Our View: No confidence in NIU police chief
We have lost confidence in the ability of Northern Illinois University Police Chief Donald Grady to perform his job to the standards deserved by the university and the surrounding communities.
The job of NIU police chief has everything to do with being accountable to the public – not just to those within the university walls. For a long time, Grady has not fulfilled that part of his job, mostly through longtime hostile relations with local law enforcement agencies and, to a lesser degree, through his broken relationship with local media outlets.
Bad relationships with other police agencies can lead to life-and-death situations. A bad relationship with local newspapers can lead to misinformation and a festering impression that something is being hidden – even if it isn't.
Grady is on administrative leave while an independent panel reviews his employment. He is under scrutiny because he has been accused in an editorial in the NIU student newspaper of threatening a student during a three-hour tirade about the controversial hiring and resignation of Police Officer Dexter Yarbrough.
The newest claims about Grady's behavior do not in and of themselves warrant his dismissal. They are, however, the latest in a long chain of disturbing events that demonstrate Grady's unwillingness to be the kind of police chief NIU and the community need.
Yes, Grady has demonstrably improved the university police force since he arrived in 2001. He has made it a requirement for every officer to be trained as an emergency medical rescuer. The department is more diverse now. Grady and his officers performed laudably on Feb. 14, 2008, when the campus was terrorized by a gunman.
Grady's decision to hire Yarbrough was a poor one, and it illustrated his lack of understanding of the connections between his department, campus and the community at large. In Grady's world, would no one have poked around about Yarbrough's troubled tenure at Colorado State University? Would Yarbrough's employment history have remained under wraps?
The hiring decision was not a fatal error – but the apparent inability to understand the consequences of that hiring decision was.
It is this isolation, this closed-door policy, that makes Grady unfit to continue in his position. Closed doors lead to the impression that leaders inside the police department – and, indeed, inside the larger university – don't believe the public has a right to public information and access to public officials.
We hope members of the independent panel are thorough in their work, and we hope they come to the same conclusion – that it's time to find a new police chief for NIU.
