Seamon draws fire on policies

Vice President for Public Safety Tom Seamon has found himself under attack this week by groups accusing him of failing to pay enough attention to the issue of women's safety on campus. Flyers posted across campus last weekend saying that Seamon has belittled their concerns are peppered with such phrases as "Seeman does not see woman." Seamon, a former Philadelphia deputy police commissioner who has been at Penn since 1995, declined to comment about the flyers. College sophomore Angie Liou, the co-chairperson of Penn's chapter of the National Organization for Women, explained that representatives from NOW, the Women's Alliance and the Progressive Activist Network met repeatedly with officials in the Office of the Vice Provost of University Life and the Division of Public Safety to discuss their recommendations for improving campus safety. The groups' concerns were ignited by last November's aggravated assault of a female University student in a basement bathroom of Steinberg-Dietrich Hall. One of their recommendations was to ensure that emergency alarms are placed in every stall in all bathrooms on campus. "For three months we were running around going to all these meetings? but what it came down to was that nobody had the power to do anything or maybe if they did they didn't want to," Liou said. "Everybody was just making recommendations but nothing was being implemented." At last week's University Council meeting, Seamon presented Public Safety's responses to the recommendations. According to Liou, Seamon downplayed the importance of the groups' requests and Council members appeared apathetic to Seamon's report. Seamon responded to the alarm request by saying that due to a limited amount of money and a high number of false alarms, emergency alarms should be placed by the door of each bathroom rather than in each stall -- a proposal which angered the students. "We felt really frustrated" after the meeting, Liou said. "We're going to all these meetings? but we're not accomplishing anything." About eight women made the flyers criticizing Seamon after the meeting, Liou said. The campaign was not organized by any particular group. The women placed the blame on Seamon because "during our meetings with [Public Safety], he did most of the talking," Liou said. "We felt that he was also more hostile than [University Police Chief] Maureen Rush and [Director of Special Services] Susan Hawkins." During meetings with officials from the VPUL's office, the students and VPUL officials composed a list of 10 recommendations to assist in implementing their ideas. Associate Vice Provost for University Life Barbara Cassel declined to comment on Public Safety's handling of the concerns, saying only that she was writing a letter regarding the issue for next week's issue of the Almanac, the University's journal of record. Besides the panic alarms, the groups also want better communication between Penn's victim support groups, more frequent publication of police statistics and a mandatory workshop with sensitivity to women's needs for new students. Seamon argued at the Council meeting that improving the communication between different student-help groups on campus was not something Public Safety alone could enforce. Seamon also said that Public Safety already releases crime statistics more often than is required by state law.