Lt. Col. Andre Parker will have a family reunion Sunday. That’s when he returns
to the Illinois State Police, the agency he joined days after he was discharged
from the military and served for the next two dozen years.
In an interview with the Richmond Times Dispatch, Parker described his close relationship with the state police: “It’s been like my family — that’s where I met my wife. I have lifelong friends there,” he said.
And the Illinois State Police is welcoming Parker back like a long-lost son. When he returns to the payroll next week, he will be reclaiming his previous rank, picking up right where he left off more than two years ago when he left to become chief of police in Richmond, Va. The 29 months he was gone from the agency were technically a leave of absence.
Master Sgt. Rick Hector, state police spokesman, says the director can approve this type of indefinite leave request for any officer who leaves the agency in good standing. However, Hector couldn’t say how many times this courtesy has been extended.
“I don’t have any numbers on how often that happens,” he says.
Parker was the third-highest-ranking member of the state police when he departed Illinois in the summer of 2002 to become top cop over Richmond’s 700 sworn personnel. He lost that job in late December, on the eve of the inauguration of Richmond’s new mayor, former governor Douglas Wilder.
Wilder, like other candidates in Richmond’s mayoral race, had promised on the campaign trail that he would replace Parker as well as the city manager who hired him, Calvin D. Jamison. In a maneuver Wilder criticized as “unseemly,” Jamison fired Parker on Dec. 27, just before Wilder’s Jan. 1 swearing-in.
Jamison was highly complimentary of Parker, calling him “a quality professional and outstanding person of impeccable integrity” just days before he terminated Parker, according to the Richmond newspaper. Parker already knew he had lost his job; the firing was apparently a friendly gesture from Jamison, as it triggered Parker’s eligibility for a $100,000 severance package.
Parker’s tenure in Richmond was plagued with a high crime rate, political maneuvering among city leaders, and low morale among his officers, who didn’t appreciate his wardrobe rules. On a Web site established to air their comments about Parker, they complained that he failed to get rid of unpopular members of his inherited command staff.
Some officials said he was a good man who simply wasn’t experienced enough with urban crime to deal with Richmond’s situation. A Richmond newspaper columnist opined that Parker was a good, honest man who had improved the force, but that he was “unaware of how desperately this city needed him to be a father figure.”
Besides the job, he had medical problems to deal with. While in Richmond, he was diagnosed and treated for prostate cancer.
He will officially rejoin Illinois State Police on Sunday, Jan. 16, as commander of the Springfield training academy, at a salary of $117,396.
This article appears in Jan 13-19, 2005.
