Even beyond the city, Chicago's South Side is known as a dangerous place. Gangs, drug dealers, guns and related violence are widespread. In the midst of the South Side sits the Olive-Harvey campus of Chicago City College, where thousands of students, teachers and other staff come to learn and work in a setting that's generally free of the crime that plagues the streets.

That safe environment is due in no small part to campus security officers like Charmaine Childs, a member of the AFT's Cook County College Teachers Union. "Without campus security, there would be problems," says Childs, who also happens to be a Chicago police officer when she's not working part time at the college. "Just because it's a college, some people don't think you need security. But we do need it so people can feel safe and secure."

The challenges the Olive-Harvey campus faces in keeping the outside world at bay may be a bit unusual--Childs says that a number of gangs are active even among the student population--but many of the places where the AFT represents higher education support staff are in urban locations, and many are community colleges that lack the sort of self-contained and even walled campus of a four-year university. Nonetheless, interviews with AFT members working at a range of campuses suggest that security is generally satisfactory. It appears that, even at colleges located in what outsiders might consider "rough" neighborhoods, the serious crime rarely spills over onto the campus itself.
 

Reporting requirements

Until a few years ago, faculty, staff and students--and the parents of prospective students who might worry about where their children will be studying--had to rely on the word of campus administrators about campus safety. Naturally, administrators have a vested interest in making their institutions look as safe as possible--whether the crime statistics back them up or not.

Today, however, every college and university in the country is required to report information about crime, not just on campus but also in nearby areas. The Jeanne Cleary Act is named for a 19-year-old Lehigh University student who was raped and murdered in her dorm room in 1986. Her parents discovered that students hadn't been told about 38 violent crimes on the Lehigh campus in the three years before her murder. They and other families of crime victims helped push the law through Congress.

Under the law, institutions must publish a report every year by Oct. 1 that contains crime statistics for the three previous years. The reports include a range of crimes, from murder on down through liquor law violations. Campuses that don't comply can be fined up to $25,000 by the U.S. Department of Education (which enforces the act) or lose some of their federal funds.

So where does an interested person find these reports? The Department of Education has an entire section of its Web site devoted to security issues (www.ed.gov/offices/OPE/PPI/security.html), with a searchable data base that includes the campus crime statistics.

Portland (Ore.) Community College is another institution where one of its campuses is located in a relatively high-crime area known for gang activity. "Ten years ago, parents didn't want their kids coming here," says AFT-Oregon president Debbi Covert, a classified employee at the campus who also serves on the AFT's national PSRP program and policy council. But the campus has worked hard with the community and the local police to improve that image, and Covert says she feels perfectly safe on campus.

Lucia Barnett, a public safety sergeant on campus who is also secretary of the Portland Community College Federation of Classified Employees, thinks the annual crime reports are very useful for students and staff alike. Because community colleges don't typically offer on-campus housing for students, Barnett points out that they don't have the sort of problems that arise from student drinking and related issues. But community colleges present other challenges because they're usually open to the surrounding neighborhoods, classes are offered late into the evenings to accommodate working students, and many employees have long treks across campuses to reach their cars. (As Terry Elverum, the outgoing president of the California Federation of Teachers' Council of Classified Employees, comments, PSRPs who work on campus are never going to get the prime reserved parking spots closest to their work sites.)

The biggest challenge that public safety staff like Barnett face is the lack of power to make arrests, she explains. Unless she or other officers actually witness a crime in progress, they can't arrest the perpetrator. Instead, they have to call the Portland police, and Barnett says it's often late to do much about the crime by the time they arrive.

Many college campuses do maintain their own uniformed police force, which has created tensions at some institutions. Elverum says he has observed that faculty sometimes resist the move toward having armed officers on campus, while the classified staff--who tend to work the evening hours more--usually welcome more security. The main thing a campus security force without police powers can do is be as visible as possible to serve as more of a deterrent, especially to petty crimes like theft and vandalism. Barnett also devotes a lot of her time to crime prevention; among other things, her department puts out fliers, presents seminars, talks to students and staff about personal safety, and even mediates classroom disputes.
 

Staffing shortages

One big challenge, which is bound to grow as colleges face tighter budgets ahead, is maintaining an adequate security force on campus. Barnett points out that the public safety staff at her institution has not increased in five years, even though enrollment is up more than 35 percent. With wages that lag behind other community colleges and other law enforcement bodies, her department is lucky to keep someone for more than a couple of years.

In Chicago, Charmaine Childs reports that the hours of their security staff, who are all part-timers, were cut from 18 to 12 hours per week. "We just don't have enough people," she says. "We've been fortunate that we haven't had a lot of problems."

Local unions that represent higher education PSRPs can play important roles in improving security on campus. In addition to tackling crucial job-related issues, such as training and working conditions for security personnel, unions can make the case for relatively simple improvements like better lighting in parking lots. At the Chippewa Valley Technical College in Eau Claire, Wis., support staff were concerned about walking to parking lots at night because of inadequate lighting, reports Deb Ausman, president of the AFT-affiliated staff and clerical union on campus. She encouraged members to report their concerns to the administration and told them the union would press the issue more forcefully if they didn't see results, but that wasn't necessary because the administration improved the lighting.

For staff who commute using public transportation, getting help from their employers can be difficult. At New York University, for example, the vast majority of the support staff represented by the United Staff Association travel to work on the subway and other public transport. The union has tried to get the university to provide escorts to subway stations or subsidized cab rides, says staff organizer Trudy Rudnick, but the administration does not want to deal with off-campus issues.

Custodians and others who work late shifts have their own safety concerns. Elverum, who used to head the classified staff union at Cuesta College in California, says the union there helped get radios for all the custodians working the graveyard shift, although the administration balked at letting them carry pepper spray. Located in a remote area of San Luis Obispo, Cuesta faces different challenges than some more-urban locations. For one thing, Elverum notes, the campus is close to a prison facility as well as the county lock-up, which sometimes releases people late at night after they've sobered up. At one point, someone escaped from the prison and made a change of clothes on campus at night, Elverum adds.

Other custodians are not equipped nearly as well as those at Cuesta College. At Portland Community College, the custodians sometimes work alone at night, and they are supposed to respond first if an alarm goes off. Barnett worries that the custodians are not trained to deal with an intruder in the building, if that's the cause of the alarm, so the union is working on ways to address this issue.

Surprisingly, outside of obvious places like New York City, security on campuses appears little changed since Sept. 11. Some colleges are being more strict about checking staff and student IDs, but most community colleges, in particular, still don't even have an ID system. On campuses, as throughout the country as a whole, employees are a little more on edge. In the past, if a fire alarm went off, it might be no big deal. But Deb Ausman at Chippewa Valley Technical College says staff were extra tense when an alarm went off a couple of weeks after the attack. Fortunately, it turned out that a student had burnt some popcorn, which set off the alarm.