Suffolk University Resident Assistants hold many responsibilities in Suffolk’s dorm halls: Above all, maintaining student safety. Some RAs are questioning whether the Board of Trustees had that in mind when deciding to arm the Suffolk Police Department.
“To be pretty honest, I was gobsmacked,” said Christian Mack, a junior and an RA in Miller Hall.
Suffolk President Marisa Kelly sent an email April 24 to faculty and staff announcing that the Board had approved a resolution in favor of arming on April 19.
“We do not want armed officers on our residential floors except in certain very specific and dangerous situations,” Kelly said in the email.
As the university begins to reimagine campus safety in the dorms, Mack is struggling to see why a firearm would be needed in a residence hall in any circumstance.
“This isn’t just a decision about SUPD, it now becomes whether or not the RAs want to make a call to bring a firearm into the situation being dealt with,” Mack said. “I’ve dealt with some pretty crazy stuff this year, but none of it was something I had even considered bringing a firearm into.”
Mack said he believes SUPD officers need to be retrained as he feels officers already handle situations they are called into with more hostility than necessary.
“I’ve even had to de-escalate an officer in a situation with another resident. I had to tell the two of them to calm down and even then it was just like, we were just asking this person questions. And [the officer] was getting really frustrated. So I would want to see a complete redo of their social training,” Mack said.
Smith Hall RA Danny Metri, a sophomore, was dissatisfied with the delivery of the Board’s decision and the lack of details that have been announced surrounding the implementation plan.
“What’s been the problem the whole time is that they’ll say, ‘Oh nothing’s confirmed, the vote is only about whether or not we’re arming and then we will figure out the details later.’ To me that’s a problem, the details should be a huge part of the discussion while the Board is still having the vote,” Metri said.
Mack said parties and mental health crises are the two most common circumstances where an SUPD officer is required.
“I don’t really see a way that a firearm would be brought into that and de-escalation be considered in the same sentence. I think it kind of just ramps up [the situation] as SUPD is already pretty intimidating with just their presence alone,” Mack said.
During Suffolk’s Student Government Association meeting April 25, members of SGA brought up concerns about SUPD being equipped with body cameras once they are armed.
Sara Tibbetts, residence life senator-at-large, expressed that the presence of body cams might further deteriorate the comfortability of a situation between RAs and their residents.
“Several of my residents already don’t want to talk to SUPD or even talk to me about certain things happening in their life, and if they have an SUPD officer walking in, first of all with a gun and second of all with a body cam where everything that the resident is now sharing to the officer is [now accessible by the public],” Tibbetts said.
Metri said that once SUPD is armed, he will monitor situations that he brings SUPD into much more closely than he has in the past.
“There’s going to be a lot less situations where I’m OK with just being like, ‘All right, SUPD can take it from here,’” Metri said. “I’m a lot less comfortable leaving situations up to them completely.”
RAs and two out of 29 members of the Board held a forum March 20 for RAs to express their opinions.
“I told the two of them at the end of the meeting, I said, ‘If it’s not an imposition, I would seriously suggest you put more weight on what was said here today and take these notes back and really emphasize this to the rest of the board because we do interact with SUPD the most often,’ and everybody at that meeting didn’t think that they were well equipped enough to handle a firearm,” Mack said.
Mack took the forum as an opportunity to make sure his and his fellow RAs voices were heard, but still feels like it fell short, and Metri agrees.
“I feel like we were pretty clear about our concerns about this and about how much more difficult it would make our job,” Metri said.
News Editor Maren Halpin contributed to this reporting.
