The March 7 University-wide alert of an armed male on campus has provided a new opportunity for advocates of arming Public Safety officers to make their case, said Michael Westrol ’07, a former Public Safety student manager. Westrol is also the creator of the 209-member facebook.com group “Princetonians for a Safer Campus,” which criticizes the University’s current policy of not allowing the Public Safety officers who are trained police officers to carry guns as “naively dangerous.”
“It takes an incident like this to get students to care about this issue, unfortunately,” Westrol said in an e-mail. “We hope that this relatively benign incident can get students talking about their own safety.”
Westrol noted that the incident has rekindled the debate about equipping Public Safety officers with guns, a discussion that reached its peak last summer when Public Safety’s Fraternal Orders of Police (FOP) union filed a formal complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requesting that its members be allowed to carry firearms.
Westrol added that members of “Princetonians for a Safer Campus” planned to re-engage in “open dialogue with the administration and the campus community” over the issue.
“I think the students would be well-served to have an open forum, such as a town-hall meeting, where we can talk about how Public Safety can better protect students,” Westrol said.
Despite Westrol’s hopes, University spokeswoman Cass Cliatt ’96 said that the recent incident and past gun scares have not prompted the University to re-evaluate its gun policy.
“The University has a history of handling fake or non-operable gun incidents, and while we are committed to reviewing our safety policies on a regular basis, none of these incidents has had the effect of changing the policy against arming Public Safety officers,” Cliatt explained.
Patrolman James Lanzi, FOP president, said that FOP has been advocating “continuously” for Public Safety officers to carry guns for more than a year.
“I don’t think the recent incident really started anything new,” Lanzi said. “We’ve never stopped our interest in having the University do a complete review of the current position.”
Though he said he thought that Public Safety, the University and Borough Police all handled the scare well, Lanzi added that in the event of an actual shooting, the University would be much safer if Public Safety officers were permitted to carry firearms.
“We do have plans in position and procedures that we would follow in the event of a campus shooter,” Lanzi said, explaining that Public Safety would rely on municipal police departments to provide assistance in the same way that Borough Police did on March 7.
Relying on Borough Police for armed backup, however, is not the best strategy for dealing with shooter situations, Lanzi explained.
“If [the police] came on campus in a shooter situation, they would need our assistance in many ways. They don’t know the campus. We know the campus,” he said.
Cliatt said the University believes Public Safety would be able to deal adequately with a gunman without having guns themselves.
“Fortunately, because of our location and rapid communication capabilities, municipal police are able to respond quickly if a situation on campus requires an armed response,” Cliatt said in an e-mail, adding that the most recent gun scare, as well as past experience, has demonstrated “how effective that response can be.”
“Our advanced 9-1-1 Communications unit is staffed by Public Safety on a 24-7 basis, and calls to the municipal police are made within seconds,” Cliatt said.
Dan Strassfeld ’12, a member of the Facebook group “Princetonians for a Campus Without Guns,” said he also thought that Borough Police would provide sufficient backup to resolve a shooting incident.
“My sense was the Borough Police responded quickly enough to the incident on Saturday,” Strassfield said, adding that the incident demonstrated that municipal police forces “would be able to take care of any shooting incidents on campus.”
Cliatt said that arming Public Safety officers could have an “adverse effect” on “the tradition of a supportive and mutually respectful relationship between our students and Public Safety officers.”
In June, Lanzi filed the complaint with OSHA, arguing that the University’s policy of forbidding officers from carrying firearms represented an occupation hazard.
“It’s a safety-and-health issue, a matter of our ability to respond to something,” Lanzi told The Times of Trenton in June.
The request was denied because “OSHA does not have the authority to require employers to have their employees carry firearms,” OSHA spokeswoman Leni Uddyback-Fortson said.
Uddyback-Fortson added that OSHA’s investigation found that the University provided Public Safety officers with “adequate training and equipment to do their jobs.”
Though it would be possible for FOP to file another similar request with OSHA in light of recent circumstances, Uddyback-Fortson said that OSHA still “would not have the authority to require firearms.”
Though another request to OSHA may not result in a different outcome, Cliatt said that the University will “continue to assess [its] policies to ensure that they meet our commitment to safety,” adding that, in coming days, the Emergency Preparedness Task Force will conduct a “thorough assessment” of the response to the gun scare.
FOP’s next step will be to try to “get the whole community involved” in a discussion over the firearm issue as FOP attempts to persuade administrators to alter the policy themselves, Lanzi said.
He explained that, though incidents like the gun scare and the recent school shooting in Germany receive daily attention, “every day, Public Safety does things without weapons that other police officers do with weapons.”
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