Chancellor Gora’s new Public Safety Advisory Board is an encouraging sign that tensions between campus police and UMass Boston community members will now have a forum for resolution.

The board was mostly formed in reaction to last year’s heated argument between an Africana Studies professor, Tony Van Der Meer, and a National Guard recruiter that resulted in the professor being tackled and arrested by campus police while the recruiter casually left the campus. The incident left many students and faculty feeling unsafe on campus, but, more importantly, it left them feeling fearful of the campus police.

Hearing board members, like Carroy Ferguson who is a CPCS professor and advocate of community policing, say, “What brought me here is the way that a human face can be put on those involved,” is a heartening sign. One of the biggest factors in last spring’s incident alone is that the campus police didn’t know who the professor was and vice versa. He continued to say, “A true community policing model is when people in the community know the police as people.”

Everyone recognizes that the campus police are people just like us, but until there is a forum created for us to get to know these individuals, it will be hard to see their faces beyond their uniforms. One idea brought forward in the initial meeting was to assign officers to specific colleges. In that case, people would be more likely to get to know the officer in their respective college, and that could lead to a lessening of tension between officers and the community. However, UMB is a small campus, as Phil O’Donnell, interim director of Public Safety, pointed out, so if our officers were required to sit in one college all week long then we would probably begin to see a higher turnover rate among them. The idea as it stands is not perfect, but at least it’s moving in the right direction.

Perhaps one of the more frustrating aspects of last year’s incident for UMB community members was that there was no apparent system in place for us to assess the actions of all who were involved. Many people seemed to feel that something off beam had happened beyond the professor’s actions, but only the professor was punished for his involvement. Too many questions were left unanswered, like why was the professor singled out between the two men and why was the recruiter allowed to leave without our public safety officers questioning him? These questions, coupled with the dozen or more testimonies given by witnesses, call for critical review of the actions taken last spring by the officers involved. The creation of a public safety oversight committee or the installation of a more transparent investigation process within the department would build trust and ease minds. There needs to be a direct line between the public safety department and the community, as well as between the chancellor and the community, in order to resolve such problems on campus.

With Van Der Meer’s court hearing coming up in early November, many UMB community members are still looking to the administration to take decisive measures in conflict resolution related to the public safety department. Building community and alleviating fears on this campus are not an easy tasks and will not happen quickly, the Public Safety Board is a step forward in tackling this sociological problem.