Michigan State University President Kevin M. Guskiewicz administers the oath of office to Mike Yankowski, the university's new police chief and executive director of public safety, at the Michigan State University Police Department on Nov. 14, 2024.
Michigan State University swore in its new Chief of Police and Executive Director of Public Safety, Mike Yankowski, Thursday afternoon.
Yankowski was previously the associate director of ethics and compliance in MSU's Office of Audit, Risk and Compliance for five years.
Prior to his time at MSU, Yankowski had a 25-year career with the Lansing Police Department, which included six years as the chief of police.
He was publicly appointed to the position by President Kevin Guskiewicz on Oct. 11, who announced Yankowski would be assuming the now re-consolidated roles of chief safety officer and chief of police, which were separated in spring 2023.
"I want to have the very best police department in the country," Guskiewicz said after the ceremony.
This new appointment comes amidst broad leadership restructuring by Guskiewicz and after former Vice President and Chief Safety Officer Marlon Lynch resigned last spring. Chris Rozman has been serving as interim in the time since.
In 2023, MSU restructured the police and created a new role for Lynch. Now that he's left, it is undoing that restructuring.
"On March 4, I promised to put a leadership structure in place that would best serve our campus community as well as the surrounding communities," Guskiewicz said during the ceremony.
There was an emphasis on building a relationship with the community during the ceremony. The department plans to do an overall assessment of the organization to allocate resources to the correct areas of need, Yankowski said after the ceremony.
Yankowski said he would like to build a relationship with the community by meeting students and holding events such as icebreakers, as well as having more officers out of patrol cars and walking or biking around campus.
"We have therapy dogs, we have K-9s, which sometimes breaks the ice for us as well," Yankowski said.
Yankowski also spoke on the surveillance system implemented after the February 2023 campus shooting, saying the department has used the system as a tool to quickly identify individuals and help coordinate efforts to distribute resources.
Yankowski would like to leverage his resources and access to technology to communicate with the MSU community, he said.
The department understands that students come from a wide range backgrounds and may have had different interactions and hold different perceptions of police, Yankowski said, so it's been making efforts to expose officers to different areas of the state so they can fully grasp what diversity means.
"It’s about treating others the way that you want your family to be treated," Yankowski said.
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