Chief of Police Bruce Lewis Named Associate Vice President

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Northwestern University Chief of Police Bruce Lewis has been promoted to associate vice president for public safety and chief of police.

The appointment, effective Jan. 1, was announced by Eugene S. Sunshine, senior vice president for business and finance, who said, "The change recognizes a substantial increase in the breadth of his responsibilities and is reflective of titles of similar positions at comparable universities."

Lewis has played a leadership role in implementing an enhanced residential security program for the Evanston campus and is now responsible for the system on an on-going basis. This initiative entailed the hiring and training of 25 community service officers, four additional police officers to staff a residential/neighborhood problem solving team, and the installation and monitoring of closed circuit television's cameras.

He also has directed creation of a comprehensive emergency preparedness plan that includes a hazard and vulnerability assessment; establishment of emergency support functions and university response centers; response action checklists in compliance with the National Incident Management System (NIMS) and Incident Command System; training to operations personnel; conducting a tabletop exercise; performing budgetary analyses to support investments for the emergency planning process University-wide; and planning for disaster recovery. An outdoor notification system will be in place early in 2008.

The University plans to create a new position of director of emergency management that will report to Lewis.

"Bruce's leadership has been an integral part of permanently establishing off-campus crime reduction strategies in cooperation with the Evanston Police," Sunshine said. "These include, in part, close collaborations on robbery and burglary task forces. His most recent accomplishment in this regard was developing and assisting in ushering through the City Council a plan to install nine additional blue light emergency phones west of campus."

Lewis was named chief of police at Northwestern in 2003 after serving as chief of police at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) since 1998.

He earned a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette, La., and a master's degree in criminal justice from Grambling State University, Grambling, La. He also is enrolled in a PhD program in public administration at UIC and completed executive education programs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, the FBI's Law Enforcement Academy, the Aspen Institute and Northwestern's Center for Public Safety.

Prior to heading UIC's police force, Lewis was director of university police at Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, for three years and chief of police and director of parking services at Nicholls State University, Thibodaux, La., for two years. He also was a municipal police officer and investigator in Lafayette, La., for eight years. Prior to that he started his policing career as a student officer at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, La.