PRINCETON: University police seeking to carry firearms

By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
   As a patrolman at Princeton University, Mike Michalski has to respond in any kind of situation, be it a drunk student who needs to go the hospital or something more serious such that he is required to wear a bullet-proof vest.
   Despite facing potentially life-threatening situations, he and his fellow officers are not allowed to carry firearms per a long-standing university policy.
   Mr. Michalski, president of the 17-member Fraternal Order of Police Local 75 representing the campus police, said that needs to change.
   He says his members, as well his roughly 11 to15 supervisors, should be allowed to carry firearms. He is calling on the university to study the issue, one that has come up before during the tenure of President Shirley M. Tilghman.
   Martin Mbugua, university spokesman, said Wednesday that the school had done a comprehensive review of arming campus police, ultimately concluding the policy should remain the same.
   He said the university’s 70-member department of public safety — made up of 27 sworn officers with arrest powers and 43 others — has a close-working partnership with Princeton Police.
   Mr. Mbugua said that depending on the circumstances of a given incident, university security would determine whether to contact police for assistance.
   ”We work with local police on joint training program opportunities, and we continue to coordinate our respective resources,” he said in a phone interview.
   The question about Princeton’s campus police comes amid heightened attention toward guns and schools in the wake of the Dec. 14 massacre that left 26 dead at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.
   Earlier this week, President Barack Obama introduced gun-control measures, despite objections from Second Amendment advocates such as the National Rifle Association.
   And this month a group of university professors submitted a petition to Ms. Tilghman calling for the school to divest in companies that make or sell assault weapons and bullets.
   Mr. Michalski said the timing of his raising the issue had nothing to do with the massacre in Newtown. Rather, he said that after consolidation, there might be times when Princeton Police might have a longer response time coming to campus in an emergency.
   He said that as things stand now, campus police’s policy in the event of a shooter is to “basically run away” and form a perimeter to prevent the public from getting into what he called the “killing zone.”
   As a sworn officer, Mr. Michalski can make arrests. He is provided with pepper spray, hand cuffs, a collapsible baton and the mandatory bullet-proof vest.
   He said most other universities in the country that have police forces allow their officers to carry guns. Sister Ivy League schools, Penn and Yale, are among those in that category as is Rutgers University — although they are located in large, urban areas. At nearby Rider University, campus security is unarmed.
   ”Public safety officers at Rider University do not carry guns and are not sworn officers, though a few of them happen to be retired members of local municipal police departments,” university spokesman Sean Ramsden said Wednesday. “Rider’s Lawrenceville campus is adjacent to the Lawrence Township Police Department, whose officers are able to respond within moments of a call.”
   At Princeton, campus crime is and has been low, according to data the university publishes in its annual crime report.
   So far in January, bike theft was the most common offense, according to the crime blotter the department of public safety maintains on its website.
   In July 2009, a minor carrying a toy gun sparked a lockdown of the Ivy League campus. But there has not been a campus shooting in recent memory, although there were three knifepoint robberies on university property last year, Mr. Michalski said.
   In the past few months, two college students have been shot by campus police officers at other universities. A naked 18-year-old freshman at South Alabama University was killed in October after charging an officer, while last month a 38-year-old graduate student at California State-San Bernardino was killed after fighting with authorities.