Former director of parking and transportation services and part-time English instructor Perry Gordon walked out with a layoff notice in the spring of 2010 after years of service at Miami University.
This layoff opened up opportunities for Gordon, and he resiliently responded despite being at the end of his teaching career. He has also served as a police officer, Hueston Woods park officer and assistant to the chief of police and parking services with Oxford Police Department over his 37-year career.
Today, Gordon works in his favorite position yet at the OPD: property room technician. His colleagues describe him as a hard worker.
“He exceeds expectations from previous people in his position,” Lt. Adam Price said. “He’s raised the bar to a whole other level.”
Gordon was born 68 years ago in Troy, New York, a medium-sized town overlooking the Hudson River, where he was raised with three brothers. He also did graduate studies in American literature at Miami University.
He found various jobs at the university starting in 1988, which included serving as a graduate assistantship for the English department, coordinating student operations, working as an EMT and 911 dispatcher, and getting commissioned as a police officer in 1994. Later, he served as an assistant director in 2003 and then director of parking and transportation services in 2007.
“I never had an absolute career plan,” Gordon said. “I just knew I wanted to work in public service in some regard.”
Gordon started working as a park officer at Hueston Woods in 2001, where he performed roles such as running speed checks, assisting new campers and giving tours of the park. He worked this job until retiring in 2017.
It was during his employment at Miami that Gordon met his wife Kate, and the two have been married for over 20 years. In their sixth year of marriage Kate, a human resources employee at Miami, had to give him a layoff notice.
Gordon was laid off after Miami eliminated the parking director position and was among many others who were let go that year. He informed the coordinator for the English department of his layoff and said he didn’t know what his schedule was going to be like.
“And that was my end to teaching,” he said.
Gordon wasted no time in finding a new job after his layoff. He immediately dialed former OPD Chief Stephan Schwein to ask him if there was any space for him in the department.
“I told him I will write parking tickets, I will sit in dispatch, or if you are hiring any full or part-time officers, I will do that,” Gordon said. “So he hired me.”
Gordon said it was a rocky transition and took five to six years to get back to the income level he was receiving in his former roles. At the time, he was splitting his week between his job as Hueston Woods park officer and as an OPD officer.
He became the supervisor of parking in Oxford two years after starting with OPD. Gordon, a people-person known for his sense of humor, described this as, “sort of like three years in purgatory. It was not the most exciting stuff.” He said it was nothing new compared to what he did in the past at Miami.
After Gordon’s monotonous purgatory ended, he was promoted to property technician, a role that he is incredibly passionate about. In this role, he is in charge of the intake of property, storage and status and disposition of property.
All aspects of the property room were in disarray when he first arrived. The first thing he did was a complete inventory of the property in the room and the system, and he found things that were missing and things that should’ve been gone.
The room itself was even messier, even after Gordon cleaned. He moved in before the police station was renovated in 2018, and the room was located in what is now the bathrooms and showers at the station.
A standard household refrigerator was used to store OVI and sexual assault kits, guns sat loosely in open cabinets when the gun locker was full and a giant hole in the ceiling had to be taped over so asbestos wouldn’t fall on Gordon’s head. “It was primitive,” he said.
Today, the room is much nicer and more organized. The wall opposite Gordon’s desk is lined with black evidence lockers, and sitting in the room behind them are shelves stocked neatly with evidence.
On the far side of the room is a board stocked with various weapons that Gordon has collected over the years, one being a three-pronged garden tool that a woman chased down her husband with. Next to that sits a collection of three long skewers of fake IDs, something he is proud to show off.
You can hear the hum of the OVI and sexual assault kit refrigerator throughout the spacious room where Gordon completes his work every day. “It is a whole lot better now,” he said.
Gordon has many responsibilities in his role and said no two days are the same. He is in charge of managing all property that is turned into his office, whether it be evidence, safekeeping, confiscation or found property.
He must file an intake sheet for every piece of property. He’s kept track of his number of evidence intakes since 2017, and there have been 16,540 items to date.
“Gordon is an extremely organized and detail-oriented guy,” Lieutenant Price said.
Gordon has to check with local courts and patrol officers to determine whether he has to dispose of or keep evidence for longer. When dealing with sexual assault kits, he must store these for 30 years, per Ohio law.
He drives to several different labs throughout the week, whether it be for drug verification, OVI testing or testing sexual assault kits. He’s made 456 lab runs since 2018, averaging 1.33 per week.
Gordon has different routes he takes when it comes to disposition. He takes drugs and court-ordered firearms to be destroyed. He has a dealer he sells firearms still in usable condition to in exchange for ammunition the department can use.
For other items, he lists them on GovDeals.com, an online auctioning website, and gives the money received from the items to the city. Recently, he sold a Topps 1992 edition of Cincinnati Reds baseball cards online for $63.
Gordon is most passionate about donating property that isn’t claimed. If tools are used in a robbery case, those criminals aren’t getting those back. “I can bring those down to Streets and Maintenance, and they can always use them there,” he said.
He takes nice pairs of shoes or backpacks to the TOPSS Food Pantry to donate to someone in need. The same goes for clothes – since 2021, Gordon has donated over 500 pounds of clothing to Thread-Up in Oxford.
Gordon finds other ways to keep busy outside of work. He and his wife own two cats. He is the secretary for the Oxford Lions Club and the vice president of the board of trustees of the Butler County Regional Transit Authority. There, he chairs the meetings when the president is absent. Aside from this, he’s a passionate baseball fan.
Gordon says that retirement is coming in the next one to two years. “I’ll stick around and help you hire and train the new person, and after that, I’m done,” he said.
His biggest accomplishment from his career is that many of the students he trained back at Miami PD went on to continue as police officers and be promoted to high ranking positions. Gordon doesn’t take credit for training them, as he said that they were already good – he is proud he gave them good recommendations to succeed.
“When Gordon decides to retire one day, it is going to be very hard to find someone to fill his shoes,” Lieutenant Price said.
