MANSFIELD — Shari Robertson walked in wearing a pink t-shirt with ARUBA printed in white block letters. In her hand was a mocha with extra chocolate syrup, nicknamed “the captain” by the baristas at Relax, It’s Just Coffee.
The former captain of the Mansfield Police Department is less than a week into retirement. She looks relaxed, smiles frequently and has no regrets.
“You’re always told that you will know when the time is right,” said Robertson, a 27-year veteran of MPD.
“As much as I love being a part of this community and trying to make a difference, I just knew for myself that the time was right.”
Robertson retired last week as the Commander of the Special Operations Bureau, which includes the detective section and major crimes unit, forensic science section, neighborhood impact section and office of professional standards and training.
One of the highest ranking female officers in the division’s history, Robertson has worn numerous hats during the course of her career.
Assistant Chief Jason Bammann said she set the bar high wherever she went.
“Her leaving this division has left a huge void that’s going to take several of us to fill,” he said. “Everywhere she went, it was never about her, it was always about the community.”
“Her ability to communicate, her ability to understand things — it’s something you can’t teach. She uses it to make everything she touches a better place.”
In 2008, former police chief Phil Messer noticed Robertson’s knack for writing. She became the department’s de facto grant writer, bringing in $11 million over the course of her career.
Chief Keith Porch said Robertson helped fund staffing, equipment and initiatives that wouldn’t have existed otherwise during financially-strapped times for the department.
In 2008, one of those grants funded a dedicated domestic violence and sexual assault officer position. Robertson worked with Det. Sgt. Matt Loughman and the shelter to implement the Lethality Assessment program not long afterwards.
“I’m very proud of the fact that I was able to secure funding to get a detective to focus on that,” she said.
“A lot of time, a law officer will go into that situation and handle the call, but then a victim really doesn’t have a contact at the police department to follow up with anything.”
In 2019, Robertson received the Advocacy Service Award from the Domestic Violence Shelter for initiatives to better serve victims of domestic violence and their families.
Kathy Ezawa, the shelter’s executive director, said Robertson has been intentional about building a strong relationship between the department and the shelter.
“The Lethality Assessment Program is effective in our community because it provides victims with an immediate connection to a trained advocate of The Domestic Violence Shelter,” Ezawa said.
“Capt. Robertson worked closely with our program to ensure that officers were trained to administer the assessment and to ensure that victims were able to connect with someone who could provide immediate assistance.”
More than a uniform
Robertson grew up in Mansfield and graduated from Madison High School in 1985. Her first interaction with the department came in her teens, when officers shooed her and her friends away while they skateboarded inside a parking garage downtown.
Robertson began her career with the Mansfield Police in 1994. She didn’t have grand aspirations for a career in law enforcement at the time. In fact, she says she stumbled into the career partly by accident.
She was 25 at the time, working as a quality control auditor and a pizza delivery driver. Four of her friends decided to take the police civil service exam and urged her to join them.
She was hesitant, but relented. She still remembers sitting in her car at the then-Malabar High School parking lot, watching dozens of men enter the building to take the test.
Her friends never showed up.
“At that time, you’d have 200 to 300 people show up for that test. It was a very competitive process,” Robertson recalled.
Months went by with no contact from the Mansfield Police Department. Robertson kept working and life moved on.
Nearly a year and half later, she got a call. When she heard the lieutenant’s voice on the answering machine, she assumed it was about an unpaid parking ticket she’d been issued just three days ago.
“I’m thinking ‘Oh my God, give me a chance to pay the ticket!’ I kind of forgot about the test because it had been so long,” she said.
When she called back, the officer asked if she was still interested in joining the force. Robertson knew there was no guarantee of a job after going through the police academy, but she decided to take the leap. She was the first female candidate the department had sent to the Ohio State Highway Patrol Police Academy.
Becoming a police officer was an eye-opening experience.
“The average citizen has no idea what’s really happening out there,” she said. “Actually hitting the streets, seeing what’s going on – it’s a whole different world.”
Getting her badge even cost her some friendships.
“You realize that some people treat you a little different,” she said. “That was kind of tough to realize that people saw the uniform and not you.
“I think that’s a lot of what’s going on today in our society. People see the uniform and they don’t see the person behind it. And that’s sad because we are people. We have families, we have a life.
“That always stuck with me throughout my career. When I interacted with people, I tried to make them see the person, not the uniform.”
Early in her career, she walked into the office of former chief Phil Messer and saw a poster with a Maya Angelou quote on his wall.
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
It resonated with the young rookie.
“When I was out on the street, I just wanted to make people feel better about themselves and whatever situation they were in,” she said.
“I always strove to leave that situation better than when I got there. It didn’t always work, but I tried.”
Many of Robertson’s fondest memories are from her time in community policing, early in her career.
Robertson noted that only a certain segment of the force was assigned community policing in the mid-1990s. These officers were assigned a section of the city to patrol. They were charged with building relationships and trust, working with the community to address challenges whenever possible.
“We attended neighborhood watch meetings,” Robertson said. “We were able to interact on a more constant basis with the same people in those areas. So they got to know us.”
Robertson was briefly assigned to the Hedges neighborhood before being reassigned to North Lake Park. She spent the next five years there, often patrolling on foot or bicycle. Community policing officers enforced the law, but they also held events like the D.A.R.E. Olympics and Safety Town.
In 1999, the Mansfield Police Department along with the Richland County Adult Parole and Probation and Richland County Sheriff’s Office received the Governor’s Award for Community Policing Excellence.
Robertson called it a highlight in her career.
“I love the programs that community policing initiated,” she said. “It was one of our officers that started the ACE program which stands for A Community Effort. That’s still going on today.
“We had a lot of autonomy. If there was a problem in our neighborhood, we were tasked with solving that problem and that’s what I loved.”
Today the Mansfield Police Department has a community policing philosophy, with each officer assigned a certain section of the city. But Robertson said it can be challenging to fully embody those ideals with an understaffed department.
“Unfortunately, because of our staffing and because of the volume of calls, we can’t only stay in those areas,” she said. “You got to go where the problem is.”
Around 2000, Robertson became involved with the Ohio Crime Prevention Association. She served as an OCPA district representative, secretary and then president in 2007. As president, she helped start a house of worship security training program for churches, synagogues and temples.
She co-chaired numerous state training conferences and co-authored the organization’s Advanced Crime Prevention Specialist Training Manual and Curriculum in 2012.
She was promoted to Sergeant in 2005 and Captain in 2014.
“The one thing that bothers me quite a bit was that I never actually was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant,” she said. “I went straight from Sergeant to Captain.”
Robertson said she was supposed to be promoted to lieutenant along with four other officers. Only three of the five ultimately received the promotion.
Despite still being a sergeant, Robertson petitioned the city for the chance to take the captain’s exam. She scored first among her colleagues and was promoted to captain shortly afterward.
Robertson said she’s grateful for the community’s support of the department over the years. She hopes that in the future, that relationship will continue to grow stronger.
For that to happen, she said, there needs to be communication and openness on both sides.
“It doesn’t matter what profession you’re in — if you think that you can’t do better, you’re kidding yourself,” she said. “Getting people to better understand what we’re about and us listening to what the community wants — I think that’s that’s key.”
Although she’s hanging up her badge, Robertson plans to stay active in the community she calls home.
She will continue volunteering at the Ohio State Reformatory, where she’s overseen security since 1998 and currently serves as board president.
“I’m looking forward to getting busy with something else here soon,” she said. “I definitely can’t just retire and sit around. It’s not me.”
