Lieutenant Lara Fening, 28-year OPD officer, set to retire this month
Lara Fening worked her way from patrol officer to lieutenant during her nearly three-decade career with the Oxford Police Department. Now, she's ready to retire.
During her 20 years working patrol with the Oxford Police Department, Lieutenant Lara Fening found that not every call for the cops warranted a law enforcement solution.
From disputes with property managers to problems with the neighbor’s dog, Fening said many people default to dialing 9-1-1 when they have a problem that needs solving. She remembers one call where a tenant was upset about hearing their neighbor through the thin apartment walls. Even though Fening couldn’t offer a legal remedy, she still had a solution to point to.
“I said, ‘You know what? Why don’t you put together a pot of chamomile tea?’”
Fening has been an officer with OPD since 1996 and steadily rose through the ranks from patrol officer to sergeant to her current position as lieutenant in 2016. Through each of her roles, she’s brought her problem-solving attitude to the situations she’s faced, both with community members and within the department.
After nearly 30 years with OPD, Fening is ready to retire Jan. 31.
Fening grew up in Middletown and attended Miami University, where she graduated in 1993. After that, she enrolled in the police academy and got a job with the Miami University Police Department, working for the Oxford Township Police Department at the same time. In that role, Fening first started to engage with OPD officers, a dynamic she said helped her get hired three years later.
Fening worked as a patrol officer until 2013 when she was promoted to patrol sergeant. Every day was different on patrol, she said, and she got to see Oxford grow and change from her time as a student.
“The cruiser was my office,” Fening said. “I liked it all, because you truly had your thumb on the pulse of your world.”
OPD Chief John Jones began his career with the department as a part-time dispatcher in 1998 before becoming an officer in 2002. On one of his early calls with Fening, he remembered responding to a theft at CVS. Fening entered the store first and as Jones approached she was about to handcuff the suspect, but then he bolted. Jones looked down each aisle for the suspect and knocked down shelves’ worth of merchandise as he tackled the suspect.
“That was more memorable because it was me tackling this guy, but she was chasing him, too,” Jones said. “... We worked a lot of shifts together. She was good at diffusing situations, good at going beyond the initial surface-level issue and trying to problem-solve through it.”
Jones and Fening both steadily moved up the ranks in the department. In 2016, Jones became the police chief at nearly the same time Fening was promoted to lieutenant, and they learned how to navigate their leadership positions together.
“It took a little bit of time, but soon we learned what everybody’s strengths were,” Jones said. “And Lara certainly had her strengths. Her strengths were community relations, communication, that type of thing … so we put her in charge of our public affairs, essentially. She worked well with people.”
In Fening’s role as lieutenant, she’s overseen parking and animal control efforts, helped with external communications and records, and more. She comes to work with a full inbox each day and often needs to troubleshoot problems within the department, she said, from software issues to high-profile incidents that attract media attention.
A lot has changed in policing since Fening began her career. She remembers when cell phones got cameras and people began regularly recording police officers. No one in the department had even conceived of body cameras at that time, she said, and it shifted the dynamic of interactions. “It was so seemingly intrusive,” Fening remembers, “and I laugh at that now, because we’re always being recorded.”
More recently, cities across the country have re-evaluated their relationships with law enforcement in the wake of high profile police brutality cases. In 2015, Oxford formally created the Police Community Relations and Review Commission (PCRRC) to improve communication between OPD and the community and facilitate public accountability measures.
Oxford’s creation of the PCRRC preceded the death of George Floyd in 2020, an event which led to mass demonstrations throughout the U.S.
“It was a good way to funnel any questions about the integrity of our department,” Fening said. “… So that probably was a good mediator just as a function of the public seeing that the oversight was already being done.”
Oxford has since added a social services liaison to the OPD staff, another new change in the city’s approach to policing. That position has formalized and brought structure to the department’s efforts to connect people with the resources they need to get help, though Fening had been bringing her service-oriented mindset to her own role for decades already. She remembers making
As she looks back at her time with OPD, Fening said she’ll remember the investment she’s made in people the most. She recalled one father who came up to her more than a decade after she’d gone to his house for a problem involving his daughter. He thought about the advice Fening had offered regularly and regretted not taking it ever since.
“You always hope that if you’re giving some guidance to somebody or helping solve a problem, that they’ll remember something, that they’ll use it to their benefit in the future,” Fening said. “Every once in a while, people come back, and they let you know that they did, so that is the most fulfilling thing to me.”
OPD will host a retirement celebration on Feb. 4 from 5-7 p.m. at the Oxford LaRosa’s, and Oxford City Council will recognize her service to the community at its 7:30 p.m. meeting Feb. 4.
