My name is Dan Swanson.
I am a lecturer here at Southern Utah University.
I was born and raised in Las Vegas where I then began my career in law enforcement.
I was a corrections officer and a police officer for over twenty years.
Criminal justice and what I love about it is
the ability to go out there and help people in that time of need.
Being there in the real moment when people need your help,
it never made a dull moment.
It was very rewarding to have that feeling that you did something and made a difference for people.
I'm proud to be in criminal justice because we have an enormous
amount of job opportunities.
The careers out there are:
everybody sees from the Hollywood
the policing aspect, the FBI detectives, the DA - they're out there.
We've got an enormous amount of jobs in parole and probation and correction
and all of those different rehabilitative services
thousands of job opportunities.
Teaching them the real-life scenarios and
this is what you're faced with, and this is what they're expecting you to do
when you get there,
really helps them get employed and fortunately it's been very rewarding
for me to see students all over the country getting employed,
it's nice.
We have retired colonels from the military,
we have retired judges from all over the country,
we've got retired law enforcement like myself,
we've got research PhD's.
We've got a great team and we teach them,
this is how the real world is out there, plus this is where the research is going.
He have a lot of criminal justice students
we want the classes to be small so we know you and we know what your interest is
and really, we can guide you for that type of career so that
you can utilize those type of skills that you have.
Here at Southern Utah University, we're fortunate that
the room I am standing in we've got a mock court room.
It is utilized by courts, we actually have judges that come in here and sit.
We've also got a lab that we do all kinds of crime scene analysis,
we've put together all kinds of different crime scenes to let them analyze.
We've got investigations classes that teach them those skills
not just in identifying specific elements we need to in crimes,
but also how to talk and communicate. Communication is key to being involved in law enforcement.
We teach a lot of skills in our courtroom for communication
as well as in our lab going through what an investigator would be like on a scene.
I think we need a lot of amazing people to get into this field.
It's needed and it's simple to protect, it's difficult to serve.
And that's really where that focus is changing now.
We need to get people involved that can really serve the public
rather than worrying about the arrest.
It's really nice to be here in this venue.
I get asked by departments all the time, "send me your brightest, your best".
So I'm continually sending them graduates saying, "here, here's a student" and it's very rewarding.
