RUPD forced to cut number of officers

By Yan Digilov     9/10/09 7:00pm

Last year, each department at Rice was forced to cut its budget by 5 percent. No area was left untouched, and the Rice University Police Department was no exception. However, RUPD was not simply forced to make cuts in both materiel and personnel - it was forced to scrap plans of expansion, made all the more necessary by the fact that Rice now has the largest student population its campus has ever held.

Glaring vacancies

Before being faced with the required cutbacks, RUPD had initially planned to expand its department to keep up with the addition of Duncan College and McMurtry College. RUPD hoped to allocate three additional spots in its force for the projected increase in student population.

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However, RUPD instead did just the opposite. Last year saw four slots vacated on the force, Chief Bill Taylor said. Two of the four officer slots cleared were part of the university-mandated budget constriction. Due to these economic cutbacks, an increase in the police force necessitated waiting for economic times to improve before taking action.

"We put together a plan two or three years ago that would add significantly more officers," Taylor said. "It is just that the economy being the way that it is, it is hard to do [that]. It has been set back a little bit, but it is not off the table. It is just that we have to wait and see how things go."

With the combined lack of expansion and the loss of the officers, the force's net loss grew to seven officers. Of the 31 officers RUPD planned, before staff cutbacks, to have active this year, just 24 are out in the field.

Additionally, of the active officers, even fewer can work alone. Several are still learning the process and are shadowing another officer.

This strain has been felt across campus, Taylor said. In previous years, an officer would be assigned to work with a single college; now, several officers find themselves patrolling two colleges. The posts added to monitor the two graduate student apartments have been reduced to a single officer moving back and forth from the Shakespeare Street apartments to the Greenbriar Drive apartments.

These openings in the police force coincide with a university-wide increase of 121 students from last fall, including a 13-percent increase in foreign national students who may be less familiar with the local laws. These trends are expected to hold over the next few years. The formula of more students and less RUPD officers makes campus safekeeping a more trying task, Taylor said.

"It just means we are going to have to work harder," Taylor said. "It is harder to get time off. It makes things more difficult for us. The schedules are tight."

Taylor said he is confident that even without the additional staff the university remains safe as ever, and despite an increase in demand, the new officers will live up to the highest standard.

But as the number of students rises, the needs of the department may run up against the slow-moving economic stimulus program.

RUPD officers could not comment on RUPD's plans for expansion.

"When we have all the new colleges [filled to capacity], we are going to ask for new officers to do [help patrol]," Taylor said. "In fact, it [will get] large enough to where we are going to have to ask for a new supervisor."

Taylor said RUPD plays a vital role on campus.

"We are in the middle of the fourth-largest city in the country," Taylor said. "There is no wall or fence around this campus. We are the wall. We are the people who are supposed to provide that level of security to keep it safe."

Communication issues

RUPD's intent to keep up with the pace of previous years did not prevent misunderstandings from occurring. During Orientation Week adviser training last month, several students received a version of a speech that, to them, seemed out of line with RUPD's previous approach to campus security, one that Taylor called a miscommunication.

"They actually told us that if any of our freshmen were caught drinking, we would be held responsible," Brett Wakefield, an O-Week coordinator at Wiess College, said. "Everyone was pissed. Here, Night of Decadence was basically the big deal. If what they said was true, no one would open up [rooms]."

The miscommunication stemmed from a switch in personnel, according to Taylor.

"There isn't a philosophical change [in RUPD policy]," Taylor said. "It was just a miscue."

In attempting to improve communication, RUPD looks for community input when replenishing their numbers, he said. As part of the agency's screening procedure, recruits undergo an assessment panel, designed to give students, faculty and staff an opportunity to engage with potential officers.

During this process, members of the Rice community from across campus act out scenarios and give the recruits an opportunity to showcase their interpersonal skills and decision-making abilities. However, just when RUPD needs new recruits the most, student input in the process has been nonexistent, Taylor said.

"When we first started doing this, we used to have all kinds of staff and students to do it," Taylor said. "But in the last few years it has been really hard to get students to do it. We send out notes, and we don't get responses from students. But that is what we would like to have: faculty, students and staff to help out."

For the time being, there has been no visible change in RUPD's procedures or impact on campus, Wakefield, a Wiess senior, said.

"The one time [RUPD] came to a party at Wiess, they followed all the same rules," Wakefield said. "Everything is fine now. We have noticed that everything has been good over here."

Filling spaces

Taylor estimates RUPD will soon be filling two of the four vacant slots, but this process will not be completed anytime soon. After the screening and evaluations are completed and a formal invitation extended, the recruits go through 11 weeks of training, and only then will they be allowed to perform in full capacity as RUPD officers. This timeline suggests RUPD likely will not have new officers until next semester, at the earliest, further hindering their ability to make up for the previous year's losses.

Taylor said the application process is selective. On average, of 100 applicants to the force, three get called back.

"We have been pretty selective, and we will continue to be selective, because we feel that officers that work here need to be better officers than those who work for the City of Houston," Taylor said. "They need to be able to interact with the student population, faculty and staff, and they need to be thinking more. The mindset is not 'hook 'em and book 'em.'"

Katharine Yang contributed to the story.

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