Chief of police wins award at conference

Raul Munguia, chief of UTRGV’s Police Department, has been named UT System Police Chief of the Year at the 2018 University of Texas System Police Chiefs’ Conference in Galveston.

The conference is held every year in October. Chiefs from all University of Texas System schools attend the conference.

This is Munguia’s first UT System award.

The conference’s purpose is to discuss what is impacting universities and what has been done in other universities to resolve certain issues.

The Office of Director of Police evaluates chiefs from all UT universities and selects who has accomplished their goals and maintained a professional police department.

“It caught me completely by surprise,” Munguia said. “I wasn’t expecting it, the fact that they believe that UTRGV Police Department is doing an awesome job at providing safety to the UTRGV community.”

Munguia said he believes other universities are doing a great job, but since UTRGV is a new university, it had to start from the bottom.

“The fact that we have police officers from what was at one time three separate police agencies, and now we’ve formed it into one cohesive group that’s working together … that’s probably what brought a lot of the attention to us,” he said.

Patrick Gonzales, associate vice president for Marketing and Communication, said the award is well-deserved. He also said the university is pleased and proud of Munguia’s work.

“His leadership of the UTRGV Police Department is second to none,” Gonzales said. “He always puts the campus community safety first and it’s a top priority of his and the department to ensure the campus community is provided a safe environment.”

Kinesiology freshman Alexander Camp said that most of the time he stays late on campus and feels safe because of the constant presence of police officers around campus.

“The police force is known, like you see their presence,” Camp said. “Late at night, there’s not so many people here.”

Munguia said the Police Department wants to interact with the students because that would make the whole campus safer.