Among the many things the board of St. Louis Community College will review in the aftermath of a bungled campus police investigation is whether its campus police should exist at all.
In a scathing report commissioned by the college’s trustees and released last week, investigators recommended that the board “investigate the possibility of having local municipal law enforcement cover the campus as opposed to having its own police force.”
“It’s an interesting question,” said Chairman Craig Larson in an interview Friday. “That’s part of the next step in figuring out how to implement these recommendations.”
While private institutions typically have security personnel — who are unarmed and don’t hold powers of arrest — the community college, like most state schools, has a police department composed of sworn, deputized officers who function like municipal officers and have the same powers. The community college employs 42 full- and part-time officers on its four campuses.
“The law created a police force that the community college has, so if we were to disband, we’d have to change the law,” Larson said. “We might have to approach the Legislature.”
Another, perhaps easier, option would be to bring new leadership specially trained in campus policing into the campus police.
“Our chief of police has to have the right training as a police officer, with a good background,” Larson said, “but also has to have specialized preparation to know the laws that affect campuses. You can’t just take a police officer and stick him in the job.”
The investigation and report came nearly four months after student Blythe Grupe was attacked in a women’s restroom on the college’s Meramec campus by a fellow student. Jevon Mallory was arrested the morning of the attack, April 18, but was released hours later, even after admitting to campus officials that he was trying to “withdraw her from life.”
Grupe’s family, frustrated with the lack of police response to the attack, went public, triggering a cascade of criticism and, ultimately, staff upheaval. George Wasson, president of the Meramec campus, resigned; and the board voted not to renew Chancellor Myrtle Dorsey’s contract when it expires in 2014.
Last week the college also announced that the chief of the Meramec Campus Police, Paul Banta, along with Community College District Chief of Police Robert Stewart and Vice President of Student Affairs Linden Crawford were “no longer in their prior positions.”
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
0 comments:
Post a Comment