University names new Public Safety director

Paul Ominsky, the director of public safety at Mount Holyoke, Smith and Hampshire, has been named Princeton’s next Public Safety director.

The University announced on Wednesday morning that Ominsky will take office on Jan. 25. He succeeds Steven Healy, who left Princeton last June to focus on his private consulting business and his efforts to improve campus safety at a national level.

“I am very excited to be appointed to this position,” Ominsky said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian on Wednesday afternoon. “It’s a wonderful opportunity, and everybody has been so gracious during the process.”

Ominsky said it is too early to plan what he would do once he takes over as Public Safety director in January, but he said that he would focus on opening communication between Public Safety and members of the University community.

“I want to make sure I schedule time to go to various groups around campus and be available to talk,” Ominsky noted.

He added that he would like to have open drop-in hours, like professors’ office hours, for members of the University community to come and discuss “issues and concerns.”

“It’s important to collaborate — Public Safety, students, faculty, staff, working together to find solutions,” Ominsky said.

He also stressed the importance of outreach and “having officers go beyond the uniform, to get to know the community.”

While Ominsky acknowledged that he does not know which issues at Princeton will be particularly problematic, he said he hoped to address these concerns through communication and outreach to students and faculty.

“Things will come up that we need to work together on,” he explained.

Ominsky began his career in campus security at the University of Massachusetts in 1974. In his current position, Ominsky manages more than 100 full-time and part-time staff in a centralized three-campus public safety dispatch center.

At Princeton, Ominsky will oversee a department of 60 professionally trained, University-commissioned officers, who hold powers of arrest, and noncommissioned officers.

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“Paul Ominsky is an outstanding public safety director with over 20 years of leadership experience on a variety of college and university campuses,” Treby Williams, assistant vice president for safety and administrative planning, said in the University statement.

As department head, the Public Safety director is responsible for ensuring the fulfillment of the department’s four-pronged mission. According to the University’s release, the department’s responsibilities include “community caretaking; providing first response to requests for assistance; enforcement on campus of University regulations, state and local laws, and compliance with relevant fire code regulations; and emergency management, planning and response.”

Public Safety also works in conjunction with Township Police and Borough Police on a variety of matters, ranging from the string of gun scares last spring to the fight during last Saturday’s tailgate.

Discussing dealing with off-campus police, Ominsky emphasized the importance of communication, noting that he would like to have “conversations with Borough and Township Police about issues of mutual concern.”