Choose an area:

« back to columns
« back to fall 2000 columns

Guns in the hands of BUPD make for a safer campus

Everyone wants to feel safe.

Luckily, in a town like Bloomsburg, for the most part, the university community has felt safe. Some say safety is due to the small town atmosphere, while others point to the job the university and town police forces have done to keep the university environment safe.

A bill in the state senate is trying to expand the powers of the university police forces throughout the State System of Higher Education (SSHE). One goal of Senate Bill 1555 is to give university police an additional 500-yard coverage zone to help control crime around campus. The theory is that university police should help control university students.

While I agree with this in theory, it's just not a practical way to look at law enforcement. University police often suffer from a lack of money and manpower as it is. To increase their coverage zone would only create greater resource constraints. University Police should enforce matters solely on the university. Town police should enforce matters in the town. It sounds very black-and-white, and in effect, I believe it is.

Whenever expanded university police powers get discussed, the issue of whether or not the university police should be able to carry weapons is brought up again. The Bloomsburg University Police do not carry firearms. According to SSHE, BU is one of only five schools in the 14 state-funded universities that do not allow its police officers to carry firearms.

This is a big mistake. Not only doesn't this essentially handicap our university police in times of crisis, but it also shows how far behind the times our university really is. It shows very narrow-sighted thinking when a university won't allow its officers to be armed.

While the university community hasn't had a lot of violent crimes, it certainly has had its share of alcohol and drug related crimes in recent years. There have been 132 liquor-law violations on campus in the previous three years, according to the United States Department of Education. And, in 1999 alone, there were 275 arrests of BU students for liquor-law violations.

While the alcohol violations haven't escalated to violence yet, who is to say that it won't tomorrow or this weekend or three months from now? Statistics have shown a correlation between alcohol and violent crime. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, about 3 million crimes a year occur in which the victims believe the offender had been drinking at the time of the incident. Two-thirds of victims who suffered violence by someone intimate to them (current or former boyfriend, girlfriend, or spouse) reported that alcohol had been a factor. To say that Bloomsburg is immune to statistics like these would be foolish.

Whenever the firearm issue is debated on campus, the typical response from students and sadly, from some faculty, is that the University Police is nothing more than a bunch of rent-a-cops that give out parking tickets all day. What they don't know is that the University Police is professional police force with police powers like Bloomsburg town police have. They go through the same training that all other police officers do.

I'm not sure what everyone is afraid of. Police officers don't just shoot people for no reason. If the police cite a student for an alcohol violation, they won't shoot the student. They'll just carry out the normal procedure for alcohol violations. Giving university police the ability to carry firearms doesn't create an Old-West showdown at the O.K. Corral-type scenario. The University Police would still have to conduct themselves like every other police force. And, if a situation never arises that necessitates police using their weapons, then that is all the better for the university. I simply cannot understand why someone would equate university police carrying firearms as the end of the world. If anything, I'd think it would make the university community feel safer.

The often-quoted running argument against university police carrying firearms is that Bloomsburg doesn't have a lot of violent crime. In that case, none of the officers will ever have to pull out their guns. I just don't see how someone can say that a lack of crime justifies a lack of readiness on an officer's part.

Sure, Bloomsburg University doesn't have a lot violent crime. But, as many victims will tell you, crime is unpredictable. You don't always see it coming. Penn State certainly didn't. On September 17, 1996, Jillian Robbins, a Penn State student, opened fire on campus, killing 21-year-old Melanie Spalla and injuring Nicholas Mensah, another student. That shooting took the university community by storm, leaving many wondering if it can happen at Penn State, could it happen where they go to school?

Police need some measure of force if and when these incidents occur. When lethal force needs to be used, seconds count. The time that it takes town or state police to get to campus in a crisis could very well make the difference between a peaceful ending to a conflict and a horrible tragedy.

The Bloomsburg University community has not seen a violent crime on campus recently. That certainly doesn't mean that it won't in the future. While we can't prevent all violent crime, the best thing we can do is be secure in knowing that our University Police is adequately equipped to deal with violent crime if and when it occurs. And I think that's something that everyone on campus would feel safer knowing.