Amy Rock (00:00): Hi everyone, and thank you for listening to the Campus Safety Voices podcast. My name is Amy Rock. I'm campus safety's executive editor. And joining me for today's episode is Felix Martinez, director of Public Safety at St. Mary's College of Maryland, and Felix is a 2025 campus Safety Director of the year finalist. Our program is now in its 18th year and we recognize leaders in hospital, university, or school security, law enforcement, or emergency management. So today we're going to discuss a few of your endeavors and accomplishments, and I know when you started in your role, you said you noticed that the department had several critical challenges, which is similar to anyone coming into a new role. Some of yours included outdated policies, low morale, staffing shortages, and strained relationships with the campus community, which again, I think a lot of our readers can relate to. Can you touch on one or two of them, kind of the state of them when you arrived there and how you been able to improve them?

Felix Martinez (00:58): Absolutely. And first of all, I just want to say it's an honor to be a finalist for this prestigious award. It's definitely an honor for me and I'm honored to be here in this interview. And overall, I think those challenges all intertwine with each other. When you really think about it in reference to the policies, when you come to a new location, you're establishing yourself, you're trying to figure out what works, what doesn't work. And one of the things I noticed here is that our policies were not as detailed as they should be. There was a lot of missing policies, not saying that it was completely outdated, but there's a lot of things that had to change. So that's one of the first things I went to battle for. We went with Lexipol. We used them to reestablish our policies, all 179 of them, and we're still working on a few of them, but for the most part we've done a tremendous overhaul of the policies.

I think you can't have officers out there not understanding what their policies and procedures are, what they're expected to do, what they can and cannot do. So I want to make sure that we gave them that they understood fully that these policies were detailed enough so they understand you're not going to get in trouble for doing what you're supposed to do. But if you don't have that in the forefront, officers are going to be reluctant to do a lot. Because we are an unarmed department now, we are a hybrid model, so is unarmed and armed department. So that's a major change that had to come with major changes to policies, understanding what is the role of our SPOs, our special police officers, and what is the role of the public safety officers and what can and cannot do during these situations. When it came to low morale, it comes from the pay.

When I started, their pay was about $36,000 and we went to bat. We spoke to the union, I spoke to my higher administration, and we made sure that we started paying people livable wages. So they went from $36,000 to $50,000 to start 51 after probation, 55 after three years. And 57 is the top pay at the moment. We'll be renegotiating in the future, but that is a much more livable wage. Our special police officers start at 60,000. So it is much more feasible, especially now with everything going up. We wanted to make sure that they were getting what they needed and that increased the morale because they saw that it was fighting for the change in policies. So I'm fighting for them. They got a higher increase in pay. That is what they want to see. They want to see a leader that's going to come in here and fight for them.

And that's what I believe my role is. I'm an advocate for my officers. I'm not the chief. We know what my responsibilities are, policy management operations, but my role in the department is to be the advocate for my officers. And I believe that's what I'm doing. And in reference to community engagement, I love community policing. My dissertation is on the influence of the community policing model and predominantly Latino neighborhoods. Everything I've done in every department I've worked at has been community policing. I think the police are the community. The community are the police. That's appealing principle that I stand by every day. If you don't have that relationship with people, then what are you going to expect from your community? They're not going to trust you. So I tell everybody, my biggest quote is don't my uniform pays the bills, my character's, who I am.

So don't judge me by my uniform. Judge me by my character. And that has grown. So we've done kickball events with the students. We've done coffee with the chief. We're about to do coffee with the advisory board that I created that has student, faculty and staff. We're about to do a barbershop talk with students, so get free haircuts, we'll pay for it. Just come over here, have a conversation with us. And it's a different kind of vibe, giving them what they want to see, how you need to know your community. If you don't know your community, how can you help you community? How you have to understand what makes them tick. And these are the little things. These are students that want to look as they say fresh at all times. So why not have that one-on-one with them and give them that barbershop talk. And I just feel like with those little things, going to SGA meetings, going to different events on campus, it's really shown them that we're here as a resource as opposed to just being uniformed officers. That's not what we're about. We're a co-curricular section of your educational experience. And that's what I want to be first.

Amy Rock (05:16): I've never heard of a barber setting. That's amazing. I love hearing some of them. Everyone has to do coffee with the chief or some iteration of it. It's important, but I've never, I like hearing about the unique ones. That's awesome.

Felix Martinez (05:31): We're trying to change it up here little by little.

Amy Rock (05:32): And like you said, you can't just, one influence is the other. It's kind of like with public safety. You can't just focus on one thing. You can't say, oh, we have video cameras and expect everything to be safer. And same with addressing any deficits within your department. You can't just address one and expect it to fix everything.

Felix Martinez (05:50): You have to adapt real quick, understand where the issues are, and just adapt to the challenge and face it forefront. And that's one thing I'm a New Yorker through and through, and that's one thing you had to adapt in New York at all times. And I'm trying to bring that over here. And

Amy Rock (06:05): You have to adapt because every new group of students brings in a different background, different, especially with covid, they bring in different challenges because freshmen this year were in eighth grade or maybe ninth grade, and their lives were completely flipped upside down during a really transformative time. So every freshman group that you get in, you have to adapt to that as well.

Felix Martinez (06:29): And that's why being upfront with them, meeting them when before anything pops off, one of the things we're trying to do this year is meet us before you need us. So let them know who we are. What are we here for? What can we do for you? And let them see us in a different light. We're human beings at the end. So when you start putting yourself out there, you'll understand what makes them tick, what they like, what they don't like. Get those surveys, get those feedbacks from people, emails, calls, whatever the case may be. You'll see what works for them and then try to intertwine it to your operation and go from there.

Amy Rock (07:03): Absolutely. And now I know one other big initiative that you undertook was, you had mentioned this briefly transitioning the department from an unarmed model to a hybrid one with both armed and unarmed officers. What were some of the challenges you faced in doing this? I'm going to guess you've got some pushback. And how were you able to overcome?

Felix Martinez (07:23): I think pushback is an understatement. There was a lot of pushback. And I think the big word, and I think this is in academia, it is transparency, being transparent with your community and explaining to them why you're making such a major change, why it's needed, and how does it affect them, how does it help them? And being realistic with what's going on in the world. We're not saying that people are bad, but there are bad people and there's people that do harm. We don't want an active shooter event, God forbid, here on the campus and we're ill-prepared, right? We want to be the ones, if something was to happen, we're ready to go. We have the tools we need. And all a weapon is a tool. For me, 99% of all my cases from being a correctional officer, police officer, campus police sergeant, and now director, verbal judo was my number one tool.

If you know how to talk to people, nine out of 10 times you can clarify, you could figure out your situation. But there is that 1% where you might need the weapon. And we don't want to have more lives lost because we're waiting for a response from our external partners. And this is a big county and we have a staffing shortage throughout the country, so why wait when we can handle business ourselves? And I think once people started seeing that, we were out there talking about it more, explaining what is the purpose of the weapon and how it's going to be used and who's responding to certain calls alleviating that stress, that unneeded stress that they might have. I want them to understand our operation for what it is and not for what the media might portray it to be. And I think after speaking to so many people, so many, and I mean so many people, all these different events, I think we we're at a point where most people want the weapons.

One of the initiatives we're undertaking this year is that we're going to have students come to our in-service and they're going to be the actors and let the students see how we're going to respond to these types of calls for service and break it down on them. This is why we're doing this and this is the policy and this is how this works. So that there's more transparency, they understand it, and then I'm going to flip it on them. We're going to have another day where the students are the officers, and the officers are the students. So giving them that real world experience of, okay, now I'm it. I'm him at this point, so now I got to go to this call for service. How are you going to react? And giving them that realistic environment so that they understand it more so because if you're put in that situation, you understand it more than just hearing about the situation.

Amy Rock (10:01): Absolutely. And when you said verbal judo, I think often things escalate just in any setting really, because naturally people match the tone or the level of happiness or excitement or anger or whatever the person that they're speaking to is feeling or showing. And so it's just kind of learning to control that and your emotions, which is easier said than done, but it takes practice and training.

Felix Martinez (10:26): De-escalation training is one of the best things that anyone could go through, and it should be consistent training. You don't want to go into a situation at a hundred. There's no need. You're there to deescalate the situation. You're there to keep your composure and try to handle the call for service the way it's supposed to be handled. And yes, it is harder. It's easier said than done, but it, it's definitely doable. And I think you just have to be authentically, you don't have to change when you're in this uniform. You just have to be yourself and just show people that you're here to help. Let's handle this call for service and know how to code switch. You have to know, again, who are the parties involved. There's a certain way you're going to speak to juveniles and you're going to speak to somebody else of an older age. Why? Because code switching is important. It's an important aspect of policing in this day and age. You'll have more respect when you're authentically you than being a robot. So it's something you just got to practice and work out for you.

Amy Rock (11:20): Yeah, and I think, like you said, being yourself, it made me think it's so important and more commonplace now for police departments. They're letting officers wear their hair the way they like their facial hair the way they want. They're not making them look military like shaved head or clean shave and face. You want to match obviously this stuff, but match the community that you serve as well as you can.

Felix Martinez (11:43): Absolutely. Because you don't want to be ostracized. You don't want to be ostracized. We are human. When I take off this uniform, we're human beings, so I be me. Let's respect each other and let's do what we got to do. And I think allowing to be the tattoos, as long as it's not offensive, it doesn't stop you from doing your job. Hair color doesn't stop. You just be authentically. You and us as commanders have to allow the officers to be themselves. So it's the little things that make such a big impact.

Amy Rock (12:15): The submission material for your nomination also said that you were able to secure a $375,000 grant, I believe. How were you able to prioritize what to spend that grant money on and what did you spend it on?

Felix Martinez (12:29): It was, it's a tough challenge when you see there's so many things that have to be addressed. But one of the things we wanted to do was the cameras. We needed more cameras throughout for investigative purposes. There was a lot of cases that we've had that had, we had cameras we could have solved. And having unsolved crimes on a campus, we have 361 acres. I think having cameras was very important, and that's why we added more cameras. We added license plate readers because we want to know who's coming in and out of our campus. If there was an incident, we should have that information. It's an investigative tool. It helps us make sure that we go back, review the footage and use it for our investigation. We don't have it here to spy on people, which was one of the notions that people believed it was for.

It's not that we just want to use it once again as a tool. We also are working on card access throughout campus to make it easier if we have to lock down the campus. So it'll be easier to click a few buttons and lock it down versus having to physically lock down the campus throughout if there was an active assailant or a major emergency that was going on. So it just made it easier. And the lighting, we've had some poor lighting and we have over 1600 students, and we want to make sure that they feel safe walking across the trails or the sidewalks that they're walking through at night. They have a lot of events at night and lighting is very important. So those were our three major aspects. We wanted to make sure that those major goals, those major concerns that people have had, that we addressed them, and those were the three that we chose to.

Amy Rock (14:02): Absolutely. And the technology that comes with cameras now, it doesn't take you hours to find footage that you're looking for. It's just so obviously depends on the software or the company that you have, but pretty seamless in finding the exact time that you need and area that you need.

Felix Martinez (14:18): Absolutely. It's all about doing your job effectively and efficiently. This helps us do our job efficiently. We don't want to spend four hours on something that we could do within 20, 30 minutes. And the great thing is you could save the footage for however long you need it, and it's just easier to look up anything we have to look up. So it is a great tool. It doesn't take away from the officer's responsibility. It just helps them.

Amy Rock (14:44): Yeah. Years ago you’d lose so much time within the community, which is what's more important than anything a camera can do.

Felix Martinez (14:53): Absolutely. If you could listen, save time on your investigation so you could be forefront, you could be forth facing with your community so they could get to know you. People should know you by your first name or last name, however you feel comfortable. But people should know you during day shift. They shouldn't be an officer on this squad that people don't know the name. If people know my name and I'm in my office, but I try to put myself out there. I'm with my officers. I take some time throughout the day. I'll go down to dispatch, talk to them and talk to my sergeants, my captain, my office associate, go out and talk to the community. Because in the end, I am a public servant, but I always call myself a tour guide. I'm just a guy who's taken us to the end. And it's a collaborative effort. It takes everybody. It takes a village to pretty much hone in on this operation.

Amy Rock (15:40): I meant to ask you this beforehand. How long have you been in this role for?

Felix Martinez (15:44): So I've been here actually a year and about seven months. Well, actually, what's today's date? Oh, a year in eight months. Today. I think it's a continuous learning experience. You learn new things and you never stop learning. If you say that you know it all, then you're in the wrong business because things change. You have to adapt.

Amy Rock (16:00): Especially the technology side of things too. It's like you can't implement one thing and then they're like, well, here's the next grade upgrade. You're like, crap, I just installed this. I mean, at least it makes it easier now with software updates and things like that. So you're not having to rip and replace everything.

Felix Martinez (16:19): And that's why when it comes to planning and budgeting, you have to budget for, look at the software that's out there and budget. You got your micro and your macro, your micro little situation, what you're trying to handle, and then the macro level. What are you trying to do? What is the continuous process? So when you're asking, you're talking to these individuals, are they going to be upgrades? Is it a system upgrade? Does this have to be a physical upgrade? How would that look? And asking those proper questions so you can make a proper decision.