Stockton campuses trained at defending against similar attacks
Stockton Record 4/17/07
"I feel that the system we currently have in place will allow us to react to an incident of this magnitude competently and confidently," said Marc Bromme, chief of police at San Joaquin Delta College.
But Bromme hopes the school's prevention perspective will keep his officers from ever having to test that plan.
The Delta Police Department's first line of defense, Bromme said, is aggressive control of the college's boundary, aided by monitored cameras that cover about 90 percent of the campus.
Equally important, he said, is the work of four student officers and members of the 19,000-member campus community who report suspicious activities.
By contrast, CSU Stanislaus-Stockton Center is patrolled by private security officers hired by Grupe Development Co., which leases the land to the university.
Those officers work in conjunction with the Stockton Police Department.
Delta's nine sworn officers and the 11 members of University of the Pacific's Department of Public Safety just completed annual joint training for situations similar to Monday's shooting, in which an attacker is shooting at people when officers arrive.
Called "active shooter training," the tactic focuses on the first officers arriving at a shooting to establish contact, contain and either capture or neutralize the shooter at the earliest opportunity to reduce the loss of life.
"Once you establish a four- or five-person team, you go in," said Mike Belcher, Pacific's director of public safety.
Belcher said his department - at one of the two private universities in California whose officers have full police powers - often is alerted by members of the close-knit 4,700-student campus about intruders, who account for about 95 percent of all department arrests.
"Outsiders coming on campus is where the school lacks protection," said Nicco Cipolla, a Pacific junior.
Cipolla said campus parties, which the university requires to be registered, often attract nonstudents, who can become combative after finding they are barred.
Karen Dawkins, also a junior at Pacific, said she regularly walks alone late at night from the gym on one side of campus to her town house on the other.
"I should be more cautious, but I'm not. You never think about it until something happens," she said.