Students may not know Lt. Shannon Trice’s name, but they likely would curse it if they did.

Trice’s day job is running the Syracuse Police Department Traffic Division but he more infamously heads Operation Prevent, a project funded by an $18,000 grant from the state to put a stop to underage drinking and the use of fake IDs. Each time a student is charged as part of an Operation Prevent raid, like the one on April 1 that led to more than 50 arrests, or gets a parking ticket, they can likely thank someone working for Trice.

‘Unfortunately, he has a job that is not very popular. Really, you couldn’t pay me three times my salary to do what he does up at the university,’ said Detective Dan Babbage, a member of the narcotics division.

Trice realizes his reputation and uses the sense of humor so many of his friends and family talk about to make jokes about it.

‘I am probably the most hated man on campus,’ he said with a chuckle.

Although Trice may be hated on campus, he can relate to students more than most would assume. Like the community that he patrols, Trice went to college in Central New York at Cornell University and graduated in 1989.

Babbage, one of his best friends, remembers working crowd control after a Final Four game with Trice on Marshall Street. During the night, officers ventured into the crowd and faced jeers from many students. Babbage remembers one time when a student got in Trice’s face and began yelling at him.

‘This kid was calling Shannon stupid and uneducated – and I am putting that nicely – and here is a cop that went to Cornell. He is a smart guy,’ Babbage said. ‘I can’t think of too many Ivy League guys in uniform.’

Trice and members of his unit also work with Laura Madelone and the Office of Off-Campus Student Services, going door to door to help students adjust to living in Syracuse among several other projects, she said.

‘At heart, I believe Shannon is truly an educator,’ Madelone said. ‘He enjoys teaching and facilitating training.’

Madelone first came into contact with Trice after someone in the District Attorney’s office recommended him to head a not-yet-hatched Operation Prevent. It was Trice who got the funding for the project through the Governor’s Traffic Safety Committee, after Madelone had trouble.

That is not to say that busting underage drinkers has been a lifelong passion. Trice admits to trying to sneak into bars as a student but said if he were a student at SU now the threat of Operation Prevent would decrease the probability of him trying to do so.

Trice thinks it would be good if people could consume alcohol at a younger age and be more responsible but doesn’t see it happening. He said that the work being done through Operation Prevent is not meant to ruin anyone’s lives – the charges can be erased from someone’s record after a number of years – but instead are preventing things such as rapes, fights and drunken driving accidents that can be preceded by a night of drinking.

Shane Kidd, a junior film major, said he thinks Operation Prevent is an easy way of ‘sugar coating’ some problems and not addressing some of the major problems in Syracuse.

‘If they were really concerned with stopping drunk driving and things like that they would use the $18,000 to increase funding to public transportation so people don’t drive,’ Kidd said.

Trice points to the fact that officers working the Operation Prevent detail are making overtime funded by the grant. Trice added officers are actually preventing crime by not allowing students to put themselves in a position to commit serious crimes and by the increased numbers of officers in the area in the hours leading up to a raid.

He sees Operation Prevent as a way of telling students that the police department understands that they now have a great deal of freedom, but with freedom comes responsibilities, and with neglected responsibilities come consequences, one of which can be an Onondaga County court appearance ticket.

‘I’ve had similar experiences as other college students,’ Trice said. ‘It differs but a lot of the commonalities about growing up and trying new things are shared.’

One of the new things Trice tried in college landed him in law enforcement. Trice went to Cornell pursuing a career as a veterinarian but as junior year came around and with mounting loans and without stellar grades, he began to wonder if further schooling was for him. He decided to take a class on law enforcement psychology and throughout the semester decided that it might be a better fit.

Trice made his way to Syracuse after college because it was the first department to offer him a chance to begin paying off his student loans.

During his college years, Trice had a job as a bartender to help pay his way though college.

‘I don’t think (bartending) has anything to do with police work other than just dealing with drunks and checking IDs,’ he said.

Helping to fund his education is not the only thing Trice owes to bars. He met his wife, Jo Ann, in an Armory Square bar when a mutual friend set them up. The two dated for about five years and have been married for 10.

‘I love her smile and her laugh,’ Trice said. ‘She is a very, very loyal person. I did not have a lot of loyalty in my life growing up but she has always been there for me.’

Trice now has two children: Luke, 6, an aspiring hockey star, and Alison, 4, a ballerina and singer who loves Jessica Simpson.

‘As a father is the job he probably takes most seriously,’ Jo Ann said.

When not spending time with his children, Trice can be found playing hockey. He wanted to play ever since he was a child but his family could not afford it. When he joined the Syracuse Police Department he was invited to join their team even though he couldn’t skate. He continued on and eventually blossomed. He points to the sense of camaraderie that the team created to help him do something he always wanted to.

This sense of camaraderie is also what has kept Trice in Syracuse since 1989. He never intended to stay this long but as years went by and he stayed, he continued to make friends and never left.

Babbage, the captain of the team, points to him as one of his best teammates whose major fault on the ice is over-aggressiveness he learned from watching the NHL on television.

‘I am definitely not a finesse player,’ Trice said.

While starting to play hockey himself, Trice is making sure his son will have the opportunity to play the game at a young age that he never had. Luke has now been playing for three years and his father says he is a great skater.

‘It is really great to watch the kids grow up and enjoy doing things for them that weren’t done for me growing up,’ Trice said.

Along with children in the Trice household you would also find a black lab Spooky and until recently the police dog Trice had while he was on the K-9 unit. Trice loves dogs but Babbage remembers a time when the police dog got the best of Trice.

It was the mid-1990s during the spring time, when the snow was beginning to melt, that Trice, along with other officers received a call about a man with a gun. Once on the scene Trice roused Spooky and was preparing to go after the suspect on foot pursuit, Babbage recalled. Before he could get off and running, however, the dog became anxious and with his size pulled Trice off balance and down into what other officers thought was a pile of mud.

It wasn’t.

Trice continued on and eventually made the arrest but it was only at this point, when the other officers came nearer, that they noticed a distinct smell. They realized Trice had actually been pulled into a pile of dog feces.

‘It is one of the funniest things I have ever seen,’ Babbage said. ‘He took it in stride.’

Trice didn’t let it phase him and went back to the station, showered and changed clothing. The ability to laugh at himself is just one of the ways that Trice expresses his sense of humor. He is known to play jokes at times, something students who have been arrested or ticketed may not find all that amusing.

Officers have been known to receive memos from internal affairs informing them that they are under investigation. The memos are really from Trice.

‘Things like that are common but he never lets it go too far,’ Babbage said.

Students see Trice as the brutal overlord of Operation Prevent. Trice sees himself as a regular guy who likes playing jokes, spending time with his family and remembers vividly his own wild past. Somewhere between the two, halfway between lieutenant and daddy, lies the truth.

Published on April 14, 2004 at 12:00 pm