photo by: Dylan Lysen/Lawrence Journal-World

Nelson Mosley, KU's new police chief.

After serving nearly 30 years in law enforcement for Kansas’ largest city, Nelson Mosley was ready to retire in the small suburb he had called home.

But shortly after leaving the Wichita Police Department and experiencing a taste of retirement, Mosley said he had grown restless. He quickly jumped back into law enforcement, becoming chief of his hometown Rose Hill Police Department, which serves a community of about 4,000 people just southeast of Wichita.

Now, five years later, Mosley said he’s still not finished as he becomes the new chief for the University of Kansas’ Public Safety Office and its police force.

Mosley, who took over the position on Sept. 17, recently told the Journal-World he was ready for the new chapter on KU’s campus, particularly because the university setting allows him to be more focused on community policing, rather than on reacting to crimes.

That’s become an important issue nationwide recently, as communities have called for various types of police reform in the wake of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minnesota police officer last year.

With that in mind, Mosley said he sees his role at KU as building and improving relationships with the campus community.

“It takes one contact at a time … to build our great relationships,” he said. “How I liken that in my role is building upon what we already have established here. If there are relationships we need to do better, I plan to do that.”

Law enforcement career

As the Journal-World previously reported, Mosley spent much of his law enforcement career in the Wichita Police Department, beginning in 1987 as a police officer and advancing through the ranks to become deputy police chief in 2009. He served as the interim police chief in Wichita from September 2014 to January 2016.

He said he chose to retire after his time in Wichita. He and his wife planned to travel and relax, which he expected he would enjoy. But that did not last, he said.

“After a while, I ran out of projects around the house,” he said. “So it was time to get back to work.”

Luckily for him, the Rose Hill police chief position opened up in 2016, and he took over the agency for about five years. He said much of the job in Rose Hill was being a proactive police force, working in the community and serving residents, rather than a reactive force that focuses on responding to reports of criminal activity.

Mosley said he planned to retire again after his time in Rose Hill, but then his plans changed again when the chief position for KU opened.

Mosley said he became interested in the KU job partly because he was friends with the former chief, Chris Keary, who retired from the position and had shared information about the job with him. It would also offer Mosley the opportunity to serve a type of community he hadn’t worked for before — a college campus.

“I’ve worked for the largest police department and then a smaller (one), why not a university setting as well?” he said. “In my mind, it’s still a community. Although the students change quite a bit, it’s still a community that we have to police and be proactive and connect with.”

Being a Jayhawks sports fan didn’t hurt either. Mosley, who had a picture of Allen Fieldhouse waiting to be hung up in his office, said he’s originally from Delaware but moved to Kansas as a young man after joining the military. He said he’s been a KU sports fan ever since.

But he also splits allegiances with his former home’s college basketball team, the Wichita State Shockers.

“Ever since I got here, I’ve been a fan of KU — football or basketball,” he said. “But I divide loyalties. I love Wichita State basketball as well.”

Progressive policing and building relationships

Mosley said he was also attracted to the KU agency because of decisions to improve the transparency of the agency, such as installing an oversight board. He said he thought KU was making common-sense decisions to improve policing that other agencies needed to be doing. He also thought that KU wanted to be a leader that other police agencies could follow.

Additionally, he said he looks forward to getting to know the other local law enforcement agencies — which KU Police will need to work with — and the many offices, groups and students on KU’s campus.

With regard to police reform, Mosley said that he makes an effort to ensure his officers “do things right,” but that he’s always interested in looking at ways to improve how policing is done. He said that Floyd’s death in Minneapolis last year never should have happened, and that the truth of the incident didn’t come to light until footage was released by bystanders.

“All of it comes down to community policing philosophy,” he said. “Nationwide incidents involving law enforcement didn’t put a good face on us at all. We need to be more in tune with what’s going on in our communities and what’s going on around the nation.”

During his policing career, Mosley has also served as an adjunct professor in the field of criminal justice and law enforcement at both Wichita State and Butler Community College.

He has served as an equal employment opportunity trainer for the city of Wichita, the city of Andover and the Wichita Police Department. He also worked as a trainer on ethics, diversity and racial profiling for the Wichita Police Department, according to a news release from KU.

“I totally get revamping how we do things — we all need to be progressive,” Mosley said.

When asked about recent protests near KU’s campus in response to an alleged sexual assault at a fraternity, Mosley said he believes police have a responsibility to be proactive against sexual assault. But preventing sexual assault among college students — or anyone, for that matter — has always been difficult, he said.

“If we could prevent every (assault), we would do that,” he said. “But what I’m finding is that our best resource is education and making sure folks are armed with the information (so) that if something happens they can make an informed decision.”

Mosley said he looks forward to the agency meeting with student groups to better understand what issues they are facing and what they believe needs to be done to improve student safety.

“Part of my job is listening and getting the information from the students themselves,” Mosley said. “A lot of times, that’s where the best ideas come from, because they have thoughts on their safety at the university as well.”