Since a few weeks before winter break, there have been 13 documented incidents of a suspect lurking at the doors and windows of residence halls and directing sexually harassing comments at students. The suspect, described as “white, male, average build and height, 20–30 years old” and as possibly driving a red sedan, has also been reported as entering students’ unoccupied rooms.
In an email to the student body on February 4, Director of Community Safety Gary Granger detailed new measures the department was taking to apprehend the suspect, including “Extra CSOs, including in plainclothes,” and a request to Portland police to “increase patrols of the parking lots and primary roads through campus after hours.”
At the senate meeting on Friday, Granger announced that plain clothes officers had already been on campus for “around six weeks” leading up to the email’s dispatchment, and—despite claims that plainclothes officers would not be handing out AODs—the CSOs would in fact not look the other way for policy violations, including those relating to the consumption of alcohol or marijuana.
The announcement was met with some displeasure from the student body, a reaction Granger says he was unprepared for. “It didn’t occur to me that it was such a big deal to have a couple officers everyone knows out there without a uniform…this was not designed to be surreptitious or hidden from the community,” he said in an interview with The Quest.
“I don’t have a use for CSOs out of uniform generally, because we don’t do surveillance or investigate students, and we don’t try and catch people doing stuff…I don’t anticipate doing this often, if ever,” explained Granger. In addition to emphasizing that plainclothes officers were “the team’s idea,” he wants to make it clear to concerned students that plainclothes CSOs have been posted no more than “a half-dozen times in the last six weeks.” He added, “it costs me overtime…we don’t have an unlimited overtime budget.”
Addressing police presence on campus, Granger clarified that the request sent to the Portland Police Bureau would likely not have a significant impact on patrols through campus, and that correspondence with the police was often a necessary part of his job. “Whenever we’ve had any kind of serious crime that we thought might be ongoing, we’ve had contact with the police department and asked them to help us monitor campus,” he said. “There’s a narrow band in which we can work, and as soon as we get outside of that band of what we can do, we kind of have to ask for help.”
He also addressed concerns about possible interactions between students and police on campus, saying that “based on how difficult it’s been to get Portland [police] to do some things…it seems unlikely that a police officer would spend a lot of time trying to write up a minor in possession citation on campus, especially when we have a partnership with them that says we handle that kind of stuff.”
Regardless of motivation or severity, this is undeniably a new precedent for Community Safety. Students are also encouraged to watch out for each other and report any persons or behavior fitting the descriptions in this article to Community Safety.