CORTLAND, N.Y. — SUNY Cortland announced that Steven Dangler, university chief of police since 2003, is retiring next Friday, July 7. He has worked for the university for more than 40 years.
Mark DePaull, assistant chief of police, will take over as chief of the university police force on July 9, according to a news release posted on the SUNY Cortland website. He has served in the department since 1990.
The university police department recently moved to a new home on campus that provides officers a “state-of-the-art dispatch room to monitor all parts of campus,” as well as improved intake, interview and, evidence rooms, per the release. The improved accommodations for the department are just the latest in a “long line of accomplishments for Dangler in his four decades at SUNY Cortland,” the university added.
Dangler’s first major move as chief of police was working with SUNY Cortland President Erik J. Bitterbaum to arm SUNY Cortland’s police-department officers in 2004. SUNY allows each campus president to determine whether its department’s officers are armed, the release noted.
SUNY Cortland’s police department expanded under Dangler’s watch, adding positions such as the assistant chief of police, a full-time investigator, a pedestrian safety aide, a communications specialist/dispatcher, and a security systems division, the university said. Dangler also oversaw the creation of a standalone parking department.
Dangler earned his bachelor’s degree in criminal justice at Upper Division College in Utica, which today is called SUNY Polytechnic Institute.
The new chief
DePaull started as a university police officer in 1990. He was promoted to lieutenant in 2001 and became the department’s first assistant chief of police in 2006.
“It will be relatively easy, the transition, because as assistant chief, when (Dangler) isn’t here, I fill in for him,” DePaull said in the release.
As assistant chief, DePaull has run the day-to-day operations of the department. The two men have worked on many of the same committees and split up work between them.
“So it’s a lot easier than someone coming from the outside,” DePaull added. “I’ve been in the SUNY system since I was 23 years old, so I know how it operates.”
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