Tim Hegarty served with the Riley County, Kansas, Police Department for 26 years, retiring as a division commander in February 2021. He was promoted to the rank of captain in 2007, and over the next 13 years he commanded his agency’s Investigations, Patrol, Administration, and Support Divisions. He served as an adjunct instructor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work at Kansas State University and as a subject matter expert and instructor for the Virginia Center for Policing Innovation. He is also a Level II Certified Instructor in Problem-Based Learning.

Hegarty championed problem-based learning in police recruit officer training, and in 2006, the Riley County Police Department became the first agency in Kansas to adopt the Police Training Officer (PTO) Program developed by the US Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.

Hegarty also promoted the use of evidence-based crime reduction strategies, leading a hot-spots policing research project that earned his agency recognition with the 2013 International Association of Chiefs of Police/Sprint Bronze Award for Excellence in Policing Research. In 2014, he was inducted into the Evidence-Based Policing Hall of Fame at George Mason University’s Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy, and in 2015, he was named a National Police Foundation (now National Policing Institute) Executive Fellow. Hegarty’s further research explored the practical application of Lawrence Sherman’s Crime Harm Index theory to improve community safety, and as a result, he was invited to a 2016 symposium at the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services along with a small group of executives, practitioners, academics, and advocates to discuss furthering the implementation of community-oriented policing by leveraging the strengths of CompStat as a management tool. Hegarty was also the first to use the term community-led policing in a July 2016 online essay for the National Police Foundation, and he was invited to expand on this concept in a 2017 guest blog for the Policing Project’s website. Hegarty was part of a team that studied community-led policing in practice through the development of a traffic safety program based upon the principles of procedural justice. Most recently, Hegarty assisted researchers from George Mason University in providing data to show that hot-spots policing can reduce crime throughout an entire jurisdiction over time.

Hegarty authored or co-authored works on evidence-based policing in The Police Chief Magazine, the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy’s Translational Criminology, the Journal of Intelligence and Analysis, Police Practice: An International Journal, Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, and in the FBI Academy Associate magazine. He has also been a conference speaker for the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the Southern Police Institute, and the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy. Hegarty earned his Master of Business Administration from Benedictine College where he received the Lawrence E. Hart Eagle Award for Academic Excellence. He also holds a Master of Science in Justice Administration from the University of the Cumberlands. He is a graduate of the FBI National Academy.

Since retiring, Hegarty worked as a Senior Associate and policing subject matter expert for Citygate Associates, LLC, a private consulting firm with a strong commitment to improving the delivery of all public services to their communities. Hegarty then served as the chief investigator for the Department of the Prosecuting Attorney for the City and County of Honolulu, Hawaii. Currently he is working as an investigator in the Office of Institutional Equity for Kansas State University.