After years of planning, Syracuse University’s Department of Public Safety swore in its first class of peace officers Monday afternoon in the Syracuse Police Department’s Public Safety building, department officials said.

‘It’s exciting; it’s a new era that the Syracuse Department of Public Safety is going into,’ said Public Safety Lt. Vernon Thompson.

A conversion to peace officer status has been discussed since late 2002, said Captain Drew Buske of DPS.

‘It’s probably been on the table since the arrival of Chancellor Shaw,’ Buske said.

A promotion to peace officer status will allow officers to carry firearms, perform searches without warrants when constitutionally permitted and seize alcoholic beverages from underage people, according to DPS’s Web site.

According to Marlene Hall, director of DPS, this will better allow DPS to deal with cases of sexual assault, harassment, stalking and robberies.

DPS will divide its ‘enhanced authority’ officers into two classes of seven people each to train in separate conversion academies for peace officer status, Thompson said.

‘Those who go through the conversion academy are those who currently hold the enhanced authority status so they don’t have to go through the full-blown academy because they had so much training before,’ Hall said. ‘They still have quite a bit of training to go through but not as much as the basic.’

In addition, seven former police officers will also be trained for peace officer status.

‘They’re training is less than the conversion for enhanced authority is,’ Thompson said.

The training will be divided into two phases, Thompson said. The first phase will last ten weeks and will require 16 hours of training a week. Officers will undergo academic and physical training during the first phase.

‘What we’re trying to do with the academy is make sure they’re up-to-date,’ Hall said.

The second phase will last four weeks, although officers will be training for 40 hours per week. The second phase will focus on training officers in emergency vehicle operations and firearm use, Thompson said.

‘At that point is where you take all the knowledge you learned during the academic portion of the academy along with firearms training and other training that you have and you place it together in mock scenarios,’ Thompson said. ‘In the end of it we come out with a better officer.’

DPS will eventually have about 50 trained peace officers, Hall said. All peace officers will be trained by July 2007. The current class of peace officers will complete their training by June.

Before deciding to train DPS officers as peace officers, DPS looked at alternatives such as services, programs and partnership with local law enforcement and community groups, Hall said.

‘We found that we really needed to take a look at a status that would enable us to do a better job for victim’s assistance and, we felt, a better job for crime prevention,’ Hall said. ‘What we found (in our research is) when you compare us to schools of comparable student population that there are 91 percent of them that have already reached that peace or police officer status. We felt that it was a reasonable move for us to go forward.’

Published on February 21, 2005 at 12:00 pm