Controversial NIU police officer Dexter Yarbrough resigned Tuesday.

“Northern Illinois University Department of Public Safety today announced the resignation of recent patrol hire Dexter Yarbrough,” according to a statement released Tuesday by the university. “Yarbrough was hired by NIU Public Safety and began work with the campus police on June 29. He resigned his probationary position on July 14, 2009.”

NIU Police Chief Donald Grady has directed his assistant to tell media outlets that he will only do interviews via e-mail as he believes there have been “problems with accuracy” in talking to the media in the past. Grady is in the process of answering the e-mails, according to his assistant.

NIU President John Peters is out of town on vacation and unavailable for comment, according to NIU Public Affairs.

Yarbrough, a former Chicago police officer who was most recently Colorado State University Police Chief, came under fire when he allegedly told students that beating suspects and paying off informants is routine for Chicago police. Yarbrough resigned from his post at CSU after an internal investigation.

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.”

The Associated Press contributed to this story.