Seymour Police Sgt. Stephen M. Prajer received a leadership award from the Northwestern University Center for Public Safety, Chief Michael Metzler announced Oct. 5.
The center was founded at Northwestern in 1936 at the Traffic Safety Institute.
It launched under the direction of Franklin M. Kreml, a sergeant with the Evanston Police Department in Illinois who is regarded as a pioneer in traffic safety and accident prevention in the U.S.
Today the university’s Center for Public Safety offers training to law enforcement on crash investigation along with courses on police operations and management.
Prajer, a Seymour police officer for more than 20 years, took a 10-week program under the center’s school of police staff and command this summer.
The course covered everything from budgeting to grant writing to media relations to project management.
The goal is to train first and second level police managers for senior level positions, according to a prepared statement.
Sgt. Prajer was selected by his classmates to receive the Kreml Leadership Award, named after the center’s founder.
The award goes to the student “who best displays the dedication, devotion, ethics, sense of justice” and other leadership qualities, according to a letter to the Seymour police chief from David Bradford, the public safety center’s executive director.
“Sergeant Prajer stook out in all of these qualities,” Bradford wrote in the letter, dated Sept. 28.
Sgt. Prajer was Seymour’s Police Officer of the Year in 2011.
