Victor Strecher began his college career as a chemistry major at the University of Wisconsin Extension where he remained for two years before enrolling in the University of Wisconsin in Madison as a music major. During his daily trek to classes at U of W he passed by the Wisconsin State Crime Lab so it was natural for him one day to check out what went on there. And from that day on, Strecher was hooked on anything to do with analyzing evidence from a crime scene which eventually steered him to MSU in the College of Business and Public Service, where he came under the tutelage of Ralph Turner. He completed his bachelor's degree in police administration at MSU in 1953, his master's in political science in 1957, and his PhD in sociology at Washington University in St. Louis in 1968. After his graduation in 1953, Strecher joined the MSU campus police unit as a detective working on a homicide, several sexual assaults, and drug crimes. During this time he also served as an assistant professor in the School of Police Administration and Public Safety until 1959 when he traveled to Viet Nam as the police advisor to the government of South Viet Nam. Strecher came back to the US in 1961 and began work on his PhD in St. Louis while serving for five years as the director of the Police Academy at the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department and for two years as the director of the Law Enforcement Study Center Social Science Institute at Washington University in St. Louis. In 1968 Dr. Strecher returned to MSU to serve as a professor in the School of Criminal Justice. Then in 1971 he was chosen by the American Council on Education as a Fellow in the Academic Administration Internship Program. The fellowship gave him the opportunity to learn how to run a university from the inside by observing a university president and other high academic officials. The Environment of Law Enforcement was written by Strecher in 1971 to highlight the lack of change over the years in how a policeman must do his job. Rather than taking the popular notion of the day that urban problems, racial confrontation, civil disorders and corruption were new phenomena, he cites police records going back to colonial times giving accounts of riots that barely made a dent in the history books but were often more horrific than the racial disorders of the 1960s in loss of life and property. The book also offers simple advice on areas such as race relations and the "culture shock" many rookies experience. Through a grant from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) in 1973, the Criminal Justice Systems Center was created at MSU, and Strecher once again found himself working with Ralph Turner researching manpower development and educational programs available to personnel in criminal justice agencies. The center advised LEAA on long-range personnel policies and concentrated on increased integration of the national criminal justice systems by devising manpower strategies and competencies for better coordination and cohesion of the overall system, i.e., the role of women in police work, improvement/extension of career paths in criminal justice, job enrichment of supportive personnel, and the feasibility of off-campus graduate programs for career personnel. Dr. Strecher left MSU in July 1976 to serve as director of the School of Criminal Justice at Arizona State University. In 1978 he became Director of the Institute of Contemporary Corrections and the Behavioral Sciences at Sam Houston State University and retired from SHSU in 1995.
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