Deputy chief plans ahead to commencement

It seemed silly for Laury Flint to go back for May graduation.

She’d been working at the IU Police Department since January, but there was no such thing as winter graduation when Flint, the new IUPD deputy chief for the Bloomington campus, finished her degree at IU in December 1981. So she never went back for commencement.

Now it’s high on her priority list. A big part of her job as an administrative lieutenant and something that she will continue as deputy chief is coordinating IUPD for special events that range from controversial lectures, which might have one officer in plain clothes, to commencement, which has about 50 officers.

When she received her degree in criminal justice, Flint said she wanted to go to the Los Angeles Police Department because it looked like the kind of place where you could spend your whole career. So she applied.

“Everybody has big dreams when they graduate,” Flint said. “But I was broke.”

After she applied, she needed to go to Los Angeles for testing and a physical. But she’d never been there and had no way to get there. As she was trying to figure it out, she was offered a job at IUPD. She took it and wrote a letter to LAPD and said she wasn’t coming.

Flint said she thought IUPD would be a stepping stone for two or three years, but then she made friends and became attached to the department. Flint is now in her 30th year at IUPD.

“I grew up here,” she said about the department.

When the deputy chief position opened up, Flint said she knew she wanted to move up. She works days, when people are active, calling in and stopping by with questions. Flint also keeps an open door policy so that anyone in the department can stop by, too.

On her desk was a wooden paper tray with a stack of folders that overflowed into a second stack. The folders were red, manila and even dark brown. Flint said she spends her morning classifying cases, which can sometimes take an hour, sometimes longer.

Then there’s the planning for special events. Most are planned in advance, such as the football games that every officer works. But others can come up last minute and she helps to schedule officers for those events, too.

“One of the beauties is you never know what you’re going to get,” she said.

As deputy chief, Flint said she hopes to help with policies such as uniforms. She said the policies need to be more universal across the campuses, regardless of their size. This would help with everyone knowing the officers are a unit. It also helps to have the rules written down, she added.

Soon Flint will relocate her office from the one she shares to one down the hall that is all her own.

She wistfully said she’d love to add a treadmill to her new office since she spends so much time there. But right now she has to see what else she needs for the office and continue to plan big upcoming events like commencement.

“It won’t be until after graduation that I move in,” she said.