The Chronicle

Dave Balson
Opinion Editor


      Prevention and intervention are keys to keeping CLC’s campuses safe and open to all students, the CLC Police Department says. The CLC Police Department reported that the college’s campuses have had eight incidents of violent crime.

      The statistics, which the department is required by law to produce, show the frequency of certain crimes committed on campus 2006 through 2008. Throughout those years, the statistics show no murders, one sexual assault, two aggravated assaults (both in ’06), and five cases of battery.

      “Our statistics are not fudged,” CLC Police Sergeant Theodore Waters said. “These are honest statistics and not all schools can say that.” 

      In his 19 years at CLC, Sergeant Waters said he hasn’t seen violent crime rates trend in either direction. Fights make up the majority of violent crime the department deals with. But college campuses across the country now confront the challenge of trying to prevent the next major school shooting.

      “CLC has always been a very safe place,” Waters said. “But we have to be prepared and have those plans in place to keep it safe, because violence is trying to make its way in.”

        “You try to intervene and prevent,” CLC Chief of Police Kevin Lowry said. “On a national level, that’s what the FBI and Secret Service do for our country. They try to intervene, prevent, before that bomber does what he’s trying to do. On our level, we’re trying to do the same thing. Campus wide, a department of 20 can’t do that all by ourselves, so what we try to do is train individuals to help with that.”

      The individuals Chief Lowry is helping to train make up the school’s Crisis Prevention and Intervention Team. Most of the staff on the team are heads of departments who have direct contact with students.

      “We have the key players in place who might get information about students in crisis,” said Julie DeGraw, dean of the Counseling, Advising and Transfer Center at CLC. DeGraw is also the team’s chairwoman.

      College campuses across the country are implementing similar prevention teams. The teams are largely a response to the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, when student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people before turning the gun on himself. 

      “What they found from Virginia Tech was that Cho had had encounters with campus police, counseling, health center and numerous faculty members,” said Lowry, also a member of the team. “All that information from the faculty was held within their divisions.”

      “As a result of that,” DeGraw said, “there was a lot written about how we should create avenues for (information sharing) to happen, especially in extreme situations where we’re worried about the safety and health of the student or the campus.”

      The team’s main functions are to train and educate staff and faculty on how best to identify and work with students who may be in crisis. Then, they meet and share information to identify students who have the potential for violence.

      If a student seems to be in crisis, his or her name is brought up to the group. 

      “If others say, ‘yes, that name is familiar to me,’ then we share the info as it’s appropriate.” DeGraw said. “If people say no, that’s the end of it.”

      “Anything that is said in that group is confidential,” she added, “it can’t be taken out of that group. I don’t want people to think that if they come in to talk to me or the police that we’re going to share that information outside of our office. It’s really only when we think it may be harmful to other places on campus.”

      The team is also responsible for helping plan the campus-wide emergency response.
      “I’ve been really impressed since I’ve been here,” DeGraw said. “We know what we’re doing. Everybody has a plan and has walked through that plan.

      “We don’t want to just be responding, we want to be preventing things before they happen.”

      Waters and DeGraw both stressed the importance of keeping the college open to the community.

      “Community colleges have people who are fresh out of prison for violent crimes,” Waters said. “But they are here to get an education, to become a productive member of society. This is where you want them to be.

      “They’re coming here to learn how to not be violent and live a better life, and that’s a good thing. CLC is lucky, and CLC is a good place. People are here to improve their lives, and they don’t want to mess that up.”

      In fact, countless studies have shown that prisoners who get an education are far less likely to go back to prison. A 2009 report released by the U.S. Department of Education, “Partnerships Between Community Colleges and Prisons,” found that community colleges make their community safer by turning potential re-offenders into productive citizens.

      “You want colleges to be open and public and available to all people,” DeGraw said. “We’re all about access and trying to be a resource to the community. Do we want to be about locking our doors and making everybody swipe a card to get in? I don’t think we do.

      “There’s a strong connection between education and being able to move forward. So why wouldn’t we want that to be available to everyone?”

      Sergeant Waters also said the general attitudes and expectations of people on campus play a very large role in keeping the campus safe.

      “We, the students, staff, everybody, create a culture that is not accepting of the precursor elements of violence,” Waters said. “Valuing diversity and making sure that everyone feels included and is included, treating people with respect, that’s what we do. I think that’s why CLC is a safer place.”