Like many folks in their mid-40s, Joseph Hasara was looking for a bit of a career change. Hasara had spent the last 20 years in the Philadelphia Police Department, the last 15 of them as a detective.

"It's not that I disliked what I was doing, just that I needed a new challenge," said Hasara. He retired from the police department in May, but he didn't sit around long. In July, two former police department colleagues -- Tom Seamon, managing director of public safety, and Maureen Rush, chief of police operations -- hired Hasara and three other retired Philadelphia detectives to double the size of the Penn police investigative unit.

And it has worked.

In the last several weeks, working closely with the Philadelphia police Southwest Detective Division, the Penn investigators' work led to arrests in the series of robberies at Penn fraternity houses, in a rash of armed robberies near campus, and in a series of burglaries in Moore and Towne Buildings, in addition to the recapture of a stolen $10,000 piece of artwork.

"Now, none of this could have been done without the great help of uniform campus police," said Bill Danks, another of the new University detectives. "But we hope that the four of us coming on will continue the spirit of cooperation necessary to solve crimes on campus."

Hasara and Danks, and the two other new University detectives, Frank DeMeo and Patricia Brennan, have a combined total of more than 100 years of Philadelphia police work behind them. They all seem genuinely excited about their mid-life job switches.

"Sure, I retired, but at 53, realistically, I wasn't going to stop working," said DeMeo. "I saw things come and go when working with the Philadelphia Police Department. Some things I liked; some I didn't. But I liked investigating, and Chief Rush has given me the opportunity to keep on doing that."

Brennan was a homicide detective for the last nine years and said she needed a change.

"This was just a wonderful opportunity to move to a different environment and not really disrupt my career," said Brennan, who noted that the University police work closely with the Philadelphia Southwest Detectives, at 55th and Pine streets, where she started her police work. "Staying in the city, we keep our contacts. We get to use what we know."

The four new detectives stress that they will be doing the same things at Penn as they were in their former jobs: working with uniformed cops to sort out crimes and to arrest those who commit them.

"All the things you might expect, crimewise and socially, that you find in Philadelphia, you will find at Penn," said Danks. "Because we are part of the inner city, you are going to have those same city problems, just on a smaller scale."

The new detectives like the idea that the challenge seems less daunting. "We see Penn as a microcosm of the city," Hasara said. "Rather than focus on the whole of Philadelphia, we will be dealing with the smaller community. And Penn is a close community, so we expect we will be able to do our jobs well here."

The new detectives want to make clear that they don't look upon themselves as a sort of Legion of Super Heroes, some arrogant new small force of saviors that will once and for all clean all crime out of the University area.

"We do hope our experience helps solve more crimes," said DeMeo. "But, really, what we can do is free up the other investigators and campus police to do their jobs more efficiently. If we are going to be successful, it will be because we cooperate with all police and all parts of the University community."

For the time being, the detectives will switch between 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. shifts ("You see different things around campus in the daytime and at night," said Hasara), but they may find one shift or another better as time goes on. Their eventual goal is to have enough strength to clear cases right on campus, sending cases directly to the city District Attorney's office rather than burden the Southwest Detectives with the paperwork.

"There have been a lot of cutbacks in the city police department and our real mission is not to let that affect overall police work," said Danks. "We are realistic enough to know that crime may always be with us here, but our goal is to make everyone at Penn know that every crime will be thoroughly investigated and, hopefully, solved."

Return to Compass Features for October 8, 1996