John
Landry
It was another late-night
session for John Landry, a doctoral learner in the
School of Education. He was doing his Capella
course work as he prepared to enter the
comprehensive examination phase of his doctoral
studies, and he suddenly got an idea.
His research involved
finding the proper criminal statute as it related
to a particular crime, and he thought, "There's
got to be a better way to do this." While
searching through the four-inch-thick book of
statutes, he wondered if there was a computer
program that could do most of the legwork for
him.
There wasn't, so he set
about building one.
The classroom tool
migrates to the field
He envisioned a
computer program that would lead law enforcement
students through a series of questions and then
take them directly to the correct statute every
time.
After Landry created and
built the first Computer Statute
Identification Program, he and his business
partner, Agent Jarrod Petrelli, formed a new
company: Ten-8
Software Solutions, LLC. As an adjunct
professor in criminal justice, Landry saw this
program simply as a tool for the classroom, a way
for criminal justice students to learn how to
associate the right statutes with particular
crimes. When an editor at Thomson
Wadsworth looked at his program and agreed to
publish it, she told him he could probably take it
to leaders in the law enforcement community for
use in the field. She said she had never seen
anything like it.
He decided there and then to
create two versions: one for the classroom and one
for police officers in the field.
A new
career
Landry has 15 years of
experience in law enforcement as an officer, a
supervisor, and a trainer, so he knows that the
process of finding the right information in the
statute books is fraught with errors. Officers are
often trying to find the right information, "they
are doing it in the middle of the night after
working 12 hours, after running after someone,
after fighting someone," says Landry. So he needed
to make his program easy and nearly
foolproof.
Early reviews from his
publisher indicate he achieved both goals in his
academic version. The field version is still under
development.
Once he received the
copyright for the software, Landry decided to
embark on a new career as an educational software
designer. His company is continuing to build a
series of CSIP programs for the law enforcement
community.
He credits his
doctoral work for both the idea and the new
career. "This PhD program got me thinking, got my
creativity going, gave me the confidence to do
this," he says.
