On a recent afternoon at Harper College in Palatine, public safety officer Phillip Robert activated his flashing lights and pulled over an athlete whose vehicle had rolled through a stop sign on campus.
It was a routine traffic stop, but the student reacted incredulously, repeating the words, “You can’t do this to me,” Robert recalls.
When the young man refused to answer questions, citing advice from a coach who claimed campus security personnel like Robert weren’t “real” cops and lacked the power of arrest, Robert tried to explain. But the student persisted and eventually found himself riding in a squad car to the Rolling Meadows Police Department.
“You can’t do this to me” were the student’s last words when the Rolling Meadows officer shut the door on the lockup.
“I just did,” was the officer’s reply.
Capable, mild-mannered and approachable, Robert says the incident was unusual, and quickly added that under normal circumstances the student probably would have walked away with a warning. In this case, however, the athlete’s refusal to answer questions eventually led to his arrest.
However atypical, the story brings attention to the public’s sometimes confused notions about the role and powers entrusted to campus police and security officers.
“It’s the people who think they don’t have to listen who are usually the ones who are most shocked to find themselves with a court date,” he says.
Although the powers of security officers at area junior college campuses do vary, at Harper officers are fully trained police and are licensed as such, supervisor Kevin King says. Although the officers do not carry weapons, they would be qualified to do so if it were deemed necessary by college administrators–and they can make arrests.
King has a staff of 23, including seven sworn officers (who must be 21, have had weapons training and be a graduate of a certified police academy) and 16 security officers and clerical staff. Three to five people are on patrol during daytime and evening shifts, and two of those are sworn officers, Overnight, there is one sworn officer and one security person on duty.
At Elgin Community College, Richard Cervantes, director of campus safety, oversees a staff of four sworn officers and seven security officers. At least one sworn officer is on duty at all times, plus two to three security officers, he says.
And at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, there are eight sworn officers and five cadets and security guards employed.
As at other two-year colleges in the northwest suburbs, Harper’s crime rates have been very low in recent years. The most serious incident at any of the schools occurred in 1979, when a 22-year-old Harper student from Riverside was charged with stabbing two fellow students, killing one and seriously injuring the other.
“That one was solved in about 20 minutes,” King says, after Dean A. Johnson was arrested in a cemetery about a mile from the campus. King says the Harper department, Palatine police, Cook County Sheriff’s deputies and Illinois State Police were in on the arrest.
Last January, King’s department also investigated the reported rape of a student that allegedly occurred outside the Harper library. Although the victim’s mother contacted authorities, she declined to let her daughter come in. Without a victim, the investigation stalled, King and Palatine police say.
Employed at Harper’s public safety department for 18 years, King of Streamwood considers himself lucky that his school’s crime rate has remained so low for so long, but also attributes his success to solid training procedures, hiring practices and vigilant patrols. Although King’s department retains police jurisdiction on campus, in higher-profile cases such as the 1979 murder and the recent alleged rape, the Palatine police are quickly called in to help.
Deputy Chief Jack McGregor of the Palatine Police Department says that although the college is a municipal corporation with its own police force, “if a major crime occurs there, we have an agreement to work with them,” given his department’s greater resources, including evidence technicians.
McGregor has a solid working relationship with King because the two worked together at Harper while McGregor was studying toward his first degree in law enforcement and learning the ropes as a young officer on the campus in the late 1960s, he says.
“Many young aspiring police officers use the campuses as stepping stones,” says McGregor. “Policing a campus is a unique experience.”
Chief Robert Sturlini of the Des Plaines Police Department was also a classmate of McGregor’s at Harper.
Other area college police departments report good working relationships with their municipal police counterparts.
“My opinion is that the campuses are usually safer and more secure than their municipal counterparts,” says Jim Bondi, president of the 80-member Illinois Campus Law Enforcement Administrators Association. “That’s pretty amazing when you remember that 20 to 25 percent of the campus population changes from one year to the next, and that the students are not property owners within their community. Students also tend to be young, and risk-takers.”
His group is currently designing standardized training guidelines for campus police departments. Currently, campus security training and hiring guidelines are as different as the schools that officers are hired to protect, he says.
“We’re hoping to come up soon with industry training standards, so that our members can say, `Yes, we meet and exceed them,’ ” Bondi says.
As at Harper, most other area campus police carry full power of arrest and the right to carry weapons if administrators deem it necessary, Bondi says. At Harper and other schools, administrators may also hire security guards who are not sworn police officers. Often, a combination of security guards and academy-trained sworn police work together. At ECC, for example, the city police department contracts on-duty Elgin officers to work at the school in tandem with security officers employed by the school.
“It’s been a win-win situation,” says Elgin Deputy Chief Jim Burns. Although Burns said it was difficult to set up the current arrangement with the school, low crime figures reported there under the Uniform Crime Reporting System have shown him the system is working.
Cervantes of ECC says the school has reported no incidents of violent crime since at least as far back as 1992. “That’s good news but maybe not good headlines,” he says.
Jed Babbitt, an 18-year-old second-year Elgin student, says a that highly visible police and security presence on campus make him feel safer there than in many other parts of Elgin. Elgin police officers and school security personnel are often seen patrolling parking lots, and their presence, Babbitt suspects, deters would-be car thieves and burglars.
“They seem to be all over,” Babbitt says. “There’s even a motorcycle cop who will be out in a couple of minutes if you park in front of the wrong building” without the proper permit.
Babbitt, who recalls sometimes tense relationships between fellow students and authority figures during his high school years, says relations between the police and students at ECC are much better. “There’s no background whispering that I’ve heard,” he says, adding with a laugh, “I think the kids who are worried about the police here are worried about them because they have a reason to be worried.”
“Colleges have been doing community policing for years,” says Ron Dietz, chief of campus security at Triton College in River Grove. “If we didn’t, we couldn’t survive.”
Dietz, whose officers recently helped arrest three non-students who were charged with stealing books from the campus book stores at Triton and Oakton and then trying to exchange them for cash, says a good rapport between police and students is essential to his officers’ work. That relationship has improved much since the “Days of Rage,” he says.
“You’ve got to embrace the students as friends,” Dietz says. Getting to know people and routines also helps officers spot unusual situations before they turn into crimes, he says.
As an officer at Triton for 24 years and chief for 14, Dietz recalls hostage-taking by radical students during the early 1970s with a shudder. He hopes those days never return.
“We’re always talking to people here, too,” says Robert Habel, a sergeant of campus police at Oakton Community College. “We keep a high visibility. On an average day, we have two patrol units (each containing a sworn officer) covering a 720-acre campus. Most towns can only wish they had that much coverage.”
As at other area schools, serious crime at Oakton is notable only for its absence. High police visibility discourages auto break-ins and car thefts, Habel says, often the primary worries of campus police.
The transient and highly mobile student population at community colleges can make it difficult for campus police to determine who belongs and who doesn’t, Habel says, but his officers do their best.
Sturlini, who worked briefly as head of security at Oakton before returning to the Des Plaines Police Department as chief in 1994, says the interpersonal relationships police develop on campus are surely a key to keeping their crime rates down. Sturlini’s present municipal officers may, for instance, make a traffic stop, write a ticket and never see the person again, he says.
“On campus, you’re involved day-to-day with faculty, students and staff, and that’s a good thing,” he says.
The training that Oakton’s sworn police receive is excellent, Sturlini says, and “makes for excellent, dedicated officers.”
Back at Harper, officer Robert is speeding toward the school cafeteria while responding to a radio call of an “unknown situation” happening there. Running in, he learns the situation is not as serious as he’d feared. A contentious student has lifted a sandwich and disappeared.
“We haven’t had a lot of serious crime here, and that’s good,” says Robert’s supervisor, King. “It does not mean serious crime can’t happen, though.”
Unlike the Maytag repairman, King will not be caught napping if it does.
“We’ll be ready,” he says.
Figures tell the tale
The federal Campus Security Act of 1990 requires colleges to report their crime figures annually. These statistics represent attempts as well as actual crimes.
Harper College, Palatine
1994: Two aggravated assaults, five motor vehicle thefts, 18 burglaries to motor vehicles, 77 thefts.
1993: Seven motor vehicle thefts, 30 burglaries to motor vehicles, 75 thefts.
1992: Fifteen burglaries to motor vehicles, 85 thefts.
Elgin Community College, Elgin
1994: Two burglaries, two motor vehicle thefts, one weapons possession. 1993: One burglary.
1992: One burglary and one motor vehicle theft.
Oakton Community College, Des Plaines campus
1994: Two aggravated assaults, two burglaries to motor vehicles, three drug abuse violations.
1993: Three aggravated assaults, one burglary, two motor vehicle thefts, eight burglaries to vehicles.
1992: One burglary to a motor vehicle.
