photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World

Retired Douglas County Sheriff's Lt. Clark Rials poses next to some of the awards he received during his 30-year career with the county.

As Lt. Clark Rials enjoys his retirement, he has no regrets about staying close to home.

“I had an offer from the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department, and back then I wanted to be a patrol officer,” says Rials, a recently retired Douglas County sheriff’s deputy, as he thinks back to the start of his career. “I wanted to get out and be a deputy, carry the gun, drive the fast cars and all that good stuff.”

It has been 25 years since Rials turned down that offer. He is now celebrating — and relaxing — after 30 years working with the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office.

As he weighed the K.C. offer, Rials had already been working as a corrections officer in the Douglas County Jail for five years, and he was ready for a change. Two weeks later, Sheriff Loren Anderson offered him a chance to stay in his hometown by promoting Rials to sheriff’s deputy. Rials said it was a “no-brainer” to stay in Lawrence.

That promotion came in 1997, and in the decades that followed Rials was a participant and a witness to the changing landscape of law enforcement in Douglas County. He saw sheriffs come and go and the county jail double in size, and he also saw his son grow up to become a Kansas Highway Patrol trooper.

Clark Jr.

“When he was 15 we started planning it — him getting into law enforcement,” Rials says. Rials started his law enforcement career around age 25, and his son, Clark Jr., started around the same age.

Eventually Clark and Clark Jr. would sometimes find themselves at the same scenes, from fatal car accidents to arresting a murder suspect together in North Lawrence.

“When we were interacting together I didn’t really see him as my son. We just click together like any other officer,” Rials says.

photo by: Contributed by Clark Rials

Clark Rials, left, and his son, Clark Rials Jr., pose for a picture after Clark Jr. graduated from the Kansas Highway Patrol academy in 2017.

The only time it ever got “weird,” Rials says, is during his final night on patrol a week before his official retirement.

“We got into a chase that night,” he says.

The chase wasn’t spectacular and no one was injured, but Rials says it just felt a little different that night, coming at the end of his career, knowing it would be the last joint effort. He says he’s proud to see his son carry on in the profession.

If someone hadn’t ‘asked me’

Rials wasn’t necessarily interested in getting into law enforcement when he was detailing cars and stitching seat covers at a Lawrence boat shop in 1992. He grew up in Lawrence and had been working there for seven years before a sheriff’s deputy who frequented the shop put the idea into his head.

“Ken Fangohr would come into the boat shop and visit with his friend Larry, and one day he asked me if I’d ever thought about becoming a corrections officer,” Rials says.

Fangohr pitched the idea and secured an interview for Rials with Sheriff Anderson.

“He hired me, gave me a chance at it, and it took off from there,” Rials says.

While the way Rials was recruited looks like happenstance, it is actually the best way to recruit, Rials says. Online recruitment opportunities and job fairs are plentiful, but talking to young people one on one is how Rials sees new recruits joining law enforcement.

“I don’t know if I would be here if, by word of mouth, someone hadn’t come in and asked me,” Rials says.

Recruitment tools like current Sheriff Jay Armbrister’s fancy new muscle car can certainly get young people’s attention, but it will take a real person behind the car to convince young folks to join up, Rials says.

Rials was a candidate for undersheriff in the election against Armbrister in 2020. He says that one of his goals, if he and sheriff candidate Dale Flory had won that election, was to hire a full-time recruiter for the office.

“What I would like to see is targeting more of the junior colleges to try and recruit those who are trying to figure out where they are going after their two-year college experience,” Rials says.

‘We’ve come a long way’

Rials says throughout his career he has been one of the few African American deputies working at the office. Early on, he remembers only one other African American and one Native American accounting for the racial “diversity” in the office.

“I was able to relate with the inmates more than any of the other officers were able to, the African Americans who were incarcerated. I was able to communicate better,” he says.

But it wasn’t only with people of color that Rials connected; it was everyone who was from Lawrence that he grew up with or interacted with in the community, he says.

As a corrections officer, being able to relate to the cultural differences with some of the inmates wasn’t always a benefit; some inmates would question Rials about why he chose such a line of work, insinuating that the choice was at odds with his racial identity. Such questions, though, never led to self-doubt, he says.

At one point, he was the only person of color working on the patrol shift, he says.

“I had a conversation with Sheriff Anderson about it. We determined that not very many people of color were applying. You couldn’t get turned down if you weren’t applying,” Rials says.

That situation changed a bit when the county opened the new jail in 1999, Rials says. The sheriff’s office moved out of the Judicial and Law Enforcement Center downtown. The jail’s capacity nearly quadrupled from a 50-bed facility that averaged 75 inmates on average to a 186-bed facility, which required more staffing.

While some of those new positions were filled with people of color, the overall problem remains, Rials says: a lack of candidates who could diversify the makeup of the office.

“We’ve come a long way, but there is still a lot to do,” Rials says, adding that when he started, the few positions that might become available between corrections and patrol divisions would have 100 candidates to choose from, but now the office struggles to find any candidates in the corrections division.

“A lot of people don’t want anything to do with law enforcement because of what they see and hear on television,” says Rials, a phenomenon from which he has not been immune himself.

“I was ready to hang up my boots because of what was happening in law enforcement,” Rials says, referring to the murder of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer in May 2020.

It was the first time in his decades of public service that he doubted his profession, he says — not that he had made the wrong career choice but that the public’s faith in law enforcement had been so shaken. Law enforcement was being seen as something to fear, not as a helping hand the public could rely on.

Rials says he considered retiring after the months of protests in 2020 and after seeing law enforcement officers across the country retire in record numbers. Ultimately, though, he looked to his community for the determination to go on.

photo by: Contributed by Clark Rials

Former Douglas County Sheriff Loren Anderson, left, retired Sheriff’s Lt. Clark Rials and former Sheriff Ken McGovern are pictured at Rials’ retirement reception on March 25.

Rials’ sister, Rita Rials, says her brother’s biggest strength has been his ability to connect with the community. Rita, who ran a private day care for about 20 years, says Rials would often come by and show his car’s siren to the kids. One kid started referring to him as “Uncle,” then all the kids started calling him that, Rita says.

Years later, Rita says, she worked at Liberty Memorial Central Middle School and Rials participated in an after-school program where he connected with the students and told them how they might find themselves getting into trouble at some point.

“He has invested a lot in the youth of this community from the time they were toddlers to now, following them through high school,” Rita says.

Rials’ other sister, Nicole Rials, is a therapist for people who work in and around law enforcement.

“We are probably known as Clark’s sisters who are always trying to get a badge,” Nicole jokes.

Nicole has partnered with the sheriff’s office on many occasions over the years, including helping with counseling at the emergency room after serious car accidents. She fondly remembers the connections she and and her brother made with former Sheriff Ken McGovern.

McGovern praises Rials for always being ready to step up. Whether it was volunteering in community events or training new deputies, Rials was always the steady one who knew everybody, McGovern says.

“Clark was always the one willing to jump in and take on the challenge and be able to develop the program and then take it down the road awhile,” McGovern says.

New pursuits

Rials started his career in law enforcement as a corrections officer and retired as a lieutenant. He got to drive the fast car, as he had hoped. At the beginning, he says, that car was a Ford Crown Victoria Interceptor, and while he has plenty of fond memories of driving that car through the county, he prefers the car he was driving in the last few years before his retirement, a Dodge Charger.

Now, the days of fast cars and loud sirens are behind Rials. He has traded in the keys of his patrol car for the keys to a boat, he says, and the only suspects he plans to catch are the fish swimming in Clinton Lake.

photo by: Contributed by Clark Rials

Retired Douglas County Sheriff’s Lt. Clark Rials poses with his catch of the day at the Clinton Lake Marina.