Christopher M. McKee recently joined the Spector Training Team after retiring from over twenty-eight years of law enforcement service, most recently as Captain and Executive Officer for the Town of Suffield, Connecticut Police Department. With a notable pending Master of Science in Administration of Justice (concentration in Leadership in Justice) from Salve Regina University, McKee also possesses a wide range of law enforcement experience, having commanded the majority of units of the Windsor, CT (mid-sized agency) and Suffield, CT (rural agency) Police Departments as well as having served in leadership capacities in multi-jurisdictional law enforcement and judicial federal, state, and local task forces and initiatives.
McKee has extensive background and passion for school-based policing, police-school-community partnerships, and police crisis intervention for both youths and adults in mental and behavioral health emergencies. Captain McKee provided command and administrative leadership of both agencies School Resource Officer (SRO) programs, Crisis Intervention Teams (CIT), and community-based youth diversionary Juvenile Review Boards among other youth/school-based programs.
In addition to being a practitioner, Captain McKee (Ret.) serves as an instructor providing professional development to police officers, juvenile court officials, youth mobile crisis clinicians, school faculty and administrators, school clinicians, and child welfare staff throughout the country on youth crisis intervention and mental health, school resource officer and school based / juvenile policing topics.
Captain McKee (Ret.) has successfully developed and obtained numerous grant funding projects for public safety initiatives and enhancements in these same areas including the award of $2.9 Million Dollars to the Suffield Police Department for the Law Enforcement and Behavioral Health Partnerships for Early Diversion from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), during 2018 and the award of a $200K Justice and Mental Health Collaboration Program grant award to the Windsor Police Department from the U.S. Department of Justice to enhance a collaborative police-mental health mobile crisis response and linkage to services to those experiencing mental health crises.
In 2016, Captain McKee was awarded the Chief Michael J. Fallon Memorial CIT Leadership Award for the State of Connecticut in recognition of his “…exemplary leadership and compassionate service to people with behavioral health conditions in the community”. Captain McKee is a recipient of the United States Department of Justice William French Smith Award for Outstanding Contributions to Cooperative Law Enforcement (2009) awarded by then sitting Attorney General Eric Holder as well as the Town of Windsor Human Relations Commission 2015 Bridge Builder Award recognizing his contributions in the area of Human Relations to the citizens of Windsor.
