Highly publicized crimes spur meeting between Columbia chief, USC administrators
Columbia police are ramping up their patrols of USC’s campus and the areas around it, Chief Randy Scott said.
Scott met with USC administrators Thursday to discuss the department’s relationship with the university and how officers patrol the area.
Its main resolution: Columbia police will make more contacts with people on and around campus and place “directive patrols” on the campus, Scott said.
That means officers will be stopping more students and will be instructed to keep a closer eye on the university. Police generally assign cops on directive patrols for big events or areas with “potential issues,” Scott said.
“It’s the beginning of the year, you have a new student body coming in,” Scott said, adding that many new students may not be entirely aware of the risks around them.
Officers will also fill out field contacts cards after each stop, noting information about who they spoke with, what they looked like and where they were.
Columbia police will share that data with USC’s Division of Law Enforcement and Safety, so investigators there can track down potential suspects and witnesses in crimes that occur nearby.
Just what Columbia’s officers will be looking for isn’t clear, but USC President Harris Pastides said he was concerned about drinking and its safety implications as well as violent crime.
“I couldn’t say one is more important than the other,” Pastides said.
The meeting, Scott and USC police spokesman Capt. Eric Grabski said, didn’t follow an increase in crime, and it wasn’t spurred by any incident in particular either.
But Grabski noted that it followed a number of highly publicized crimes this semester as reports of handguns in a dorm room, an indecent exposure and a strong-arm robbery on campus, among others, have spread through the Carolina Alert system and news media.
USC didn’t ask Columbia police to patrol the campus outright, Grabski said, and the campus itself shows lower rates of crime than the areas around it.
Plus, Grabski added, those three incidents have been resolved with arrests.
“That happened, but we caught those folks,” he said.
Still, the publicity was enough for Pastides to speak with Mayor Steve Benjamin about crime near campus earlier in the week and to call the meeting.
Even so, Pastides said the meeting, which included Scott, Provost Michael Amiridis, Vice President for Student Affairs Dennis Pruitt, USC police Chief Chris Wuchenich and Cantey Heath, of Pastides’ office, wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.
“Not having had a meeting might’ve been more an aberration than having a meeting,” Pastides said.
Instead, Pastides and Scott said, it’s an effort to keep closer tabs on a campus that’s seen high-profile crimes and to maintain a close relationship between the university and police department.
“Unless the data say ‘zero,’ then we’ve got a problem,” Pastides said. “I think every large college campus in America has some level of a problem, and I don’t want our students or any members of university community to be preyed upon.”