Pending the passage of legislation being reviewed by the Oregon State Senate, the University will actively pursue an initiative to provide a fully trained, authorized and potentially armed police force on campus.
Such a force would operate under the current Department of Public Safety and in partnership with the Eugene Police Department. It would be the first campus police force in the state with firearms authorization.
An as-of-yet untitled bill. which would allow for the creation of sworn and armed police officers on Oregon public college campuses, will likely be introduced this January in the Oregon State Senate.  Upon being brought up from committee and passed in both houses the bill would likely be signed into law around the second week of March, said Sen. Floyd Prozanski, one of the bill’s proponents.
Prozanski is a Democrat who represents Oregon’s 4th District, which includes the city of Eugene. He admits that he has not always been behind such a bill. but that he recently decided to support the measure.
“My position was in opposition until last year because this concept/model had been discussed over a number of years, and I didn’t see what I thought was the framework or the groundwork for it,” Prozanski said. “I think it’s very important that in order to change to a university police department model we need to make sure we have the safeguards in place, and the checks and balances.”
University spokesperson Phil Weiler confirmed that the University will actively pursue creating an active and sworn campus police force, building upon its current DPS model if the legislation passes.
Weiler, along with DPS Director Douglas Tripp, insisted that any changes would not be immediate and that the earliest the University would see active and sworn campus police officers would be at least a year after the bill’s passage.
Both highlighted that they saw a need for the creation of a campus police force because they considered the University to be a “target rich” environment for criminals.
The University, along with Oregon State, are the only two schools in the Pac-10 that do not have sworn campus police forces. OSU maintains an existing contract with the Oregon Police Bureau to provide Oregon State Police personnel on its campus.
SB 658, a piece of legislation that passed the Oregon senate and was signed into law in 2009, has enabled Oregon Health and Science University to provide a limited sworn campus police presence, but does not allow OHSU officers to carry lethal weapons, or take full advantage of the Oregon Public Employee Retirement System (PERS) benefits that other state and municipal police officers are entitled to.
The University held a contract with the EPD up until last June to provide armed officers to the University on a temporary basis. Under that contract, the city supplied four officers as an armed campus security detail.
The University currently does not have a precise projection as to the ideal number of officers that it would bring into a campus police force, but according to DPS, they would work together with existing elements instead of being a complete replacement.
[email protected]