Virginia Tech forces closer look at campus safety

Portland State has created a committee on university emergency procedures to examine the role of campus public safety officers, as well as look at how effective internal communications would be in the event of an emergency.

The committee will be in charge of looking at whether public safety officers should carry guns or stun guns, what freedoms they have on campus and the best methods for notifying people in the event of an emergency situation at PSU.

The ad-hoc committee was formed after Oregon University System mandated that PSU gather information about public safety and emergency preparedness, said Ron Tammen, committee chair and director of the Hatfield School of Government. OUS decided to assess the state of public safety on Oregon’s college campuses after the Virginia Tech massacre last year. Tammen said PSU has examined their preparedness further than other OUS schools. The committee will present the findings to OUS in March.

The committee met with representatives from Public Safety, Student Housing and Facilities Tuesday morning to talk about how PSU’s current public safety model is viewed, Tammen said. The one clear thing, he said, is that PSU’s officers need more time to prepare to become officers.

“If there is an incident on campus, Public Safety’s only recourse is to call the Portland Police,” Tammen said. “Our public safety officers need to have substantially more training than they are getting.”

Tammen said communications strategies were also discussed at the meeting, including the idea of creating a cell tower that would automatically send out communications to cell phones across campus in the event of an emergency.

But Tammen said communication is often tricky.

“You want to inform people, but you don’t want to scare the Dickens out of them,” he said. “That’s a challenge.”

Yesterday’s meeting was the first of several planned forums with university representatives and students over the next week, including a public forum that is scheduled for Feb. 7.

He said the same two issues would be posed at all the meetings in order to get the most responses for the survey. Tammen said the meetings will help provide information, foster open, educated discussion and come up with solutions that represent and benefit everyone.

“Our goal is to be totally transparent,” he said.