Almost any St. Joe’s student would agree that there is a serious lack of trust in the Office of Public Safety & Security among students.

This breakdown in trust doesn’t just result in a litany of individual negative outcomes, it also makes the entire St. Joe’s community less safe. The overwhelming consensus among students I’ve spoken with personally is that delayed responses and caustic interactions with officers makes the average student less likely to utilize the resources offered by Public Safety. This, in turn, makes Public Safety less aware of problems in the campus community and incentivizes violations of behavioral standards.

Public Safety isn’t the villain in this saga. On the contrary, I’d argue the office as a whole is working to make the best out of an unenviable situation. Over the last few years, the responsibilities for Public Safety have greatly increased without a commensurate increase in resources and personnel to tackle these new tasks.

This doesn’t excuse individual failures by officers — they can and should be addressed — but it’s important to remember the overall problem with Public Safety results not from these individual suboptimal situations. It results from the broader communication breakdown and a growing responsibility list of a department too overburdened and underfunded to adequately address any one area of its purview.

There are no easy solutions to this crisis. If there were, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. More resources for this department are, in my view, necessary, but far from sufficient. If we want to see real change that leads to a safer and more secure campus community, we need to have serious dialogue about what the expectations are for Public Safety, how university policies align with those expectations and how students can facilitate this.

These conversations won’t lead to improvement overnight, but they can create the foundation for renewed trust between the student body and Public Safety.