“the bill makes no provision for transition. All SUNY security officers will become Police Officers by the stroke of a pen — even though they never qualified for the position of police officer by civil service examination. The fact is that many SUNY security officers became such because they could not qualify for appointment as Police Officers in police agencies.
“Our other concern pertains to the tendency of campus officials — and their security forces — to create their own standards for applying the State’s criminal laws on campus. As a practical matter, if SUNY security officers become SUNY police officers, other police agencies will be excluded from operating on campus — by custom, by protocol, and by the fact that limited budgetary resources will dictate that local police be deployed to areas that don’t already have their own police available. This will tend to exacerbate the town/gown dichotomy in our justice system. Campus police officers will inevitably be pressured by their campus administrations to ignore certain crimes, or to give certain students immunity from arrest — and the only current check on that, the presence of outside police agencies, will be gone. […]
“Our concern over this bill is increased by the fact that, under the bill, the SUNY police officers would be appointed by a member of the educational bureaucracy who is in no way accountable to the general citizenry. We have always argued that it is a very dangerous thing to give the state’s police powers to officers who are shielded from accountability to the public by multiple layers of appointed bureaucrats, none of whom are chosen by the electorate. The person who controls the police power must be directly accountable to the public or we run a great risk of losing our freedom.”
I think the NYS Sheriffs’ Association proved to be right about most, if not all, of their concerns - which extended to firearms and salaries as well.
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