Bill Would Let Oregon Campuses Establish Police Departments

June 15, 2011, 12:46 pm

A bill allowing campuses in the Oregon University System to establish police departments has passed the state legislature and now awaits the governor’s signature, The Oregonian reports. The University of Oregon promoted the bill and hopes to hire, in the next six years, 26 police officers whose authority would be greater than that of existing public-safety officers, the newspaper said. Administrators believe that a sworn police department, which is common at large public institutions, would be better equipped to serve the university, according to The Oregonian, but the Oregon Student Association opposes the move, citing additional costs and the prospect of guns on the campus.

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tee_bee

This argument has been going on at UO and other Oregon schools for about 30 years–at least since I was an undergrad at UO. I don’t really know what the big problem is. Having UO establish its own police makes sense because, otherwise, the Eugene PD has to come to campus, which delays response time and put a pretty big strain on the EPD (or the Corvallis PD, or wherever). As for “guns on campus,” the city police have them anyway. It’s not like a lot of nuts will be tearing around with guns. Based on my experience with five university PDs, the officers are professional, intelligent, and are sensitive to the public safety needs of campuses. I think the Oregon schools will find that they can find, train, and manage fine people to meet the needs of their campuses, at a level much greater than the “public-safety officers,” who were so constrained that they very often had to summon city police.
609zr

It sounds like you have a good understanding of the situation. Has this issue been on the table for 30 years or is that hyperbole? As states pass legislature allowing students to carry guns on campus, more foreign students enter college, and more religious zealots incite riots on campus, it is a war zone. Police are needed in convenient locations throughout campus, not in a tiny office at the front gate. They need to move quickly.

Meada Woods, an American student is the 34th foreigner killed in New Zealand. My condolences to her family and friends. Are there no safe places left in the world?
lewandowski

Let’s not get carried away here. Goiong to college ( over 4,000) and millions of students is not a war zone.
99.99 percent mature, learn, gain life skills and yes have fun. It is a good thing for higher education to actual have real cops for only to deter the nut states who legislators get monies from the NRA with the hopes to sell more bullets.
There will be people in the next few years that will push for high schoolers to have arms – that is a given and sell the B.S. of self-protection. Americans are getting more paranoid which is a shame and this really points out that we have so little to worry about as the rest of the world.
jesor

It was a campus issue at least 15 or so years ago when I was attending a campus in the Oregon University System as an undergrad. Since then I’ve been at two institutions in other states that have professional police forces and I can tell you that while the presence of guns made me a little uncomfortable initially, on a couple of occasions I was happy to have them be able to do more than just say ”Stop……or I’ll call someone!”.

The school I work at now is a smaller (about 5,000 student) public that also has its own police force…they make a good point that campus police with their understanding of a particular campus’ culture are able to add a whole additional level of understanding to a situation that municiple or county law enforcement isn’t able to.

The reality of life for most of these forces is pretty boring though, although I guess doing drunk patrols late at night on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights can generate it’s own source of entertainment. I would hardly describe American college campuses as “war zones”. Even at one of my previous institutions where we did have a student threaten another with a gun inside of a parking garage (it was gang related), that was one incident in 4 years of me working there. My understanding of war zones is that a lot more ammunition is expended. Nonetheless it is very useful to have police with arresting and charging powers be more experienced in the types of crime more common to campus such as sexual assault, substance abuse, and physical assaults (typically not involving weapons but generally involving alcohol).