Colleges look to help students, re-examine safety
Daily Bulletin 4/17/07
UC Riverside will fly the flag at half-staff for the rest of the week in commemoration of the tragedy. There will be a remembrance at noon on Friday, and music may ring from the bell tower.
In a more practical vein, counselors will have their doors open to students who feel overwhelmed and oppressed by the violence and the knowledge that it can happen anywhere.
Keeping a large campus safe is not always easy, said Mike Guerin, chief of police at Cal Poly Pomona.
"These are open, public institutions," he said.
In an open society and at an open university, security cannot always be airtight, he said.
"That's probably the most difficult thing for all this."
Although there have been no recent incidents of gun violence on Southland campuses, one of the earliest and deadliest was in 1976, when Edward Charles Allaway shot nine people, seven fatally, in the library at Cal State Fullerton.
In 1994, Khallid Abdul Muhammad, a former spokesman for the Nation of Islam, was shot and wounded at UC Riverside after giving a speech.
Many Southern California colleges are so-called commuter campuses, which can make keeping track of people even more difficult.
Out of 19,000 students who attend Cal Poly Pomona, only about 3,000 live on campus, Guerin said. People are constantly driving in and out of campus.
Echoing that was Lt. Jimmie Brown at Cal State San Bernardino, where only 1,500 out of 16,000 students live in residence halls. "You've got people coming and going all day.
"During the day, everything is open to the public," he said.
It can also be difficult to tell whether someone is likely to commit a crime on campus.
Sometimes faculty can sense when something is wrong with a student, but school shooters are hard to profile, Guerin said.
"You don't always know what you're looking for," he said.
Most of the large colleges and universities in the area have professional police forces with the same training and equipment as city departments.
Cal State San Bernardino, for example, has its own force of 15 sworn officers. Someone is on duty 24 hours a day, Brown said.
On Monday at Cal State San Bernardino, extra campus police officers were on patrol, Brown said.
State law also prohibits bringing a firearm on campus, Brown said.
And even though classroom buildings are open during the day at nearby universities, only students can enter residence halls.
Despite the difficult balance officials describe, they said they will review their safety and security policies.
At Cal Poly Pomona, officials have already begun talking about their emergency plan to make sure they have the best possible communications strategy to get the word out in the event of an incident, Guerin said.
At UC Riverside, officials will also try to improve safety and security plans, said Kris Lovekin, a university spokeswoman.
In the wake of the shooting, Lovekin said students can see a university counselor if they feel they need to, and the flag will be flying at half-staff all week.
But it was business as usual on local campuses Monday.
"I think that the campus is operating normally today," Lovekin said.