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Alumni Month Profile: Ken Barnett

Ken Barnett

It could be considered the police equivalent of working your way up from the mail room to CEO, but there’s more to Ken Barnett’s rise from student police dispatcher to Sacramento State’s chief of police than just climbing the ladder.

While the campus police are responsible for looking after the welfare of what amounts to a small city, what Barnett (Economics ’78, MBA '89) sees as his biggest accomplishment is building his team into an integral player in law enforcement in the region.

With the Olympic Track and Field Trials in 2000 and 2004 as a springboard, campus police have developed strong relationships with the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department, the Sacramento Police Department and other area agencies. Previously the agencies would work together infrequently and that, combined with turnover, resulted in officers that rarely knew each other. “Now when we run into them on patrol, we’re familiar with each other. We talk to each other, we help each other,” Barnett says. “I’m proud of that.”

Barnett learned the inner workings of the Sacramento State police department after starting as a 17-year-old student with the University Foundation. When an opening came up, he tested for one of the positions and became officer in 1979. He went on to become a sergeant in 1987, lieutenant in 1992 and then chief in 2000. Along the way, he earned his bachelor’s degree in economics and his MBA from Sacramento State, and graduated from the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training Command College.

Like many law enforcement officers in those days, Barnett did not have a background in criminal justice when he joined the police force. And while that trend has reversed itself in recent years, Barnett believes that it takes more than an understanding of criminology to be a police officer on a college campus because so much of the job is customer service-oriented.

The University’s population—more than 30,000 students, faculty and staff—is equivalent to a town and it faces similar challenges, such as homeless issues, traffic congestion and burglaries. There are “industries” as well: banks, food courts, stores and educational areas. And the campus puts on as many as 34,000 functions each year ranging from 18 visitors for a small art event to 22,500 for the Olympic Trials.

But even though they face many of the same issues that city and county law enforcement officers do, a campus police officer needs to have a certain type of personality, Barnett says. “There’s a fine line between customer service work and law enforcement. If you don’t have good communication skills then you can’t do the job.”