Major Jerry Williams rose to his current rank in 2014 and serves on Indiana State Police Superintendent Douglas Carter’s executive staff. He’s the highest-ranking African American on the state police out of 11,000 troopers in the agency.
Major Williams oversees the maintenance of some $300 million worth of assets including buildings, aircraft and more than 1800 vehicles. He has also coordinated the construction of three new facilities – one of them the new ISP Post in Lowell – 60 miles south of Chicago.
But Williams says one of the projects closest to his heart is the six months he took a leave of absence from the ISP to serve as Interim Police Chief of the Gary Police Department in 2023. Williams says he thinks he left Gary officers in a better position to make his childhood hometown safer.
“My goal and my challenge to myself was to get everybody, every stakeholder, in the room so that we can all understand what we bring to the table,” he said. “And then how do we maximize it? How do we then take that out of the room, off the table, and apply it in our communities to make them safer every day. Not only literally, but from the perception of it. How do I make people feel safer in their own homes? How do I make people feel better about going out in the daytime as well as at night?”