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Credit: Photo by Nick Romanenko
CSO trainees from Rutgers-Newark march
in file on their way to a traffic safety
lesson
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“Training and constant reinforcement of their responsibility to simply observe and report limits the involvement of students and prioritizes their safety,” Kohl said.
The students, who are all undergraduates, will not be chasing perpetrators through backyards or in cars, because they are not authorized to do so. As Officer Washington told them, “For less than 10 bucks an hour, it’s not worth it for you to get your block knocked off.”
Nor will they be dusting fingerprints at a crime scene or defusing explosives. Still, they have to learn some fundamental things about weapons of mass destruction, like isolating people if there are signs of a biological attack or not using a handheld radio in the vicinity of a suspected bomb.
“I didn’t really know what application that [WMDs] had to our jobs,” said student officer trainee Daniel Miller, a political science major at Rutgers-Newark. “It wouldn’t have crossed my mind before, but there are all sorts of packages moving in and out of this university.” Retired Deputy Chief Thomas Giordano, who taught the WMD segment, reminded the trainees about two small bombs found in the Mabel Smith Douglass Library in 1995.
Rutgers Police Officers Washington and Bryant Myers demonstrated how the officers should compose themselves when interviewing a potentially hostile suspect. It’s harder, Myers said, to push a person over if he or she is standing at a 45-degree angle to the attacker with legs spread apart.
The path of least resistance is most important. Commander Dan Pascale, a security officer and head of the student CSO program, said the students are armed with only “a flashlight, a radio, and their minds.”
“That’s really the key thing in any situation,” Pascale said. “Keeping yourself in a safe position.”
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