Reuben Morris Greenberg (June 24, 1943 – September 24, 2014) was the first black police chief of Charleston, South Carolina, and known for being an innovative criminologist. He was police chief there from 1982 until his retirement in 2005. Childhood Born on June 24, 1943, in Houston, Texas, Greenberg was the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant father and an African-American mother. Of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry on his father's side, he converted to his father's religion of Judaism at the age of 26. Education Greenberg received his bachelor's degree in anthropology from San Francisco State University in 1967, and earned master's degrees in public administration and city planning from University of California, Berkeley in 1969 and 1975. He was also a graduate of the FBI Academy. Teaching career He taught sociology as an assistant professor at California State University, political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and criminal justice at Florida International University. Law enforcement career He served as the undersheriff of the Chatham County Sheriff's Department in Savannah, Georgia, and he was a major with the city's police department. In Florida, he was chief of police at Opa-locka and chief deputy sheriff of Orange County, rising to deputy director of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. He arrived in Charleston as chief of police in 1982. In the words of Charleston's The Post and Courier reporter David Slade, he "turned the... Police Department into a national model. In the process, he became a celebrity and a source of pride for the city ...." Greenberg told his cops that their job was not to punish (that was up to the courts), but to make arrests, and in order to do that they had to be on good terms with the citizens. So he put his cops out on the streets, not in cars. They walked, rode bicycles and horses, and were accessible to "normal people," who might not want to call or visit headquarters. He also required that every cop earn a bachelor's degree, whereas when he arrived at the department not all had even graduated from high school. He added a K-9 bomb and drug-sniffing unit, a harbor patrol, and a crime lab to the police department. He had a team of officers remove graffiti the moment it appeared, sending a message that the city belonged to the police, not the vandals. It worked, and