Berkeley police officers detain a woman at the protests outside a scheduled speech by Milo Yiannopoulos on campus in 2017.Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images
The College and University Professional Association for Human Resources reported this morning that the number of campus police and public-safety personnel, though one of the smaller employee pools at institutions nationally, had grown from 1,077 to 1,403 positions at surveyed colleges from 2017 to 2018, an increase of 30 percent.
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Berkeley police officers detain a woman at the protests outside a scheduled speech by Milo Yiannopoulos on campus in 2017.Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images
The College and University Professional Association for Human Resources reported this morning that the number of campus police and public-safety personnel, though one of the smaller employee pools at institutions nationally, had grown from 1,077 to 1,403 positions at surveyed colleges from 2017 to 2018, an increase of 30 percent.
In fact, colleges are hiring only data analysts at a faster rate than they are those in the safety sector. The association surveyed 1,100 public and private institutions.
The finding comes at a time when police officers’ role on campus has come under scrutiny for what critics call the enforcement of racial bias.
At Yale University last week, a white student called the police on a black student who was napping in a common room. Lolade Siyonbola, a graduate student, had been working on a paper and had dozed off when her fellow student called the police and said, “You cannot sleep in that room.” Campus police officers spent several minutes checking Siyonbola’s identification, saying that they had to “make sure you belong here.”
At Colorado State University at Fort Collins this month, two prospective students who are Native American were pulled from a campus tour after a mother on the tour called the police. The mother had described feeling “sick” upon seeing the young men.
In both cases, the universities were quick to offer apologies to those subject to police scrutiny and to disavow any racism.
The number of police officers on campuses has grown, agreed Sue Riseling, executive director of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators.
But she suspects that the growth isn’t coming so much from large campuses, where the number of officers is generally stable, as from two-year institutions, which are adding more traditional officers to their ranks.
“It’s probably the ones that are going from a handful to a maybe 24/7 presence,” Riseling said.
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Steven J. Healy is the chief executive of Margolis Healy, a firm that does consulting related to “campus safety, security, and regulatory compliance.” He said it’s likely that colleges have added more safety-staff members in recent years as enrollment continues to grow on some campuses.
Healy, who was the director of public safety at Princeton University from 2003 to 2009, also said extreme events on campus, such as the recent riot pre-empting an appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of California at Berkeley, the gathering of white nationalists at the University of Virginia, and even shootings like the those at Virginia Tech at 2007, may have prompted college officials to stop and ask themselves, “Are we ready for this?”
“For many, many years we kind of had this idea that ‘Those things don’t happen on our campuses. We are a learning environment. Everybody who is here on campus is 100-percent committed to the purpose and mission of the institution, and those bad things won’t happen.’ I think folks have now moved beyond that ‘bad things can’t happen.’ "
Chris Quintana was a breaking-news reporter for The Chronicle. He graduated from the University of New Mexico with a bachelor’s degree in creative writing.
