Ryan Chesley, police chief

The Berry College Police Department would like to welcome you and extend our wishes for a healthy and enjoyable year. The Berry College Police Department operates with a goal towards positive community policing model and is charged with the responsibilities of providing safety and property protection. To meet these important responsibilities, we maintain a force of state certified police officers whose duties are integrated to provide law enforcement, crime prevention and parking control/enforcement.

Officers are on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Our Communications Center, located at the Welcome Center, is staffed 24 hours a day. The department strives to contribute to the academic environment by performing professional law enforcement tasks with a positive, service oriented and educational approach. It is our wish to help you in any way that we can to ensure your safety, your success, and the enjoyment of your new home. Specifically, we will be assisting you with issuing your vehicle decals and student ID cards. If you encounter any issues with these items, please reach out to us so that we can promptly correct them.

Behind the scenes, but an important part of our job, is to administer the various technologies and security layers that serve to assist in the protection of our community. If you have questions or concerns about those technologies or security in general, please reach out to Chief Chesley for a sit down to discuss them. I always tell people that Berry College Police might not be the best answer for your particular problem, but that I truly do believe that being physically present at any time of day or night does often make us the best starting place to find the resources that you need. We need your help to do our jobs well.

Collectively, the community has many more sets of eyes than we have and I believe that true security can only be achieved when we all work together. Safety and security are everyone’s responsibility. If you see something that gives you pause or causes you concern, please say something to us about it. If there’s nothing concerning and you just want to say hi, I encourage you to do that as well.

We have recently added some Part-Time officers to our staff. To date these are officers who were formerly Full-Time employees and for various reason moved on. While we wish them well, we are excited that they desired to remain part of our team and welcome the extra presence on campus that they provide.

I wish you all the best and look forward to seeing you all enjoying this beautiful Berry.