Logan Casey, member of the Class of 2022, spoke to senators at SGA’s final general meeting for the year about his concern that the organization did not properly advertise its resolution on arming the Suffolk University Police Department (SUPD) before it was passed in a 23-11 vote on April 4.
The resolution recommends that Suffolk University arm its sworn police officers who have successfully passed psychological evaluations and firearm trainings. It will go to a vote with the Board of Trustees in June.
“I understand that it’s incredibly hard to get people to interact with [SGA]… but with such a large and momentous resolution that has huge implications for Suffolk, I really didn’t see and I’m still questioning why more people don’t know about this,” said Casey during the meeting.
Casey told the senators that the first time he heard about the resolution was on the front page of The Suffolk Journal after it had been voted on. While Casey commended SGA for holding a forum with SUPD about arming the force in February, and publishing several surveys to collect data on whether or not students wanted SUPD to be armed, he said that the advertising of these events and surveys did not reach enough of the student body, including himself.
“The problem that I see is that Suffolk, specifically SGA, made a vote and passed a resolution that didn’t necessarily look at the full Suffolk community and it didn’t necessarily take into account everyone’s opinion,” said Casey.
Casey also said the surveys only represented a small portion of the student body, as the survey sent to students by SGA during the 2018 spring semester was only answered by about 1/5 of the student body, and did not include the Class of 2022.
While some senators said during the meeting that they agreed SGA should have advertised the resolution, the SUPD forum and the surveys better, Kostas Loukos, Class of 2021 senator and author of the resolution, disagreed.
“Fifty-four percent of the people who took the time to vote in that survey said that they were in favor of it,” said Loukos during the meeting. “If [students] don’t take the time to go into [their] inbox and vote in a survey, to me that seems like [these students] don’t care [about the resolution].”
Loukos said the resolution was effectively advertised as he ensured the status of the resolution was mentioned in the minutes of many SGA general meetings, which are posted on SGA’s social media. He also said information about the SUPD forum and when SGA would vote on the resolution was shared on social media by SGA and many of the senators.
Lukas Phipps, commuter student senator-at-large, said SGA should do its best to serve and communicate with the students as effectively as it can.
“We’re not going to go back to the old conversation [about whether or not to arm SUPD],” said Phipps at the meeting. “We have the new conversation. With the new conversation, we can have new ideas and maybe new protocol.”
