The NIU Police Department has hired an officer who was the subject of controversy at his last job.

Former Colorado State University Police Chief Dexter Yarbrough, who resigned in March after an internal investigation, began his duties as an officer at NIU on June 29, according to campus officials.

Yarbrough, a former Chicago police officer, came under fire when he allegedly told students that beating suspects and paying off informants is routine for Chicago police. Media outlets in Colorado also discovered that Yarbrough was the subject of a sexual harassment complaint by a subordinate in December 2008 and was placed on administrative leave.

Yarbrough has declined to speak to the media about the details of his departure from Colorado State. CSU has refused to make public findings of an investigation of Yarbrough due to the confidentiality of his personnel file.

A graduate student taped remarks allegedly made by Yarbrough in 2008 lectures in which Yarbrough told students that paying informants with drugs was acceptable, as long as the informants never revealed where they got the drugs, and that excessive and violent force against a suspect is a “reality of law enforcement,” according to the Rocky Mountain Collegian, Colorado State’s student newspaper.

“If there’s a news conference going on, I can’t get in front of a crowd and say, ‘He got exactly what the [expletive] he deserved.’ You know the police should have beat him, you know. I used to beat [expletive] when I was in Chicago too. I can’t say that,” the article quotes a recording of Yarbrough as saying.

“I’d have to say, ‘Well, you know we’re going to have to look into this matter seriously … all of our officers, we like to think that they operate with the utmost integrity and ethics’ … All of that [expletive] sounds good. That [expletive] sounds real good, but in the back of my mind, damn. He got popped. If he would have done it the way we used to do it in Chi-town, man, none of this [expletive] would have happened.”

NIU Police Chief Donald Grady was unavailable for comment as of press time Monday, as he was in meetings, according to his assistant.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.