When I was a student officer, 90 people or so were needed to monitor the football field, as well as other events. We took that over, and then a few years before that, we took over the security escort services as well. Where it was once one program, it soon became three programs, and it went from 90 employees to about 180.
How do you motivate student officers?
Shelow: It’s hard. It involves a great deal of energy, and you have to acknowledge up front that not everybody is going to have that energy. It’s not glamorous. We have to accept that the position is not right for some students, and we need to gradually allow them to move on. For those who do stay, we pay a little better.
We always are looking at our wages, and we always try to be 5 or 10 cents above what they’re paying in the dining halls or the other service industries. We also give them a uniform. It’s not a police uniform, but it is a light blue uniform that says auxiliary police with a patch. We give them a police radio and always integrate them with what is going on. It takes a considerable amount of work to do that, but I believe that’s how we’re able to be successful.
What types of training do the auxiliary officers go through?
Shelow: We’ve tried to develop some training programs that are both meaningful and contemporary. We’ve had leadership training for our supervisory staff. We’ve done some mutual respect and cultural diversity kinds of things for the entire work force. Some have been popular; others have not been as popular.
We’ve been asked to do self-defense, but my position on that is that we’d rather train the student work force to avoid those encounters rather than how to respond to them. We’d rather have them deal with ways to avoid those confrontations in the first place.
