DAN QUAGLIANA
Managing Editor
Photo by DAN QUAGLIANA | Managing Editor
Prior to last week, there were only two ways you would see University Police (UP) officers around campus: walking or in a patrol car.
Now, you’ll see them on bikes, as well.
On April 23, SUNY Fredonia’s University Police Department debuted bicycle patrols, meaning students will now see uniformed officers patrolling around on bicycles.
Currently, there’s three UP officers who are trained as bicycle patrols, but the department has plans to increase that number.
University Police Officer Scott Richards explained that to become certified for bicycle patrol, officers have to go to a state-run school. In Western New York, that school is hosted at the University at Buffalo every summer.
The bike patrol project has been in the works for about a year, and according to Richards, the three bike patrol officers on campus were extremely helpful to the department in allowing for such a short time from conception to debut.
“The three officers that are bike patrol-trained actually had bike patrols at the SUNYs that they came from … I came from [Buffalo State University] and it was a really big program. We probably had 20 bike patrol officers,” Richards said.
University Police expects to see “a lot better visibility of officers. The patrol car kind of acts as like a barrier — you see a cop car go by, and sometimes you can’t even see in the windows. This will be a lot more of a community policing-oriented type of patrol where that barrier is removed. It puts officers more in line with the community.”
Richards said that bikes are a “better mode of transportation” than cars for a campus the size of Fredonia.
“This gives a hybrid where you have the versatility of walking, getting between buildings, getting into parking lots, things like that, where you can better observe things, but it also has a little more speed than walking. It kind of puts the two of them together,” he remarked.
Richards claimed that officers could detect things better on bicycles than in cars, and how riding bicycles offer response times that are just as fast as if they were in a patrol car, with the added maneuverability of being able to quickly travel between buildings and down sidewalks.
“It’s really good for detecting property crimes,” Richards said. “Car break-ins, bikes being stolen… [car thieves] are looking for patrol cars. Sometimes the bike is overlooked, and you can detect things a little better that way.”
The department’s bikes are equipped with flashing lights in the back and headlights in the front, allowing them to be used at night. “This campus is pretty well-lit, so … there’s no reason why you can’t” use the bikes on a night patrol, according to Richards.
“We’re very excited about bringing this to the campus,” he said. “Students will be able to see the officers a bit more personally, because our whole goal … is to have everybody who goes to school here, everybody who works here realize that we’re a part of that community. We’re not aside from it, we’re not overlooking it, we’re part of it. This will help remove that barrier of the car and get us out there and talk[ing] to people.”
Richards mentioned that during his inaugural ride, he was stopping every so often and talking to people around campus — something that’s “hard to do when you’re driving a car down the road.”