Dec. 11—Capt. Greg Leonbruno, of the Willoughby Hills Police Department, recently graduated from the School of Police Staff and Command at Northwestern University.

Implemented by the Center for Public Safety in 1983, Leonbruno successfully completed the 22-week Staff and Command program held in Evanston, Ill. The program has graduated more than 30,000 students both nationally and internationally.

Leonbruno was a student in SPSC Class 526, which accommodated a total of 19 students.

"It's upper level college instruction and a total of 27 core blocks of instruction, so he has been very busy," said District 3 Councilman Christopher Hallum. "We look forward to all the assets he's going to bring us from the education he received."

The Center for Public Safety was established at Northwestern in 1936 with the specific goal of expanding university-based education and training for the law enforcement community.

Since its inception, the center has broadened its original objective and now provides a variety of courses, and programs in the area of police training, management training and executive development.

The 27 core blocks of instruction include leadership, human resources, employee relations, organizational behavior, applied statistics, planning and policy development, as well as budgeting and resource allocation. Each student is academically challenged through written examinations, projects, presentations and quizzes in addition to a staff study paper that are all required parts of the curriculum.

In addition to the Willoughby Hills department, Leonbruno serves on the Western Lake County SWAT team and helps coordinate tactical patrol trainings for officers.

"Our main focus is to get (officers) more tactically sound whether that be just responding to your every day disturbance and traffic stops," Leonbruno previously told The News-Herald. "We're always going to be behind the curve is someone chooses violence against us."

Willoughby Hills officers focus on traffic stop training alone throughout the year and room entry, as well as hands-on and jujitsu training, all of which are perishable skills, Leonbruno said.

"You need a lot more training to be able to retain the information, so we try to spread it out so officers have that retention," he said. "At the end of the year, we do an all inclusive, scenario-based training."