ALUMNI PROFILE
Col. Richard "Butch" Collins
Superintendent, Ohio State Highway Patrol
BCOMP '94
The apple doesn’t fall far… Although his father was a police officer with the Marion Police Department, Richard never had a strong interest in law enforcement. He assumed he’d be a teacher just like several other family members. To help pay for schooling, he took a dispatching job at the Marion post. With jobs tough to come by, he stayed on after earning his associate degree from The Ohio State University-Marion.
Moving up the ranks. Richard worked as a post commander in Findlay, Ohio, while finishing his bachelor’s degree at Bluffton from 1992-94. In 2000, he became a district commander, overseeing six patrol posts, covering 12 Northwest Ohio counties. In April 2007, he was named superintendent of the Ohio State Highway Patrol, which is only the second time in the Patrol’s history
that a field commander was elevated to the position.
All in a day’s work. Richard says the goal of the Highway Patrol, which comprises 1,500 uniform officers and 1,200 civilian officers, is to reduce traffic fatalities on highways. Although this is the primary focus of the patrol, troopers are also responsible for criminal investigations on state owned and leased properties, the school bus and motor vehicle inspection programs, and enforcement of weight laws for commercial vehicles. Richard has a senior staff that includes eight majors and two lieutenant colonels. He says that fundamentally, his current job is a lot like his last one, “just on a larger scale.” And, he finds his social calendar much fuller as he attended in the same week a law enforcement appreciation dinner sponsored by the Columbus Dispatch in Columbus, and represented the Department of Highway Safety and the Highway Patrol at the Mayor’s Night Out in Cleveland.
Reaching a goal. Finishing his bachelor’s degree was a personal goal. “I came from a family of educators,” says Richard. “I have two sons whom I wanted to see go to college after high school and complete degrees.” Richard was living in Bluffton when he began thinking about finishing his bachelor’s, and his neighbor, Kay Hardesty, kept telling him about “this great new program at Bluffton called BCOMP.” It turned out to be a perfect fit. Richard would return to school again, completing a master’s degree in criminal justice from Tiffin University in 2003. Eventually, he’d follow in the footsteps of his family members and begin teaching classes at Tiffin.
Taking time to travel. Although free time isn’t plentiful, Richard likes to travel with his wife, Brenda, who also works for the Highway Patrol, as commander of the recruitment section. Because of his job, he gets to travel to different conferences like the International Association of Chiefs of Police coming up in New Orleans, La. A favorite place of theirs is Hilton Head Island, and most of their trips involve a least one game of golf.
-Jill A. Duling
