Public Safety still without Special Services head

Special Services is in charge of coordinating much of Penn's victim support network. The director job has been vacant since last summer. More than seven months after the Division of Public Safety's Special Services Department stepped down to resume her career as a psychologist, officials have yet to name a permanent replacement to head the University's primary victim support unit. The search for a permanent director has been underway since last summer, when Susan Hawkins resigned from the post following structural changes in her department -- most notably, the reassignment of Special Services investigators to the University Police main detective squad. Hawkins had held the position for 2 1/2 years. Since then, Det. Supervisor Patricia Brennan has been serving as interim director, in addition to fulfilling her duties in the department's detective unit. Special Services is responsible for assisting the victims of sensitive crimes including rape, sexual assault and domestic violence. According to Vice President for Public Safety Thomas Seamon, the search for Hawkins' permanent successor has not yet been completed because officials want to ensure that the best candidate is ultimately selected. "The search is going well and we hope to conclude it in the near future," Seamon said. "It has taken longer than we've wanted it to, but we wanted to be thorough in looking for candidates." Seamon refused to provide specifics on the progress of the search, but added that the ultimate selectee will be a person "who has extensive background in victim assistance, in the investigation of sex crimes and hopefully some experience in the university setting." Brennan, a former Philadelphia homicide detective, is considered a candidate for the job. She declined to comment. Special Services was originally formed in the early 1970s in response to a massive call for protection and support after a series of attacks on women in the vicinity of campus. But according to some of the people instrumental in the formation of the department three decades ago, the failure of Public Safety to name a permanent director quickly may be indicative of a change in Penn's law enforcement priorities. "I am a little perplexed that [the search for a permanent director] has taken so long, because in previous searches we've had with different public safety administrations, we've seemed to have no trouble gathering a pool of highly qualified candidates for the position," said Phoebe Leboy, a professor of Biochemistry and one of the women who helped build the department nearly 30 years ago. "I do wonder whether their inability to come up with a pool of candidates might be related to the fact that the Division of Public Safety seems less interested in community policing than it was in previous years," she added. Leboy has been quick to criticize Public Safety in the past. Last September, she and 11 other members of the board of the Association of Women Faculty and Administrators wrote a column for the Almanac -- the University's journal of record -- in which they vocalized their complaints regarding the structural changes in Special Services that preceded Hawkins' departure. Saying the department had undergone a "systematic dismantling" over the past few years, they specifically discussed the decreased collaboration between Special Services and University administrators, the various physical relocations of the department's offices and the transfer of department investigators into the main Penn detectives unit.

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