NEWS ANALYSIS: New plan offers few details

Public Safety Managing Director Thomas Seamon has spent his first six months at the University drafting a master plan to revise the initiative set out last February by University President Judith Rodin and then-Police Commissioner John Kuprevich. The long-awaited plan will be released today in the Almanac. The plan lays out a comprehensive series of goals and strategies for improvement in the areas of police, security, government and community. But missing from the document are many specific details, including timetables for implementation of the specific projects. Seamon did take a broader view of the problems facing the University campus, including aggressive panhandlers and streets rendered dangerous and impassable by the heavy concentration of street vendors in the area. These are underlying "quality of life" issues that must be addressed as part of any meaningful discussion of campus security. There is a marked lack of specific detail necessary to convince a skeptical student body that the plan is more than just good public relations. Similarly, but perhaps more importantly, the plan fails to name specific goals. For example, the plan includes no ideal levels of crime reduction. While it might be difficult to meet such standards, it would at least give the University community something concrete to focus on. Additionally, the plan fails to specify what, if anything, is being done in response to frequent student complaints about the lack of a noticeable University Police presence on the west end of campus. Seamon said yesterday that the department has no plans to expand its coverage. Finally, while Seamon has often promised to seek student input in evaluating the plan, he neglected to say which students would be involved in the process, or through which organizations he would solicit input. Nor does the plan specify who, besides Seamon, will be on the committees responsible for implementing the various parts of the plan. It could be that the plan is not including such details because objective goals would open Seamon and his department up to considerable scrutiny if they were not met. The plan often stresses the importance of changing student perceptions of safety on campus. But it never provides specific details of how and when Public Safety might do so, and thus leaves many questions unanswered. Nonetheless, many of the plan's proposals seem likely, if implemented, to improve both security on campus and overall quality of life issues significantly. One proposal likely to be controversial is the department's oft-stated desire to upgrade its weaponry to semi-automatic handguns. But in light of the fact that almost every police department in the country -- including most university police departments -- use semi-automatic weapons, the proposal seems justified. Additionally, as University Police Captain John Richardson points out, a University officer has not fired his weapon in the line of duty in almost six years. This presents a strong counter-argument to those who say that arming University Police would adversely affect campus safety. How much of this plan actually gets implemented will depend primarily on whether the University is willing to invest the large sums of money that many of the proposals would require. This fact is definitely not lost on Seamon. "Some things may not be practical financially," he said. "Funding will obviously have a great impact on the timing and scope of what we implement." But there is nothing financially outrageous in the new plan. It makes a point of mentioning that renovating a pre-existing building would be adequate for the new Public Safety facility which is a priority of Seamon's plan.