there, or I see a parent with two kids, I want them to call and say, "Why don't you wait in our station here until the bus comes, and we will let you know. We will stop that bus for you so you could get on." I want that service aspect. Eighty-five, 90% of what we do is service-related. It is that 10% that you are going to come into where a different level of policing has to be done. It might take force, it might take de-escalation, but we train for that. As I say, "We load you up for what you need, and we send you out there." So I'm asking candidates, and I come in for each one to see if this is really what they want. If you're not sure, maybe do volunteer police work.

I had really a great applicant, an Asian male, and I said, "So you want to do police work?" He said, "Yeah, my family [doesn't] want me to do this, so I sort of have to hide the fact that this is what I'm doing." And I said, "Boy, do you really want to do this?" He said, "Well, my family, they own a plant, I'm an engineer, I'm working on my doctorate in engineering, but it's just something I want to do." I said, "You know what? Let me give you these names of these communities. They have part-time police officers; they have volunteer police officers. Why don't you try that for a while to see if this fits in with your expectation of what this job is?" And he said, "I'm not getting the job?" I said, "No." And he called me two years later, and he says, "Boy, you're exactly right. I'm working as a part-time police officer. It's not what I expected everybody is not happy to see me, and then I'm getting married and the income is not what I could've made." So I just want people to take a real good introspective of what you want to do.

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

Wow. So Chief Holt, you have really shared some very insightful things for, I think, our listeners to think about. Here's a little summary of important points that I think you brought up: As far as being a leader, making the efforts in a partnership, collaboration, networking and it takes a little bit, it works harder to get people to participate, and that's OK, because your approach is a community-based approach. You use data to make informed decisions, whether that's data that you collect or data that you collect by talking to people and getting others' feedback. Flexibility a huge, huge piece of your everyday life is just being ready for whatever and having empathy for whatever situation comes on in, so I think this overall service aspect is a really important thing to consider, and one of my most favorite parts is the mentorship that you provide to community members, that you provide to your team and that you encourage your team to be mentors to others as well in the way that you are working throughout the community. So it has been an overall joy to have this conversation with you today. It wouldn't be fair if I didn't offer you the can you think of any other points that you would say, "Here's this huge long list" that in our time together you've brought up, but were there any other points that you think, Oh, no, we have to mention this one as well?

Anthony Holt:

Yeah. The only thing I forgot, I said, we really depend on data. Any incident that happened in Detroit, no matter where it's at, I can tell you, I could pull up the report, capture the data, tell you about it, but the most important thing about data: It doesn't tell the whole story. I can always come up with data to show how safe we are and the great job we do, but by having the community aspect in my CompStat meeting, you cannot tell someone who lives in the community that they are safe. They'll tell you if they're safe.

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

Yeah.

Anthony Holt:

The data goes so far, but you have to have that person who is living in the process, or that student who is walking out of class at 10 p.m. at night, walking three blocks to their car, if they feel they are in one of the safest campuses in the country. You have to have that in-person input because they will tell you the truth.

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

That's wonderful we thank you so much for sharing your time with us today. We know that you are super busy, and one final question: Is there a way that our listeners can reach out to you or stay connected with your work, such as an email address?

Anthony Holt:

Yes. If you could contact police@wayne.edu, leave your comments, leave a direct message for me, I will respond. Also, we have a monthly newsletter that goes out called Campus Watch. It goes out to 50,000 participants and, really, students never ask. It's their parents who want the information, so we could send you a copy of that. We'll tell you everything that happened in the community and on the campus, every arrest we made, there's a tip line … we'll tell you the training we're going through, and you could just vent. You could just write in you're full of hot air, or whatever you want. Just let me know.

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

Wonderful. Thank you so much, Chief Holt. It has been my great pleasure to share time with you today and share with our listeners a little bit about some of the values that you have with leadership and with community policing for Wayne State University. So we appreciate you. Be sure to join us next time on EmpowerED to Lead.

Narrator:

We're glad to have you listening to EmpowerED to Lead. To learn more about our podcast, please follow us on Twitter @WSUFacSuccess.