Yet again, our country is mourning the loss of life in the aftermath of a mass shooting event at a school, this time at an elementary school in Texas, where the lives of 19 children and two teachers were taken. The loss, fear, and despair are even more profound coming so soon after the shootings in Buffalo, New York and Laguna Woods, California.

I know that these senseless acts of violence make us feel helpless and disempowered. I am not going to wade into the partisan debate related to gun control. Rather than continue waiting for politicians to address this complex and very emotional problem, we are taking concrete steps to keep our faculty, students, and staff safe.

The Board of Trustees and I regard CR as a sanctuary and, as such, our learning environment must be a place where our faculty and students explore ideas in a collegial and safe atmosphere. We have publicly taken the position that it is extremely important we do not wait for a violent incident to occur on any of our locations before we invest in identifying and reducing the factors that make violence more likely.

So we’ve been asking ourselves what, exactly, do we need to do to keep our campus community safe? The answer to this question is twofold.

First, mental-health problems appear to underlie many school shootings. Therefore, we know that it is important to support our students’ mental-health needs. We are creating a new Basic Needs Center that will help students feel less isolated and alone, provide them with referrals for outside services and opportunities, and inform them of on-campus supports. Additionally, we will use our Behavioral Intervention Team (BIT) to improve campus safety and security by proactively and collaboratively identifying, assessing, and intervening in student situations that may pose a threat to the safety and well-being of our college community prior to the onset of a crisis.

Second, we plan to create a hybrid community-oriented police department on campus that is made up of sworn and public safety (non-sworn) officers. While our new police department will be able to quickly respond to unlikely emergencies like active shooter events, our officers will focus on pre-crisis interventions to help effectively put at-risk students back on a trajectory toward academic and personal success.

I am happy to announce that Michael Perkins will serve as our director of the Law Enforcement Center and chief of police. Michael spent 27 years in the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office. During his law enforcement career, he also worked part-time as an instructor in the basic academy and in-service training programs at Allan Hancock College.

We will begin the search for a police sergeant/Academy coordinator and a police officer very soon. I want to be clear that we will not hire officers who have demonstrated moral turpitude, harassment, discrimination, retaliation, abuse of authority or power, excessive use of force, or other misconduct incompatible with our mission and values.

Michael will oversee the implementation of new initiatives that will better protect and serve the college community and ensure accountability from our officers and the department. Some of the new initiatives include:

• Requiring campus police and security officers to adhere to community policing principles
developing a public document that establishes our requirements for the delivery of public safety services;

• reshaping our Life Safety Committee into a body that will make recommendations related to district policies governing campus safety services;

• requiring campus police and security officers to participate in regular training related to the conduct and methods of community policing, anti-bias, cultural responsibility, and conflict avoidance and de-escalation;

• providing routine mental health services for campus police and security officers;

• requiring our campus police and security officers to demonstrate a commitment to a “guardian” rather than “warrior” policing mindset;

• requiring campus police and security officers to interact with campus stakeholders in an informal social setting.

Ultimately, our goal is to create an environment in which school shootings and other acts of violence never occur. It will be challenging work, but we believe that the dual strategy of addressing key issues like mental health and creating a CR Police Department will go a long way toward preventing future tragedies at our institution.

Dr. Keith Flamer is the president of the College of the Redwoods.