Following ASU’s football victory over the U of A Wildcats last Saturday night, ASU decided to allow students to purchase tickets for the PAC-12 Championship. Obviously, emotions are pretty high amongst the student populous, and everyone converged upon Wells Fargo Arena in a rush to purchase tickets. After several hundred students (well over a thousand, easily) swarmed WFA, ASU decided to shut down ticket sales, which ignited the crowd. The students at WFA began throwing barriers, fighting, and one of our own was assaulted.
As if the horrible planning on behalf of the university wasn’t enough of an insult, the appalling staffing levels ASUPD displayed at this event should do the trick. Low staffing in ANY situation is bad, but having a couple of officers to manage several hundred angry students IS NOT ACCEPTABLE. The sad thing is several additional officers were pulled from on-duty patrol, which means if something massive were to break out elsewhere, ASUPD would be unable to respond.
If something more serious had happened, has ASUPD even given its officers adequate enough training to be able to respond to the situation? Several other major universities–Ohio State University, Michigan State University, University of Georgia–all have Special Response Teams (SRT) specially trained in riot/crowd control, among other things. Why? Because they’ve had riots or other major incidents on campus they’ve had to respond to. We’re not suggesting ASUPD should form an SRT team soon (there is no staffing!!), but it should be included in future plans of the department as the university grows.
Bottom line: ASUPD should NOT place its officers KNOWINGLY into a situation where the officer must rely on a “nothing will happen!” mentality. This is NOT a realistic, safe, or stable strategy. You are running a bare-bones operation at THE COST OF YOUR EMPLOYEES’ SAFETY! It does not take any formal training in law enforcement for a REASONABLE person to observe that the aforementioned scenario is bad!!
We are glad the officer involved is OK, and relieved the situation was not worse, but we are concerned about how quickly ASUPD’s predicament is turning ugly. We should NOT have to wait and find out how much more violence will transpire before ASUPD removes Chief Pickens.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcK35ZZyVAA
Without overtime units on scene this call could have went south quick. This is reason #101 why our department needs a command overhaul. Some naysayers will read this and go yeah, yeah, people want to hate the man, the boss, but this isn’t the case. Police departments don’t have “hate the man, fight the power” types by nature. Pickens, Hardwhiner, and the bratty bunch will lie once again to their bosses at the Fulton Center blaming a few disgruntled employees. Tired of lies? We sure the hell are.
The ONLY command staff members who have any idea about employee morale and working issues are the ones who brought positive work models from previous police departments, that’s 2 out of 8 people and one is not Chief John Pickens. Most are sucking up valuable resources sitting in meetings to discuss what happened to all the people they drove out of the department because they were sick of their shit.
The command brought up through ASUPD are useless tools with nodding heads that piss of good people, good employees one after another fleeing to other departments. It’s a brain drain and it’s another kick in the pants for morale that nearly DOA. They have no idea how much contempt the majority of the department has for them because of their behavior. The previous post on IA’s should be the first round of cuts, all those worst offender types need pink slips for the damage they have done to the agency.
A police department doesn’t need a house full of asswipe bosses who hold them in contempt as they try to keep a team environment intact and patrol a campus. Most of us have given up on this, it’s not worth it anymore, and it’s much easier just to leave. There is no team, that point has past, we have a bunch of individuals, and that makes us weak as a whole. Compare our police department to the next largest university, compare our department to puny half-sized U of A, their department kicks ours to third tier.
Nobody will stay with this command intact. This is a fact playing itself out right now with six officers leaving at a time, more before that and more on their way out. Even if all the employees here are replaced this command will ruin the new ones too, guaranteed. This is an undeniable fact. You have a chief who listens to nobody, ignores professional law enforcement advisors again and again, and he has surrounded himself with bell hop self-promoted puppet heads who bring nothing to the table but agreement with failed policies.
To the fat headed, log swallowing, Kool-Aid chugging ego maniac freaks who spout off the same old “Love it or leave it!” bullshit…get ready to suck it. You said it and people are calling your bluff thanks to your chest puffed hot air self-serving bravado. It’s costing us a lot of good WORKING people and hopefully nobody gets hurt because of their absence. You will be safe holed up in the station while we run into the call until we leave, then you can answer the next riot call by yourself without staffing, without backup. We are sick and tired of fighting the people we work for who are supposed to support us, not look down on us with contempt and shit on us. The warriors are leaving because the flunkie command is staying.
It’s only going to get worse because we have less and less staffing making us woefully unprepared to fulfill our obligations to the community. The Fulton Center, ASUPD command, nobody is doing anything to address the growing problem waiting for it to become a crisis.
Officers want to be respected by their leaders and have leaders worthy of their respect. Nobody seems to get this simple truth. I’m glad we got the new badges, patches, that the uniform committee put together. Quick! Call Tempe! should be stickers on the cars and embroidered on the patches. It’s a shame they didn’t work on a relevant issue…
We dodged a bullet here because overtime units were available and Tempe was there. This story could have been much different had these temporary resources not been available.