Washington officer retiring after 39 years on force

WASHINGTON — Police will hold a reception for Lt. Lyle Hansen on Friday, as the officer prepares to retire from nearly four decades serving the city.

It’s a career that’s had flashy moments, according to Hansen, who spent 22 years as an investigator and the rest as a patrol officer. The officer was referenced in a variety of articles by the Washington Evening Journal, about cases of murder, a bank robbery, and a drug bust.

But for the most part — about 99% of the time, in Hansen’s estimation — it’s been boring. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, however: he said the other 1% of the time was “total chaos.”

“When you first start out, you’re thinking the exciting part, red lights and sirens and mixing it up,” he said. “When it comes right down to it … as you get older, you appreciate 99% boredom. Because chaos is something you cannot control, and that’s when bad things happen. People get hurt, you get hurt, mistakes are made, stuff like that.”

Some of that 99% is spent waiting for something to happen, or looking for it. The rest is largely paperwork, for hours at a time.

Hansen said he wasn’t sure if bigger cities had busier officers, but between his preference for predictable days and his own appreciation for the community, he opted to stay in Washington throughout his working career.

Hansen is a Washington native. He said he got into police work following the footsteps of his father, an Iowa State Patrol Officer of 38 years. He never had much interest in leaving the community, and said he was grateful for good leadership throughout his time in the Washington Police Department.

“I’m familiar with the town, familiar with the people, grew up knowing everybody,” he said. “I don’t like big cities, I never wanted to get into something as random as Cedar Rapids, (which) for me, would be too big, in law enforcement.”

The retiring officer’s career trajectory was unusual in that he started as a patrol officer and became an investigator after five years, but 22 years after that, he switched back to patrol duty.

That change was entirely voluntarily. Hansen swapped a schedule of frequent interviews and interrogations for a slower-paced, desk and driver’s-seat position. He said the process of extracting information and corroborating it was taxing, as was the often disturbing content on his desk every day.

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“I spent 70% of my time doing child sexual abuse cases,” he said. “That’s a lot of time, non-stop, five days a week, just hearing about the nastiest, most degrading things you could ever think of a human being doing to a child. That works on you. The death cases work on you.”

Patrol duty was different. Hansen spent 12-hour shifts getting deeply familiar with every street and corner in town, keeping an eye open for any change out of the ordinary.

To stay self-motivated, he said he challenged himself to find specific things while looking through town, sometimes devoting his attention to missing front license plates, or animals not being cared for, or pedestrians who seem to be acting suspicious.

Officers have to avoid getting overzealous, however. Hansen said he didn’t feel he ever invented problems where there were none. Usually, he said his attention was driven democratically, either by recent calls for service or directives from leadership.

“The city council will talk to the chief, and then the chief rolls it down to us,” he said. “Right now, we’re supposed to be watching rolling stop signs, because we’re getting a lot of complaints about those. In wintertime, it seems like it’s all about parking … in some way, you could look at it as, the people dictate what kind of problems you look into.”

The work has changed considerably since Hansen’s first day with the department.

Aside from different types of cases, evolving training requirements, and a transforming world, he said objectivity training after 2020 caught him by surprise. The death of George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis whose death at the hands of police was ruled a homicide, spurred nationwide protests, and calls for reform across the criminal justice system.

At first, Hansen said he was insulted by the department’s implicit bias training, which he had to take shortly after revelations about the relationship between policing and race. In retrospect, though, he said he understood its value.

“As soon as you recognize you’ve got a bias, you should be able to work around it,” he said. “The second time I took the training, I realized that we all have biases that we don’t even realize we’re carrying around. I thought I was about the most unbiased person there was, but then I found, the more I got to reading about it … we all have implicit biases, and we need to be aware of them.”

Hansen doesn’t have any big plans as he approaches retirement. The officer said he looked forward to “not being responsible for anybody’s life,” and to having some time off.

“I lost dad when he was 66, and I’m 64 now,” he said. “I wanted some time to enjoy retirement. He enjoyed retirement for about three years, and that’s all, so that ain’t going to happen to me.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com