It’s about 11:30 p.m. on a Friday night and Lt. Steve Trame is beginning his 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift by circling campus, surveying the scene through his open window. He makes a left turn on to Daniel Street, and as he approaches Kams Bar, profanities are yelled at his slow moving vehicle.

“You hear that a lot,” he says.

Little do the drunken pedestrians know, Trame’s job entails a lot more than his glances toward them can explain.

According to an Illinois News Bureau article, the University of Illinois Police Department first began in 1895 when the then University President, Andrew Draper, wanted to put a stop to campus crime. The official start-year of the police department, however, was in 1911 when University trustees voted to permanently employ two around the clock police officers to the University’s campus.

Although their job description at the start didn’t include very many duties, current campus police officers can have jobs as detectives, field training officers, bike unit officers, drug unit officers, crime scene techs, bomb squad officers and swat team officers as well as jobs within crime prevention.

“I think the advantage of being on a university police department, and our university police department, is that I have the ability to do a bunch of different (jobs),” said Sgt. Aaron Landers, who has been a University police officer for almost 15 years. “There’s a whole bunch of cool stuff I get to do that if I were at a bigger department or a different department I wouldn’t be able to do.”

Trame agrees that working for a university police station has a certain edge over other departments.

“The way our department is run, in my opinion, has some huge advantages over other places,” Trame said. “There are a lot of opportunities to do other things within the department (and) I think the department is very good at making those opportunities available.”

Because the University police officers are provided with so many opportunities to do more than the ‘regular’ police duties, they often find it frustrating when their work gets overlooked.

“I think the biggest misconception is that we’re just security guards and all we do is open doors, and we don’t really do police work,” Landers said. “Especially when you do as much as we do it still gets you when you hear ‘oh security is here.’”

Trame, who has been a bomb tech for 22 years and is now the bomb squad commander; and Landers, who is a bomb tech, do much more than write traffic tickets.

The bomb squad includes three officers from the University and three from the Champaign Police Department. They provide Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) coverage for their district, which includes 10 counties. The bomb squad officers participate in a 6-week training course supported by the FBI. They get about 6-8 calls a year and their job is described by Trame as “very technical (and) demanding.” He even detailed a story about a bomb threat on campus that makes his list of the craziest things he has ever seen.

In the mid 1990s, members of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) were having a conference at the Levis Center in Champaign.

“Someone called in (to WILL) and said ‘hey there’s a bomb in the Levis Center and there is a letter in the fire extinguisher box in the hallway,” Trame said.

Sure enough, there was. Trame and his team went over there, cleared the building and began their search. Under a coat rack Trame found an open bag with a clock, battery and an incendiary device.

“We would normally never hand enter a device like that, but I just looked in the bag and saw it,” Trame said.

Trame took a piece of tape to stop the clock, otherwise the device would have started the coats on fire and spread.

Now, as the bomb squad leader, Trame said his goal for 2012 is to practice disabling a car bomb with a robot. Using the robot will ensure the safety of their team.

Although Trame expressed his deep appreciation for his job, he did express one frustration with working on a campus.

“Every year we have to start over at ground zero with an entire new crop of freshman,” he said. “You finally start getting students aware and they’re following your advice and then they graduate and leave.”