By Karen Farkas
Dayton Daily News
CLEVELAND, Ohio — Police at John Carroll University near Cleveland are trained and certified to carry guns, but they patrol the campus unarmed.
That is expected to change next year.
Timothy Peppard, director of Campus Safety Services, has recommended that his officers start carrying weapons. The recommendation has met little opposition in presentations to administrators, faculty, students and trustees.
The Rev. Robert Niehoff, JCU’s president, will make the final decision after consulting with the university’s vice presidents. Nationwide, the vast majority of campus police officers who are certified to carry guns, do so.
“The primary value is the capacity to be a first responder,” said Peppard. “We are not doing this because we have concerns for crime in the area. And we have a fabulous relationship with University Heights (police).”
But if something serious should occur on campus, an armed officer could keep things from escalating, he said.
Peppard knows.
He was chief of the University Circle police department in 2003 when two of his armed officers entered the Peter B. Lewis Building on the campus of Case Western Reserve University and confronted Biswanath Halder, who had killed one person and injured two others.
A review of the incident concluded that when Hal-der was confronted by the officers he went on the defensive, instead of the offensive, saving lives, Pep-pard said. No one was killed between the time the police arrived and a seven-hour standoff that ended with the gunman’s arrest.
Marietta College Police Chief Tom Saccenti agrees that arming campus police can save lives. That’s why he supported arming his officers, who began carrying guns this summer. Members of the college’s police department have been certified to carry weapons since it was created in 1993. Officials began studying whether to allow them to actually carry guns after Saccenti was appointed in 2010.
“Almost any time a shooter encounters police they stop killing people,” Saccenti said. “They either engage an officer or kill themselves.”
He said that is what occurred Feb. 14, 2008, at Northern Illinois University, where a former graduate student who had shot and killed five people and wounded 21 others committed suicide when confronted by police.
That incident and the April 16, 2007, tragedy at Virginia Tech University, where a student shot and killed 32 people and wounded 17 others, led colleges to examine security on campus.
During the 2004 school year, 93 percent of public universities and 42 percent of private universities with enrollment of 2,500 or more employed certified police officers and 90 percent of those officers were armed, according to the most recent data on campus law enforcement compiled by the U.S. Department of Justice.
The department has not released results from a survey in 2010 for the 2009-10 school year, which will include information from colleges that enroll fewer than 2,500 students.
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