The work of a campus public safety officer doesn’t end after a crime is logged—the real work begins with investigation. In some cases, between 20 and 40 hours can be logged, in addition to the regular 40 hours per week of patrol duty.
Currently, PSU campus public safety officers do not get paid for the additional hours they spend doing investigative work. Now, CPSO chief Michael Soto is hoping to change that by making a case to university administrators.
“We are looking for ways to help the office revenue,” Soto said.
Due to the economic environment, all departments in the university have seen funding reduced over the past year, and CPSO is no exception. However, Soto said that where the university makes cuts in funding for departments, it also leaves some room for departments to maneuver.
“The university budget committee has a program called the ‘campus reinvestment program’ where we can ask for more money to be put back into our department,” Soto said. “We are now asking the university to invest money in us.”
According to Soto, extra money would help pay for officers’ overtime work.
“A campus public safety officer works four days a week for ten hours. In addition to that, they work somewhere between 20 to 40 hours on a case,” Soto said.
Soto points to a recent example of a theft that happened in early January at the University Services Building in which two men made off with $68,000 worth of equipment. Working together with the Portland Police Bureau, CPSO caught the two culprits within a month.
“In this case here, we spent over one hundred additional hours doing investigative work, which officers do not get paid for because it’s considered part of the day’s work,” Soto said.
In another case, CPSO officers recovered nearly $11,000 worth of computers after 11 computers in a business building computer lab were taken last fall term.
“We caught him when he tried to sell the computers on Craigslist. Officers have to register the computers in the database and contact the guy, pretending to be interested in the items,” Soto said.
In addition to crimes that happen to the university, Soto said officers also have to work one-on-one with students on a per-case basis on “person crimes,” which are things like assault and small theft.
For person crimes, officers sometimes have to go to court with students and talk to the district attorney, collect evidence and send it to a crime lab for fingerprints. During the time that an officer spends working on a person crime, he or she is not patrolling the campus but instead working for a particular student, Soto said.
“A majority of cases are domestic violence and assault—for those cases, we work with [the student] and dedicate our time to them,” Soto said. “Right now the time we spend is not paid for by the university, what is covered is only campus-related.”
According to Soto, the vice president of Finance and Administration, Lindsay Desrochers, is behind CPSO in its request for more funding.
Recently, a new laptop security program was implemented that Soto said should help relieve officers of having to spend extra hours on cases. The system was started as a partnership between the Office of Information Technology and CPSO to track down stolen laptops.
Jahed Sukhun, director of OIT, said students can now go online and register their laptops with CPSO and OIT and if a laptop is lost or stolen, the system can send out a signal for it to be located. A majority of on-campus theft is of personal computers.
According to Sukkhun, the system currently costs $10,000 per year to implement, which will be covered by OIT, but the first year will be free to the university.