By Greg Kendall-Ball
Abilene Reporter-News
School may be out for summer, but at each of Abilene’s private universities there’s one group that’s not taking a break.
For the campus police and security officers at Abilene Christian, Hardin-Simmons and McMurry universities, keeping the campus and its population safe is a year-round task.
ACU Police Chief Jimmy Ellison said previously that being chief at the school was like being chief of a small town - one that happened to be located inside a bigger town.
But surely, if thousands of your residents pack up and move, you’re entitled to kick back in your chair and put your feet up on the desk for a few months, right?
“Well, I’m not going to say I never put my feet on my desk, but things don’t really change all that much over the summer,” Ellison said.
“We still maintain patrols 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Just because the majority of students aren’t here, doesn’t mean the school stops. The pulse of the campus is still going, it’s just a little slower.”
Hardin-Simmons Police Chief Frank Loza agreed.
“We have an open campus out here and we need to make sure it’s kept safe. We also have a lot of faculty and staff who work on campus during the summer. Our main job doesn’t change, just the clientele we serve,” Loza said.
Mark Odom, director of security at McMurry University, said things don’t change much there, either. “We’re still here 24/7, and we still have to open and close buildings every day,” he said.
Come on, guys - there must be something about the summer that changes things up, that lets you let your hair down a bit.
“Well, we do relax the dress code a little bit. We’re allowed to wear shorts in the summer,” Odom said.
While it’s true the majority of students flee campus during the summer break, the fact is, all three campuses stay pretty active.
“We have day camps, weeklong camps, we have church camps, we have sports camps. We have a lot of people who come use our facilities during the summer, and our job is to keep everyone safe,” said HSU’s Loza.
Camps, summer school and other programs also keep campus police and security on alert at ACU and McMurry.
The summer doesn’t mean less policing, but it does mean a little more flexibility in the schedule. The number of hours on patrol stays the same for each school over the summer months, but the number of calls received by police and security goes down, freeing up time for other projects.
At ACU, Ellison said it’s easier to coordinate vacation and time off during the summer, and that his staff uses the summer slowdown to tend to continuing education and firearms qualification.
For Odom, who also serves as the McMurry campus locksmith, he said the summer days mean he gets a chance to work on other things, like changing locks on doors, or making new keys for faculty and staff.
Loza said the HSU staff also uses their downtime to brush up on continuing education and firearms qualification, but they also get an extra perk: during the summer, HSU police get to provide security at a lot of high school baseball games.
“During the year, I mostly do administrative stuff. It’s nice to get out on patrol, and to catch a little bit of a ballgame,” Loza said.
On campus, the police and security staff may be able to breathe a little easier once school is out, but that’s not always true for all policemen.
“During the summer, our call load and our crime rate go way down. Ironically, in towns with a lot of students, the municipal crime rate tends to go up during those months, when the kids are out of school,” said Ellison.
Copyright 2011 The E.W. Scripps Company