By After 15 years as Cal State Long Beach’s chief of police, Jack Pearson is retiring at the end of this year.
Interestingly enough, Pearson’s career in law enforcement started by accident. Desperately needing money during his senior year as a political science major at the University of Kansas, he noticed an advertisement in the student employment office for people willing to write parking tickets, which is exactly what he did until he graduated in 1973 and was accepted into law school. After deciding a break from school was necessary, Pearson applied for an officer position. He got the job.
“I just figured I’d do it for a couple years and then go to law school,” Pearson said. “Then I had a lot of fun doing it. I enjoyed it and had some measure of success, so I just kept with it.”
After 20 years at the University of Kansas, where he ultimately was appointed chief of police, Pearson came to CSULB in 1992.
Today, as chief of police for CSULB, he has more than 40 officers on his staff, including 27 sworn police officers, 8 full-time non-sworn and 6 part-time non-sworn. There are also 40 student assistants who patrol campus parking.
“My primary job is to act as the liaison between the department and the rest of the university,” Pearson said, adding that he also controls the University Police’s financing, secures the department’s resources, and sets the policies and standards.
“Generally, it is a lot of meetings, a lot of e-mails and phone calls,” he said. “That’s my average day.”
Pearson said he and his staff are committed to anticipating the needs of the campus community that has an approximate population of 40,000, which includes faculty, staff, students and visitors.
“I keep a copy of the U.S. Constitution as a subtle reminder to my faculty and staff that everything we do is bound within the law – not [by] personal prejudice, bias or vengeance,” Pearson said.
His choice to work in a campus community rather than a city or state law enforcement group is simple: He insists that the university campus setting is just as diverse and as exciting as being in municipalities.
“What I found the most challenging and satisfying was the opportunity to work with and help young people,” he said.
When Pearson first came to California in 1992, he lived in the dorms until he found a place of his own. That’s when Pearson encountered what he calls some “bizarre” individuals.
Crimes included a student operating an illegal substance drive-thru, where the student was selling “little white baggies” out of his dorm room window. There was also a Pizza Hut delivery man getting hit on the head by a couple of students with a gun for a pizza.
“The paramedics were treating the delivery guy, and when I asked where the pizza was, he said, ‘Oh, the guys must have stolen it,'” Pearson”said. After finding the pizza’s designated address on the delivery sheet, Pearson knocked on the dorm room door to find the perpetrator sitting on the floor with a bag of money on one side and the gun he used on his other side – while eating the pizza.
“Every time I think I have heard it all, some knucklehead crawls out of the woodworks and does something new,” Pearson said.
After 35 years of serving university campuses, Pearson said he is ready for his last vacation from work and is ready to see what else the world has to offer.
Drug drive-thrus and Pizza Hut assailants aside, there are some things Pearson will miss.
“When someone is in trouble and you are able to help them through it and say, ‘OK, now how are we going to get you out of this problem,’ that’s very rewarding,” he said.
When asked what the University Police’s slogan, “Excellence Every Day,” means to him, Pearson described why precisely he fell “accidentally” into this career.
“I would like to see every student who walks across the stage at commencement go across with their diploma knowing they have never been the victim of a criminal act,” Pearson said. “We know that’s probably impossible, [but] that’s our mission.”
