Light & Verity

An alumna joins the Yale Police

Rose Dell '97 is the department's first woman assistant chief.

Allan Appel/New Haven Independent

Allan Appel/New Haven Independent

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Rose Dell ’97 (right in photo) is the daughter of a lieutenant in the New York Police Department. She says that if you had told her, when she was a Yale student, that she too would become a police officer a decade later, “I would have burst out laughing.”

The undergraduate Dell would have been even more surprised to find herself back on campus as the Yale Police Department’s first female assistant chief. Dell, a 15-year veteran of the New Haven Police, was sworn into her new job in January after being recruited by YPD chief Anthony Campbell ’95, ’09MDiv (left in photo). “We have a shared belief in servant leadership,” says Dell. Among their efforts to “move the department forward,” she says, is a push to have a 30 percent female force by 2030. That figure is at 16 percent now—but it’s higher than the national average of 12 percent.

Dell says that as alums, understanding what it’s like to be a student is an advantage in the job for her and for the chief. And did she have any interactions with the Yale Police as a student? “I’m embarrassed to say that I did lock myself out more times than I’d like to admit to,” she confesses.

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