Friday, May 17, 1996
Community service officer program helps to curb crimeBy Marie
Blanchard
Daily Bruin Contributor
There used to be no formal security program to provide students
with a safe way of getting on and off campus alone at night.
Then in 1975, after repeated sexual assaults on campus, 40
members of four different fraternities decided to organize an
escort service to help students around campus once it got dark,
remembers Sgt. John Adams the current manager of the Community
Service Officer Program.
Originally comprised of fraternity member volunteers, the
students would organize in groups of 20 each night and would walk
students around campus. A year later, under officer James Pembroke
of the university police, a formal program was organized.
Out of their efforts, the university decided to form the
Community Service Officer (CSO) program. The first seven CSOs were
even hired from the original 40 fraternity members.
Since then, the program has expanded from a seven-member escort
service to a full time program with more than 120 officers, six
vans and a patrol area that includes University Research Library,
Powell Library, all university parking structures and the
university extension building.
In fact, the Community Safety Officer program has grown so
successful that, according to Jason Pak, the Field Operations
Coordinator, several schools including Cal. State Northridge, UC
Irvine and UC Riverside have used the UCLA model to start similar
services on campus.
"We are the largest CSO program that I know of," Adams said.
"Davis has a larger CSO pool but they don’t work as often as
ours."
With a range of activities that varies from escort services,
evening van services, parking structure bicycle patrolling,
building lockups and special events associated to the UCLA campus,
the CSO program has essentially turned into a 24 hour, full time
project, Pak said.
Although the program is a branch of the university police
department, community safety officers have no law enforcement
powers. They look just like other UCLA students except they carry a
radio linking them to other CSOs and to the police department.
"We’re not sworn officers," Pak said. "We’re more like walking
911 booths, the eyes and ears of the police department. We don’t
carry weapons, just radios."
Pak argued that students do not understand the role of CSOs, and
that people sometimes think that they have the power to issue
citations and make arrests.
"We’re students just like everyone else," Pak said. "All we can
do is warn people or call the police when we see something
suspicious."
In general the program has been very successful. With a 100
percent safety record for escort service and an unblemished record
of satisfied clients, according to Adams, the program receives few
complaints.
But the CSO program does have its critics.
Recently there has been controversy with the use of female
escorts, who compose about 20 percent of the staff. Some people
needing escorts feel women are not qualified for the job, officers
said.
"An older woman was upset that her escort was a female officer,"
Adams said. "We told her we didn’t differentiate between
genders."
Other people have requested male escorts specifically and then
refused an escort when only a female was available, said Andrew
Ikeda, a special events CSO coordinator.
Additionally, there have been minor accusations of community
service officers abusing their relationship with the police
department. In the past, there were incidents in which officers
illegally parked without getting ticketed, Adams said, assuring
that it is no longer a problem.
Though the program has grown, demand has lessened in the last
few years. CSOs were called upon most in the mid 1980s, some
said.
"The heyday of the CSO program was about 10 to 15 years ago,"
Pak said. On a typical night we would escort about 150 people a
night. Now it’s more like 20 to 50 escorts."
Ikeda argued that this could be due to several factors,
including that the evening van services have become much more
popular with students in the last few years.
"People would rather ride than walk," Ikeda said.
Additionally, Ikeda suggested that people are less worried to
walk around campus alone at night. Violent crimes have gotten less
publicity and people have a false idea of the safety of campus late
at night, he said.
However, community service officers noted a correlation between
news reports of violent crime and student demand for escorts.
Whenever a violent crime gets a lot of press, the number of escort
requests soar, Pak said.
And students might have something to be concerned about, Pak
said.
"People don’t understand that at any given moment, there will be
about 65,000 people on campus and not all are students … there
are all sorts of sickos out there," he said.
Women need to be more careful than men, judging from past
incidents, Pak pointed out. A few months ago, Pak caught a man
looking up women’s skirts in the University Research Library. He
radioed police who came in and arrested the suspect, who turned out
to be a UCLA ethnomusicology professor.
Other times he has caught students pasting mirrors to the end of
their shoes to look up women’s skirts, Pak added.
Besides incidents involving women, officers said they have seen
other strange scenarios.
In one recent case a 71-year-old physician at the Center for
Health Sciences was caught and arrested after repeatedly bashing a
rival physician’s Porsche. The physician was caught by the CSO
bicycle patrol and then arrested by university police.
The CSO bicycle patrol, a new branch of the program, has helped
cut in half car thefts and burglaries, according to officers. With
its several branches, officers maintain the CSO program helps keep
the campus safe.
"The UCLA campus is like a small city," Pak said. "Some people
who enter don’t have all their faculties."
NIMA BADIEY
Albert Woo (standing on the right), a second-year English
student, and other community service officers patrol Parking
Structure 1.