Recent university shootings have thrust campus safety to the forefront the nation’s mind, and Oregonians are no exception.
Douglas Park, assistant general counsel to University President Dave Frohnmayer, and Frances Dyke, vice president of finance and administration at the University, last week finished and presented the final draft of a proposal to reform the Oregon University System’s campus safety model. The proposal, outlined at last week’s University Senate meeting, would allow Oregon universities to choose their own model, one of which involves establishing an armed police force on campus.
Park believes the needs of Oregon universities are not being met to their fullest extent with a uniform campus safety formula. Each university, he said, is situated within a different environment and has its own specific needs.
“The primary reason for putting work into this issue is because having a tailored approach to campus safety is ultimately going to increase campus safety,” Park said.
The proposal provides a suggestion of five different public safety models that University administrators would be able to choose from at their own discretion.
“We want each university to be able to consider different options to pick the one that’s right for the campus,” Park said.
Department of Public Safety Director Kevin Williams supports Park’s idea.
“It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to come into your house and tell you how to decorate it,” Williams offered as a metaphor. “I think the president and his staff should be able to make the decisions about what’s important.”
One of the campus safety models Park and Dyke included in their proposal was an on-campus police department, which would only include sworn, armed police officers. Currently, the University’s public safety department employs officers who have not undergone complete police officer training. Only four sworn Eugene Police Department officers patrol on campus.
“Campus security officers here have much more limited skills,” Park said. “They go through a six-week training course, whereas sworn officers take I believe a 16-week course. The difference in the amount of training is a significant issue.”
Park said every Pacific-10 Conference university outside Oregon has its own sworn police agency on campus and employs significantly more patrollers. The University of California, Berkeley had the most sworn officers – 73 – but even those who had significantly fewer than Cal still employed more than three times as many officers as the University.
“The Eugene Police Department is a very hard-working agency, and they’re doing the best they can, but it simply doesn’t have the resources to staff us better,” Park said.
State government bodies have also begun looking into the issue of campus safety. On Feb. 4, Gov. Ted Kulongoski signed an executive order to form a Governor’s Task Force on Campus Safety, which would draw up emergency notification methods to universities and train first responders, like campus safety agencies, accordingly. State House Bill 3318, which may make it to the 2009 legislative assembly, would require campus safety officers to carry firearms. Renewed government interest in campus safety may be attributed to recent shootings at Northern Illinois University and Louisiana Technical College this month, and last year’s Virginia Tech shootings that left 33 people dead.
“That’s what has drawn more attention to the issue as of late,” Park said.
Regardless of the reasons behind it, Williams is grateful for Kulongoski’s executive order and said it “demonstrates that the governor is taking a personal interest in the security and safety of our schools.”
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