A Chief Who Builds—Be It Family,
Teams, or Even a New Headquarters
Jeanne Miller
 

Jeanne Miller never set out to be a builder, but that’s what she became. Not only did she build a team approach to policing in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, where she has been chief since March 1994, she also convinced her city council to build a new police headquarters for her 50-sworn officer and 18-civilian personnel department. 

When Miller told the council members that they had to build for the future of the fewer than 50,000-person community and its police force, she was merely applying to her police department the future-oriented approach she has taken to her life. Miller’s career in policing began in 1973 with the Detroit Police Department. In December 1991 she took early retirement as a lieutenant to become the assistant superintendent of operations for the Peoria, Illinois, Police Department, before moving to her present position. Miller has made good on her promise to the citizens of Reynoldsburg. When she took the job as chief, the married mother of two young daughters said she wanted to “take the department into the 21st century” but that she was also looking for a place for her husband, also a retired Detroit cop, and girls to settle because “family comes first; it’s not good for my daughters for me moving around to a new place every few years.” 

At the time, her daughters were in the third and fifth grades, and she said her long-term plans were for them to graduate from high school in the community she selected. Both did and are now in college. Although neither is interested in police work, both are dating young men whose fathers are or were police officers. Family continues to come first for Chief Miller, who, aware of the high divorce rates among police couples, stressed that not only did she fulfill her wish for her children, she has remained married to the same man throughout her career moves. 

Almost 10 years after her move to Reynoldsburg, her plan for her family was just as successful as her plans for the department, which in June 2000 broke ground for a new police facility, formally named the City of Reynoldsburg Public Safety Building, which opened at the end of 2001. Even the name is future oriented; it was changed from the original police department name, she said, “in case other offices need to be located in the facility as growth spreads throughout the city.” Miller, who had presented five options to the city council when the idea for a new facility emerged, saw Reynoldsburg as a place that would grow for the same reasons her family selected it—it is an idyllic bedroom community that is home to the distribution centers of Victoria Secret and Bath & Body Works. 

Always looking forward

Whether it would be another 10 or even 20 years, she envisioned a community that would one day need as many as 75 or 100 police officers. Sounding like the holder of a graduate degree in public administration that she is, Miller described the growth rate of police officers as 1.5 per every additional 1,000 residents, and reminded the council that planning for the future is not a highly developed government skill. Her logic and her commitment to the community won them over; the plan that was selected was the most ambitious of the five options. 

Meeting Chief Miller anywhere, even at what might be described as a working, but relaxing, conference of women police executives, reinforces that she is as organized as her building plans would indicate. A tall, thin woman who wears her dark hair pulled back behind her ears, she is always in motion. 

Part of that motion, of course, involved her willingness to make career moves to reach the top. She attributed that willingness to having moved around quite a bit in her youth before settling down in Michigan and to her husband Bob’s willingness to take an early retirement from his sergeant’s position Detroit so that she, a lieutenant, could follow the career path of many officers in large departments who must move to smaller agencies to reach the top. 

When did she decide she wanted to be Chief Miller? The day she was sworn in by Detroit’s Police Commissioner Philip G. Tannian she told the woman standing in front of her that some day she’d have Tannian’s job. Although the idea slipped away as she learned “the craft of policing, got married, and was busy with two young daughters,” the idea resurfaced in 1989 while she was attending the Northwestern University Traffic Institute School of Police Staff and Command. She was elected president of her class, was class valedictorian and received the leadership award. It’s wasn’t the accolades, though, that rekindled her dream, it was, she recalled, “the hubris of all my male counterparts, talking about how putting the class on their resumes would help them get this and that chiefs jobs. That really got my mind working.”

Thus, the move to Peoria in 1991 was in keeping with her goal of becoming a chief. She and Bob were not unhappy working in Detroit, but they no longer wanted to live in the city, and its residency requirement encouraged their decision to leave. A self-described “glass is half full person,” Miller is discrete about whether she had hoped her goal of a chief’s badge would come in Peoria. But she could not deny that in 1994 she became one of the few police chiefs—female or male—to be the topic of David Letterman’s top ten reasons for anything. There is was, March 9, and on national TV, Letterman, a fellow Midwesterner, was listing the Top Ten Reasons Jeanne Miller is Leaving Peoria. The tenth and first say it all; the tenth was that she was tired of wearing a bullet proof vest to city council meetings; the first was that her head hurt from bumping the glass ceiling. What more could there be to add! 

Finding a good fit

Peoria’s loss was Reynoldsburg gain. The chief and her family are a good fit with the small central Ohio community, and it provided better opportunities for Bob, who is currently a lieutenant with the Columbus Airport Authority Police Department. Miller, who is around 50, graduated in 1973 from Marygrove College, a small, Catholic, women’s liberal arts college. She began her policing career later that same year, and she continues to be steeped in family and religion. She believes that family values are the best crime fighting tool in any police department’s arsenal, and she is less likely to blame TV or the movies for juvenile wildness than she is the breakdown in faith-driven family life. 

She also blamed a similar breakdown for problems in many police departments. While in Detroit, in addition to patrol and undercover gang and narcotics assignments, she developed the department’s precinct anti-car theft team, a unit targeting car thieves, a carjacking squad, and a repeat offender program. She also worked in internal affairs, an assignment that has influenced her beliefs in the importance of a values-based team approach to policing that stresses the role of individual police officers working in partnership with colleagues and with members of the community. She is committed to empowering her police officers, whether by providing a reasonable light duty policy, assuring they receive top-notch training and equipment, or building a new police facility that provided them with the space and equipment to deliver professional service from a building they can be comfortable in and proud to use. 

She is also known in the community to back up officers when they make traffic stops or search suspects, and she has encouraged them to admit, as she does, that their families come before their department. Among her proudest accomplishments is the leadership awards she received in 2000 from the International Association of Women Police (IAWP) in recognition of her open management style. A less formal recognition is the second nameplate on her desk; the one that says “Chief Mom.” 

Miller attributed some of her style to being a woman, but she doesn’t like to make too much of differences between women and men. She would like to see more women in policing, because, as she observed, “We have a society that is not 100 percent male and I think that women bring an interesting and different perspective to the career.” That being said, she also advised women that if they wanted to be treated equally, they had to act equal and always strive for excellence. She is more comfortable attributing her leadership style to the importance of family and religion in her life, than to being a woman. 

Education and faith

She has also been influenced by the training and education she has received. In addition to her bachelor’s degree, Miller has a master’s degree in public administration from Eastern Michigan University and is working on another in business administration from Capital University in Columbus. In addition to the Traffic Institute, she is also a graduate of the FBI’s Midwest Law Enforcement Development. Her interest in standards and training go beyond her department. At the end of 1999, she was elected chair of the Ohio Peace Officer Training Commission, a group she had been active in for the previous four years. 

Not all her achievements have been so serious. In 1999 she was also selected as Grand Marshal of Reynoldsburg’s Tomato Festival. After much uncharacteristic indecision about what to wear, she characteristically nixed the idea of a tomato-red suit and decided on her uniform. Although she does often let her hair down, both literally and figuratively, she decided this was not the time. “After all,” she said, “they selected me because I was the police chief and it seemed that I should look like one.” As one of only a handful of women chiefs in Ohio, she is aware of the need to look the part—at one state conference a male colleague did not recognize her in street clothes.

More often than not, Miller will make the decision to appear in uniform, particularly at Reynoldsburg High School. The town was one of a number in Ohio that received e-mails threatening to shoot up the school after the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Miller, who doesn’t pretend to separate her thoughts as a police chief from her thoughts as a mother, was struck that a town she selected to make a life so that her children would not be exposed to some of the violence of Detroit, could receive such a threat. Yet she also believes that schools are amongst the safest places for kids to be, and, again sounding as much like a cop as a mom, said she is much more concerned with youths in fast cars than in schools or other community meeting places. 

Since Miller likes to visit schools one might assume a similar visit by a police officer led to her policing path, but, as for many of the women who entered policing when the idea of women on patrol was still a novelty, it was television that influenced her choice, specifically the hip, young uniformed cops of “The Mod Squad.” While she admitted that her image of policing may have been somewhat unrealistic, she also noted that she met her husband in dramatic fashion; they met while working narcotics, although not specifically as partners. Each almost married someone else before they decided on one another and although she has had mentors along the way, it was Bob who saw the ad for the Reynoldsburg position and convinced her she was ready. 

Ten years is an enviable tenure for a police chief and although she’d rather look ahead than back, Chief Miller summed it up. “Not bad,” she said, “for a Catholic school girl who wanted to a nun, a teacher, and then a veterinarian before deciding that the best type of service career would be to be a police officer.”