Director Brent Chambers took over this semester as the Director of Campus Safety.
Director Chambers is the former head of the East Texas Branch of the FBI and has over a 100 cases to his name.
“I had the opportunity to become the agent in charge of east Texas, so I got promoted and came out here and I was over all the agents in east Texas for all violations: counter-terrorism, extortion, foreign counter-intelligence, espionage, everything, all areas were covered,” Chambers said.
Not only has Chambers worked on many different cases, but he’s also been involved in several high profile ones as well.
“Corrupt public officials, judges, senators, congressmen, I did a lot of investigations there,” Chambers said. “I was on our evidence response team where we went to 9/11, to the disaster there, I did the shuttle disaster.”
This is not Chambers’ first time to TJC and he previously worked with Police Chief Melton for an active shooter situation exercise.
“Well, I’ve always known [TJC] because I knew them as the agent in charge here. So we worked with TJC, we did active shooter training here ‘cause they’re on top of trying to be trained for an incident,” Chambers said.
Chambers decided to work after Dr. Juan Meija, the Provost of TJC, got into contact with him about working here.
“Well, I was getting towards the end of my career, the federal government has mandatory retirement at 57, but I knew that my age to get a different job was right around 50, so I knew it was coming to an end,” Chambers said. “Doctor Meija approached me about coming to work here and so I looked at it and thought it might be a really good opportunity and so I went ahead and retired and I came to work here. Retired on Friday, came to work here on Monday.”
As for his plans for TJC, Chambers assures us there won’t be any major changes.
“We can always enhance things, but it’s not like there’s a whole lot missing, it’s like, hey, there’s a new set of eyes, let’s try this now, let’s try this,” Chambers said. “They have a real big emphasis on protecting the students and the faculty and staff and I guess I’m just a new set of eyes.”
However, this does not mean there won’t be any changes being made.
“We’ve made some personnel moves, internal moves, as far as those types of changes. We’re gonna do a lot more emphasis on training, being prepared. That’s a big thing for me, I wanna make sure everyone is prepared. For any kind of incident,” Chambers said.
Chambers also plans to hold an FBI tabletop exercise here at TJC in the near future.
Chambers said that he looks forward to working with both the students and the student media.
