Meet the new UNT police chief, an alumna and first woman of color to hold the position

“I just looked through the course catalog, or the degree plans, and I landed between nursing and policing — and really just tried to decide,” Washington said. “I reflected for quite a bit on the two programs, just trying to determine which direction I want to go. I just saw myself being a police officer.”

Today, Washington is the new chief of the University of North Texas Police Department. She’s the first woman of color to wear the chief’s gold stars on her midnight blue uniform collar. Each workday starts at the department on the same campus where she earned her undergraduate and master’s degrees.

She takes over the post left by her former boss, UNT Police Chief Ed Reynolds, who retired in May.

It took a bit more than 20 years for her to get to the post, and Washington said she looks forward to leading the department in its mission to serve, protect and join in the project of building the university’s community.

Washington surprised herself with tears when she considered the impact of being the first minority woman to serve the department as its chief.

“It’s important for us to understand, and for myself to understand, that it matters,” she said. “And that was really the driving force for me to actually put my foot forward and say, ‘I’m going to do this,’ because I know it matters. It matters for my family as a personal decision, but also as a professional decision.

“It matters to other people who aspire to do this one day, because women are severely underrepresented in law enforcement. Nationwide, there are 12% of women serving. Only 3% are serving at the executive level. It matters.”

Washington joined the UNT Police Department in 2002. But she started her law enforcement career in East Texas, serving in Titus and Franklin counties as a jailer. Then, she came to Denton County. She made the difficult decision to commute, so her parents could take care of her young daughter while she studied and worked her way through school.

“I made the transition here, and I began working with Denton County. I took that job working full time and going to school full time so that I could finish my degree,” she said. “I would go home on the weekend.”

Washington said she always had a good work ethic. And during her first three months working for the Denton County Sheriff’s Office, she treated her job working “book-in” as a significant post. Officers who do book-in are tasked with processing inmates into the county jail.

“I really send this message out quite a bit whenever I can, which is to really run circles around people,” Washington said. “I wanted to stand out and show that I had a strong work ethic. Anything that needed done, I did it.”

In those short three months, her supervisor approached Washington to consider a job in classification, which organizes housing in the jail for each inmate according to their needs and their offense. Washington was hungry for the promotion, and the hours: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. That freed her weekends for the six-hour round trip to Mount Pleasant, where she could spend time with her daughter.

Washington didn’t take much of a breather when she earned her undergraduate degree in criminal justice. She joined the campus Police Department and served as an adjunct professor in criminal justice at North Central Texas College and UNT.

“Teaching came natural to me, it seemed like,” she said. “I really enjoy it. I enjoy discussions with the students and seeing them learn.”

Within the UNT department, she took on leadership roles, teaching training sessions about implicit bias awareness and sexual assault investigation, and she helped organize the department’s “30x30” initiative to recruit and keep female police officers.

As the chief, Washington supervises about 50 officers and about 80 civilian staffers.

Clayton Gibson, UNT’s vice president for finance and administration, said Washington is the right officer for a demanding public service role.

“Ramona embodies the professionalism and community-centric focus that we desire in a police chief to lead this department, oversee the safety of our campus, and connect with our students, faculty, staff and guests,” Gibson said. “She has spent most of her career with UNT police because the community holds special meaning to her. This is where she experienced educational and professional success, and she wants to support the success of others here as well.”

Policing is under a microscope in the United States and in cities across the country, and some citizens have lost trust in law enforcement amid high-profile cases of excessive force and police-involved shootings and killings.

Washington said officers understand they are working in a shifting environment, but she sees opportunities for both evolution in policing and community building. She joined a growing chorus of voices warning Americans and U.S. politicians about the ongoing mental health crisis.

“I absolutely agree that it is happening,” she said of the crisis. “It’s not something in other communities, it’s here in our community, on campus, as well, that we see that. My thought on it is that we have to be prepared for that, because that’s going to continue to be something that’s a high priority for communities.”

She said that sometimes “the mere presence of an officer does cause the situation to escalate, even though the intention is not for the officer to come and escalate the situation. We just know that with that mental health component that there’s a tendency for that to automatically occur.”

Washington lauded the former leadership of the department and the university for developing mental health resources. She also holds the Denton Police Department mental health care team in high regard, because it dispatches mental health professionals to calls that, 10 years earlier, would likely be attended by officers alone. She plans to lead the department in continuing education regarding mental health.

“I think my pie-in-the sky, if there was ever something I’d really like for us to have, is for us to create a team that would mirror something like what Denton PD has, because we have the resources here,” she said.

While her sights are set on growing into the chief’s office, Washington said she would like to teach again. She hopes to have a hand in confronting falling police recruitment rates. She’ll start at home base for that, though, working to bring more women into the university’s police force and promote community building as a foundation for law enforcement.

“I felt very fortunate to come into an agency that was a really fine, well-oiled, working machine,” Washington said. “It wasn’t like coming to an agency that’s broken. We had some solid leadership under Chief Reynolds for 30 years, and he definitely put things in place to help us be the professional agency that we are.”