Former Clark County prosecutor sees busy first months as Ohio’s public safety director

Wilson in December was appointed by Gov. Mike DeWine as the department’s director.

ODPS includes the state’s Highway Patrol, Bureau of Motor Vehicles, School Safety Center, Narcotics Intelligence Center, Emergency Management Agency, Emergency Medical Services, Office of Criminal Justice Services, Traffic Safety Office and Homeland Security Office.

“We take care of basically all things related to the safety and wellbeing of Ohio citizens,” Wilson said at Springfield Rotary Club’s meeting Monday afternoon.

ODPS oversees more than 4,000 employees and has a $2.5 billion biannual budget, according to the governor’s office.

Wilson called the 38-car East Palestine derailment in February a “close call” and explained that multiple agencies and local workers had to work with each other to respond to the incident and evacuate roughly 500 people in the area when one train car carrying vinyl chloride was unstable and polymerizing.

This put households within a mile of the incident at risk of an explosion and flying shrapnel. Patrol cars with bullhorns cruised up and down the roads in the impacted area for about an hour late at night, flagging people to the issue and the need to evacuate.

“I’m not lying, it was straight out of a movie,” he said. “City streets were vacant, there were flashlights, bullhorns. It was crazy.”

He compared the Northeast Ohio town to a mix between New Carlisle and South Charleston in size and setting.

He spent weeks in East Palestine for work related to the fallout of the derailment and returned home to respond to another derailment.

Tactics learned through the East Palestine incident helped inform the decisions of local and state officials who responded to the 28-car derailment in Springfield in March, Wilson said, such as the use of the AskRail app to relay data about what was on the train to first responders.

“It’s fascinating to me how quickly you learn,” he said. “Four weeks later, I’m standing in the incident command center in Clark County… we were able to walk into that situation, really, flawlessly. [They] did such a good job commanding that situation.”

Wilson also discussed other priorities of his department, ranging from encouraging teen driver safety to boosting intelligence-based operations to combat drug trafficking.

Wilson said work is also being done to help emergency response agencies with retention and recruitment amid short-staffing across the state. This work includes $75 million in funding from the governor’s office.

“It’s two prongs,” the ODPS director said. “You have the tangible -- pay, equipment -- and the intangible -- workplace climate and other factors.”

Wilson formerly served as the Clark County prosecutor, a position he left in early 2019 to serve as Gov. DeWine’s senior advisor for criminal justice policy. The next year, DeWine also assigned Wilson to assist the Pike County Prosecutor’s Office in prosecuting four individuals accused of murdering eight members of the Rhoden, Manley, and Gilley families in 2016, according to the governor’s office.