Like most of the people in CPCS, I came here rather late in life. I know the average age is still 30 years old for people coming to the College of Public and Community Service. I was 54, so I pushed that envelope a little. It came after I did a 26 year career in the New Jersey State Police. And I did fairly well. I retired a detective lieutenant. I learned a lot there, but I didn't learn a lot of things there that I did learn here. One of those things was so important and the reason I learned it is because of the teachers here, and I'm not just talking about the faculty, I'm talking about the faculty and the students because in CPCS we all bring so much to the table because we all have so much knowledge from things we've done in our lives, that we learn from each other. Nothing could be more important.

I learned how to deal with people in communities that I just didn't know about before. I learned how to problem solve rather than just do policing, and that is so important. Stuff that needs to be taught to old folks in law enforcement out there, and I think this is the best place to learn. When I got done here, they put me into a Ph.D. program in the library- Public Policy Ph.D. Program. So the fact that this is competency-based [education] has nothing to do with whether you go on to a higher education into graduate school. As a matter of fact, I think the people that graduate here do very well in graduate school.

After I had about 4 years in the Ph.D. Program, I created a non-profit educational organization called LEAP, or Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. The reason I'm bringing this up is to show that none of this would have happened had I not come here. In four years that LEAP has existed, it's gone from its five founding members, all of us former cops, to over 5,000 members today. We have membership in 65 countries. We are no longer just cops, we are cops, judges, prosecutors, prison wardens DEA, FBI agents.

We can either do what we've done for all these years, and believe in punishment which we see doesn't work, or we can start helping these people. We can treat drug abuse as a health problem, and if we do that we can actually help bring them back into society and be productive citizens. There's much, much change, and all that change I think would not have occurred if I had not started right here.