Cal State Long Beach President F. King Alexander and Vice President of Student Services Douglas Robinson addressed campus safety issues at the Associated Students Inc. Senate meeting Wednesday.
“As you know, we have had a number of campus incidents that have hit all at once,” Alexander said. “Campuses are places where people can linger and lurk. They always have been all over the United States.”
He told the Senate that the campus is not immune to the surrounding area, adding, “Within about five miles of our campus, just about everything occurs.”
Alexander said he is an advocate of adding video cameras to parking lots and structures on campus and he supports increasing lighting in vulnerable areas. He said some areas he is concerned with are the South Turnaround because the path to the University Library from there is poorly lit, behind the Steve and Nini Horn Center and along Bellflower Boulevard.
“[Bellflower Boulevard is] pitch black,” he said. “On a dark night, it’s just ominous, and then we’ve got all that vacant land right there where anything can happen. But we’re really going to have to work closely with the city to kind of pony up because that’s theirs.” Alexander said the campus is usually below average in most areas of crime, with car thefts being the main exception.
“But we also don’t have a very high proportion of our students living on campus either, and as we get more students living on campus, better lighting and all these things would be necessary anyway,” he said. “As the university matures and doubles the number of students living on campus, we increase the number of issues we have to confront.”
Robinson concurred with Alexander.
“I think this is a snapshot of the future and how diligent we have to be, especially in the area of security,” Robinson said.
He said the university will keep additional security personnel patrolling the residence areas until it sees fit to call them off.
“[The criteria for ending the patrols] would be, I think, a local comfort with our students and with our faculty and staff, that [the patrolling] is not needed,” Robinson said.
Alexander added, “I certainly, short-term, don’t see any backing away from that.”
After Alexander and Robinson left, the Senate discussed impending legislation.
The Senate voted unanimously to approve the Comprehensive Government Elections Reform Act, which was introduced for consideration by ASI Vice President Hironao Okahana at the Nov. 8 meeting. According to Okahana, the act creates voluntary honor pledges and spending limits for students campaigning for positions in the student government. He said he hopes the act will show students that ASI promotes moral responsibility.
The Senate also approved a resolution initiated by Okahana. The “Proposed Amendments to Chapter 1: Public Empowerment and Democracy Act of 2007,” which changes the number of student signatures needed to recall a student officer or place an initiative on the ballot, will be decided by voters in an upcoming election.
Currently, the bylaws require that signatures from five percent of the student population are needed. If students approve this amendment, the number of signatures required will change to 10 percent of the number of voters from the last student government election.
Okahana said he wants this amendment to pass because he thinks the change will motivate student leaders to encourage more people to vote. Under the proposed amendment, low voter turnouts make it easier to recall elected officials.
The Senate will likely gain a new member at next week’s meeting. According to ASI Director Richard Haller, a student has been chosen to fill one of the two vacant seats for the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. She will likely be sworn in at the next meeting.
