When Andy Wilson became a school crossing guard in the fourth grade in Yellow Springs, Ohio, his father made sure he didn’t take the responsibility lightly.
“My dad was a police officer at the time,” Wilson said. “He was like: ‘Look, if you don’t do your job out there — if you’re not paying attention or if you’re clowning around with your friends — somebody could get hurt. You need to make sure you’re doing your part to actually keep everyone safe.’”
The teaching moment was one of many that the oldest of Dave and Cindy Wilson’s three boys readily recalls from childhood. His father, who spent five years as an officer in Yellow Springs before accepting a job as a game warden with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, talked often at home about the work he did for a living.
“He taught us the phonetic alphabet; he taught us how to handcuff each other,” Andy Wilson said. “He taught us how to be situationally aware and look for suspicious behavior and suspicious activity. He taught us how to read license plates. He just taught us a lot of things.”
Dave Wilson’s instructional style of parenting helped Andy, from a young age, develop an appreciation for law enforcement work and public service.
“That’s just the way I was raised,” he said. “Some of these things stuck in my head —
the sense of service that I got as a kid.”
More than 40 years later, with Wilson now serving as the state’s 52nd attorney general,
the lessons of the father still resonate.
“The people of Ohio deserve an attorney general who fights crime, who seeks justice and who wakes up every morning with a focus on keeping them safe,” he said in May after Gov. Mike DeWine announced that Wilson, effective June 8, would fill the seven-month vacancy created by the resignation of Dave Yost.
Wilson’s professional background, DeWine said, made him well-suited for the role.
“I wanted someone who has high energy, someone who has real experience in the criminal-justice area,” the governor said. “So Andy Wilson is clearly, in my mind, the right person.”
Wilson, a graduate of the University of Dayton School of Law, began his professional career as an assistant prosecutor in Montgomery County before accepting a similar job in Clark County, where he focused on cases involving sex crimes and violence against children. He was later appointed Clark County prosecutor and then twice won election to the same position, serving until 2019.
Thereafter, DeWine tapped him as his senior adviser for criminal-justice policy, as a special prosecutor for the Pike County mass-shooting case and, in December 2022, as director of the Ohio Department of Public Safety (DPS), the position he held most recently before replacing Yost.
With his time in the Attorney General’s Office limited, Wilson — who is partial to the mantra “Let’s go!” — has hit the ground running.
“My No. 1 priority is keeping people safe,” he said. “That means working with BCI, focusing on its fundamental mission of supporting local law enforcement, and leveraging our experts in the BCI Laboratory to assist local law enforcement with resources and expertise that might otherwise be unavailable.”
In prioritizing public safety, he said, his office will be protecting the communities that it has a duty to protect — “which, ultimately, are our family, friends and neighbors, right?” — and bringing to justice those seeking to do others harm.
“So that’s really what it’s all about — keeping people safe and holding accountable those who are creating chaos in our communities.”
More specifically, Wilson said, he wants to improve turnaround times in the BCI Lab, focus BCI agents on traditional casework, and build on the office’s relationships with local sheriffs and local police departments.
Part of his public-safety priority involves protecting Ohio’s most vulnerable residents.
“When it comes to our elderly and children, we need to look at what we can do to prevent crimes before they occur,” he said. “The best way to deal with crime is to stop it before it happens.”
To that end, Wilson recently introduced an initiative to bolster Ohio’s response to romance scams and similar forms of financial exploitation of older adults.
"Romance scams are among the most devastating crimes targeting older Ohioans because they steal more than money — they exploit trust," he said. "This new initiative will strengthen our ability to identify offenders, connect intelligence across jurisdictions and provide Ohioans with an easier way to report suspected scams before more victims are harmed."
The initiative emphasizes digital forensics in the fight against these growing crimes.
In July, Wilson established a dedicated hotline (1-855-961-SCAM) for reporting suspected
scams — calls that, in turn, will help BCI investigators identify patterns across jurisdictions and provide support for law enforcement agencies with such cases.
Also in July, Wilson was thrust into a crisis involving another vulnerable population when BCI and Vinton County officials uncovered 16 children living in squalid conditions in a small home in the rural village of Hamden. The kids, ranging in age from 18 months to 18 years, had been confined to a small room contaminated with human waste.
On Aug. 21, a Vinton County grand jury indicted the children’s grandparents, Gary Siders Sr. and Christina Siders, and their parents, Gary Siders Jr. and Elizabeth Siders, on extensive child endangerment charges in the case.
“The children’s recovery and justice are paramount here,” Wilson said.
Coinciding with his crimefighting goals, the attorney general wants to improve training for Ohio’s peace officers, including the continued use of virtual reality and scenario-based training.
“I believe wholeheartedly that the best training that law enforcement can get is realistic, scenario-based training,” he said. “So, where we can, we need to make those opportunities available — whether that’s at the Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy in London, at the Tactical Training Center, up in Richfield or through mobile training — you know, sending our instructors out across the state to work with local agencies — or whether that’s supporting local agencies and public/private partnerships through the regional concept.”
A longtime devotee of fitness and wellness, Wilson is also a vocal proponent of instructing peace officers in defensive tactics, a subject he has addressed on the podcasts “DPS Safe and Sound” and “Chewjitsu.”
“Jui-jitsu is called ‘gentle art’ because it allows you to use technique and really leverage that technique to subdue or to control people who are much larger, much stronger than you,” Wilson said.
And the benefits, he noted, are unmistakable.
“We know, without a doubt, that law enforcement officers who are confident in their ability to go hands-on if they have to are less likely to have use-of-force claims against them. They’re less likely to be hurt themselves, less likely to hurt the people they’re trying to take into custody and less likely to escalate situations.”
Soon after becoming attorney general, Wilson traveled to a gym in Steubenville to spend time learning and “rolling” with some local peace officers — a personal approach to the job that helps him better appreciate the challenges officers face on the streets of Ohio’s communities.
“I want to work with and support the men and women who are in the profession — it’s an honorable profession — and make sure they have the resources and the training to do the job we ask them to do.”
Wilson’s in-person approach doesn’t surprise Ben Suver, who was appointed by the governor to replace Wilson as director of the Ohio Department of Public Safety.
“Andy is super-passionate about being out and hearing about problems firsthand,” Suver said. “He’s very committed to that, and that’s not an easy job.”
Before they both landed at DPS, the two worked together 25 years ago in Clark County.
“Practically his first day on the job as an assistant prosecutor, I met him,” Suver said. “I was working as a detective for the Clark County Sheriff’s Office. I think Andy’s first assignment over there was crimes against children. And so he came over, we were introduced, and then we quickly became friends professionally. He was an aggressive prosecutor, and I was an aggressive detective — and so we would work a lot of cases together.”
Suver thinks Wilson’s drive and passion will serve him well as attorney general.
“His first love is to be a prosecutor,” he said, “and so to be sort of the chief prosecutor for the state is not only meaningful for him but impactful for Ohio. It was a role he was born to do, and he will do it well for the time he has been appointed.”
Beyond the next several months, Wilson said, he isn’t sure what his future might bring. Until his tenure as attorney general ends on Jan. 11, though, he plans to focus squarely on the task as hand.
“The way I work, I just do the best job that I can in the position I’m in — and I believe that by doing the best job you can, doors will open for you,” he said.
“So I’m working as hard as I can — I’m serving the people of Ohio, the people of the Attorney General’s Office and our law enforcement partners — and whatever doors open up as a result of that, I’ll consider those options when they become available.”
Let’s go.
In his own words
Andy Wilson’s thoughts on a sampling of topics:
The 2016 Rhoden family homicides
“It was obviously the most tragic case I’ve ever worked on. From a prosecution point of view, I can’t imagine a case more challenging or more intellectually stimulating. It was so stressful but so rewarding. It was incredibly rewarding to be able to go down, to work with the families, and to be a part of providing some sense of justice to families who have lost so much.”
The SAUSA role
“I think there’s value in having state prosecutors designated as Special Assistant U.S. Attorneys. A lot of times, in bigger cities, courts just aren’t handing out sentences that truly hold people accountable, sentences that have a deterrent effect. Federal courts are just a lot tougher, really. I want to maximize the way we’re using SAUSAs to really help some cities deal with some of the violent crime they’re experiencing.”
The death penalty
“Having personally handled several death-penalty trials, I understand the value of the death penalty as an option for prosecutors and victims in very limited circumstances. In a small percentage of cases, the death penalty is the only option that can bring a measure of justice and closure to the families of victims who rely on the criminal-justice system to help them through the worst moments of their lives.”