A police chief is in charge of the entire police department. That is not typically a person who also has a second job, but the police chief here in Elgin does.

Ana Lalley has been Chief of the Elgin Police Department since July 2018, having been with the department overall since March 1996. She is also a criminal justice professor at Elgin Community College, a role she has been in since 2008.

According to Lalley, that dual role is a fulfilling experience that provides her a unique way to give back to the community. She enjoys seeing students she has taught at ECC coming to work for the police department.

“They’re young adults, and I see them transition into this role as a police officer,” Lalley said. “And that’s what the teaching part is. I love to give back and I love to teach the next generation. And I love to make those opportunities for people that I may not have necessarily had”.

Lalley attended Illinois State University, and she originally wanted to go to law school to become an attorney. She eventually realized that was not the path she wanted to take.

“I decided that, you know, I didn’t want to sit behind a desk all day, even though a lot of what I do today [as Chief of Police] is administrative,” Lalley said.

It was shortly thereafter that Lalley saw a flyer at ISU recruiting people for employment at the Elgin Police Department.

“Elgin [Police Department] was the only place I ever tested for,” Lalley said. “I grew up in Streamwood, which is right next door to Elgin, so I kind of knew what Elgin was about. So that’s what led me to my career here.”

Lalley loves the investigative side of police work, including things like cold cases, and seeing investigations to their end.

She also has a motto that she tries to live by while working in law enforcement.

“When I became a police officer, to me, it’s very important that we leave places better than they were when we got there,” Lalley said.

Lalley got her master’s in criminal justice administration from Loyola University in 2002 while working as a midnight shift officer, and later got her master’s in homeland security from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey, California.

In 2008, then-Narcotics Investigator for the Elgin Police Department Frank Trost was a criminal justice professor at ECC. Trost told Lalley that ECC was looking for more criminal justice professors. Next thing she knew, she was teaching.

“I went in and kind of had like an interview,” Lalley said. “[They asked] why I wanted to teach, what I believed, what I thought, what I could bring to the school. And then I just started teaching. I mean, it was literally just like that. It just happened.”

Lalley said she quickly found this new role to be an interesting way to connect with newer generations and learn more about them.

“Over these past 15 years of teaching, it’s been amazing to see the different types of students, and why people are in the criminal justice program,” Lalley said. “When I started teaching, it was initially about the security of the job… but over the last couple of years it has become more about the inspiration of people wanting to do better for their community.”

Lalley always starts the first day of class by asking her students what they aspire to do and where they see themselves in five years.

“If they’re in this field, they want to work in the police department, they want to be on the SWAT team, they want to be a K-9 officer,” Lalley said. “And when you dig a little bit deeper, they want to also be part of a community. And they want to be able to help people in the community.”

In 2011, ECC awarded Lalley with a Service to Students award for her dedication to ECC students. She helped shape the criminal justice program around the busy schedules of students and helped them by giving them mock POWER tests, the physical test required to become a police officer in Illinois.

“The things that you do are not for accolades, although it’s nice when you do get them,” Lalley said. “It literally goes back to making things better for the people that come after me, make it better for the community, make it better for the officers here.”

Lalley’s roles as police chief and professor often bleed over into one another. Students often ask her for help from the police for things unrelated to the class, and she points them in the right direction.

“You’re in a classroom with people for 16 weeks, they get to know you,” Lalley said. “They have families. I’ve had students ask me about a family member and I’m able to provide them resources. That, to me, is very fulfilling.”

Because of Lalley, young students who may have otherwise been intimidated to reach out to the police department for resources are now connecting with them.

“We’re there to inspire [the students] for whatever career they choose to do, but we’re also there if they have something they’re going through,” Lalley said.

As fulfilling as it can be, being a professor while also having a role as high-profile as Chief of Police can have its challenges, according to Lalley.

“When something happens at the Elgin Police Department, the students—they’re following us on Facebook, they’re reading the newspaper—so I’m going to get those questions like, ‘hey, what’s going on,’ whether it’s about a crime incident or something that’s going on,” Lalley said.

Lalley did not get those questions from students when she was a commander, lieutenant or sergeant. As chief, she now gets those questions and tries to be as transparent about the department as possible with her students.

This aspect of her dual role came into play when the Elgin Police Union completed a formal vote of no confidence in her on Nov. 7, 2022. It made headline news across the Chicagoland area a week later, and Lalley had a class to teach that night.

“I knew that the students were reading about what was going on,” Lalley said. “I was very transparent about it. I walked in and said, ‘this is what happened, we’re working through some things with the union.’”

Lalley wanted to bring it up before her students did to show her dedication to transparency. She said it is her job to represent the police department well, even when things are going on that personally affect her.

Since then, Lalley says that the biggest concern for the Elgin Police Department has been an increase in mental health calls. As a result, the department has started the Collaborative Crisis Services Unit.

This special unit pairs trained mental health professionals with police officers.

“If we have an emotionally distressed person, we’re able to provide them resources immediately,” Lalley said. “99% of our officers here, the ones who aren’t in the academy or are new, are trained in crisis intervention.”

The department also has a program called ICAT, or Integrating, Communications, Assessment and Tactics. According to Lalley, this program stresses the importance of slowing a situation down, assessing and deescalating it.

“We want our community members to be safe, and we want the officers to be safe,” Lalley said. “When people are in crisis, you don’t want to escalate [the situation].”

The Elgin Police Department has also mandated body-worn cameras for its officers since 2016.

Another important thing for the police department is community engagement. On Halloween, the department had a Halloween open house where children came to the station to trick-or-treat.

“Those interactions of meeting those young kids who are the future of Elgin, and them having a positive interaction with a police officer, that’s what we’re trying to do,” Lalley said. “It’s not necessarily about the event; it’s about the relationships we want to build with our community. The community is our top priority.”

Lalley also sees these events as a way for the community to bring up concerns they may have about the police department.

“It’s easier to tell somebody you’re not happy with the police department when you’re in a neutral setting,” Lalley said. “Whether it’s at an event or you’re sitting having coffee, those have been the best conversations. Those are the conversations that have propelled us to do things differently here, to do things better.”

Lalley has also been pleased to see many of her students show up at the community events.

“It’s awesome, because they know me not just as the police chief, but also as their instructor,” Lalley said. “And now they’re standing there with five of their friends who maybe thought, ‘ah, I don’t know if I’d ever say hi to a police officer.’ Now it’s building that bridge where they’ll say, ‘oh she was my instructor,’ or, ‘I met this police officer at an event.’”

On a personal level, Lalley has little doubt about how she views her future, and she reiterates her motto.

“Whatever it is that I do in the future, it’s to continue to leave things better than what they were and to appreciate people for who they are,” Lalley said.