In March 2005, a former ASU football player shot and killed another former ASU football player in a Scottsdale parking lot. The incident obviously sent shockwaves through a University that, before that fateful night, was largely — thankfully — a stranger to gun violence.
In the aftermath of the tragedy, the ASU police department, Student Life and Counseling and Consultation instituted monthly crime-prevention presentations. Student Life program coordinator Tiffany Harvey said, “There was an internal audit that showed the University wasn’t meeting the safety and security requirements. There were gaps and this fills the expectation [of safety requirements.]”
At one point, these presentations, while also aimed at students, were mandatory for faculty and staff.
Well, they were until recently.
Ever since the safety lectures were taken from an event requiring mandatory participation to an event where attendance was merely strongly suggested, the turnout has been abysmal.
According to Stewart Adams, a crime prevention specialist for the ASU Police who has been involved in the presentations for years, classes held during the fall semester had fewer than five people in attendance.
On Monday, when ASU’s first campus safety lecture of the semester was set to take place, the number of members of the ASU community in attendance was sparse.
How sparse? Let’s just say that there is one more Jonas Brothers than people who were in attendance at the event.
(If you didn’t know the answer to how many Jonas Brothers there are — three — we feel considerable sadness for you; their musical prowess is pure magic.)
But as exasperatingly low — and almost seemingly comical — as the number present was, there is nothing funny about it.
As we have learned repeatedly over the years, from Columbine to Virginia Tech to Northern Illinois, campus safety is of the utmost importance. A sense of security is one of the few paramount services a university must provide to maintain student success.
With that in mind, we must ask: Why did these crime-prevention seminars suddenly shift back to being non mandatory for faculty and staff? It seems unreasonable to think that a majority — let alone a few — of ASU’s thousands of employees have a firm grasp on the important items covered in the lectures, such as policies for responding to critical situations.
It would be unacceptable to allow campus safety to fall by the wayside.
Last week, Nancy Tribbensee, the first student-safety coordinator for Arizona’s universities, was appointed to review policies regarding sexual-assault, harassment, discrimination and gender equity. Though the creation of her position is hardly a giant leap forward, seeing as how it was the result of a sexual assault settlement, it can end up being a step in the right direction if she also looks to improve struggling campus-safety awareness programs.
Another solution put forth by the group that puts on the campus safety lectures, like the one attended by two people on Monday afternoon, is to possibly make its presentation available online.
That would be a good start at regaining the momentum lost when the shift to suggested attendance occurred, but a sound answer as to why the attendance requirement was lifted would be a better start.
