Department of Public Safety officers and Thomas Wolfe, senior vice president and dean of Student Affairs, responded to concerns about safety and campus-wide communication at Tuesday’s Student Association meeting.

They addressed assembly members’ outrage at the lack of campus-wide communication regarding last week’s stabbing at the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house.

Wolfe, DPS Chief Tony Callisto and Assistant Chief Mike Rathbun addressed the assembly regarding the incident.

Assembly members said they felt the students should have been made immediately aware of the incident through Orange Alert, SU’s emergency notification system.

Students were not alerted to the stabbing through Orange Alert because the suspect was immediately captured and no longer posed a threat to the campus community, Callisto said. DPS also hadn’t confirmed all of the details regarding the incident at the time.

‘We really wouldn’t want to put out information before we had more time to conduct interviews,’ Callisto said.

Wolfe presented initiatives that the university is undertaking to prevent a dangerous situation from occurring again. The initiatives include additional police patrols on Walnut Avenue on Friday and Saturday nights, crime prevention presentations to every fraternity and sorority, and a review of social event protocol.

DPS will also be conducting a lighting survey of Walnut Place to see if additional lighting needs to be added to the area. National Grid, an electricity and natural gas company, has already changed all of the light bulbs in the streetlights on Walnut Place to ensure the brightest lighting for the area, Callisto said.

Tim Wilke, chair of the committee on student life, expressed concern that students in the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry are notified later than SU students on security issues. DPS is currently working with ESF administrators to ensure safety information is distributed to ESF students quicker, Callisto said.

After the briefing on security and campus communication, five students were elected as representatives to the assembly. Sean Herron, a sophomore policy studies and economics major, Andrew Swab, a sophomore international relations and magazine major, Elizabeth Mikula, a sophomore in the School of Architecture, Julie Dellinger, a freshman public relations major, and Lianxin He, a freshman mathematics and physics major, were all elected as assembly representatives.

Chris Alexander, a sophomore philosophy and English major, Karah Cesar, and Evin Robinson, both sophomore communication and rhetorical studies majors, were elected to University Senate.

kronayne@syr.edu

Published on September 29, 2009 at 12:00 pm