Ohio State’s Undergraduate Student Government president and vice president said they will prioritize student safety throughout their tenure. Credit: Hannah Herner | Lantern File Photo

Ohio State’s Undergraduate Student Government president and vice president said they will prioritize student safety throughout their tenure. 

USG Vice President Anna Valerius said she and President Jacob Chang’s goal is to empower students to learn how to defend themselves with campus resources, opposite the university’s strategy of increasing policing efforts. The organization is speaking with students to see how requests around safety measures from different student organizations can be combined to ensure everyone’s beliefs are validated and protected, she said. 

“How do we remove and add different things to figure out what that looks like, creating the best picture for everybody as best as possible?” Valerius, a fourth-year in political science, said. “It’s so many, so many people at this university from so many different backgrounds, so we have to do that very intentionally, just to make sure that it’s as balanced as possible.” 

University President Kristina M. Johnson announced an update to Ohio State’s plan to combat crime Aug. 27 — including adding light towers and cameras along sidewalks and increasing police presence and crime patrols in the campus area. 

Chang, a fourth-year in political science and psychology, said he and Valerius will be speaking with university officials in the coming weeks to advocate for more safety measures. These include an increase in lighting and Blue Light Emergency Phones on and off campus, asking campus-area landlords to utilize home cameras and university-provided safety devices and access to toolkits with mace, pepper spray, flashlights and more. 

The Office of Student Life Off-Campus and Commuter Student Services offers safety devices such as window and door alarms, smoke alarm batteries and light timers.

Chang said USG is also looking into increasing non-police community patrols off campus to maintain security while ensuring marginalized groups feel safe on campus. The organization is also looking into collaborating with the Student Wellness Center to offer more self-defense courses for students. 

Various organizations — including the Black Abolitionist Collective of Ohio, Students for a Democratic Society at Ohio State, Young Democratic Socialists at Ohio State and 614 Community Cop Watch — signed a statement Monday demanding a decreased police presence on and off campus due to the impact it has on marginalized students, staff and faculty. 

According to the statement, Johnson’s solution of increasing police presence to decrease crime in the off-campus neighborhood is “a band-aid over the university’s decades of negligence to student, staff and faculty safety,” and continues to show how Ohio State fails to consider the impact of its policies on marginalized communities. 

The statement also calls on the university to reduce the police presence and invest in more alternative methods of public safety.

“Students have been calling for administrators to reimagine public safety and divest from CPD for well over a year, but it has been consistently ignored,” the organizations stated. “Instead, the university has opted to ‘improve community relations’ with police, including the recent implementation of the ‘Coffee with a Cop’ program.”

University spokesperson Ben Johnson said public safety is multifaceted and police are only part of the answer. The university will implement several measures to ensure the community is safe — including the light towers and surveillance cameras. 

“We’re happy to continue talking to people. We expect to continue talking to people,” Ben Johnson said. “This has to be a collaborative effort where everyone is involved.”

University Police Chief Kimberly Spears-McNatt acknowledged the concern for students, particularly those of color, resulting from an increased police presence in a press conference Wednesday. She said police deployment is not the only action the university has taken to address safety. 

Chang said he and Valerius are also working to ensure public safety notices do not identify the victim in any manner, after a university public safety notice revealed the race of the suspects in September 2020. 

Valerius said she and Chang want the university to acknowledge that the content of public safety notices can be scary for students. She said USG advocated for the list of resources included at the end of notices to ensure students know where to reach out after reading of a crime that might have occurred in their vicinity 

“That’s something we want to focus on, making sure that students are being heard and how they’re feeling is being acknowledged,” Valerius said. 

Valerius said her and Chang’s process in reforming safety is deliberate, in order to ensure their plans make a lasting impact at the university. 

“It’s a slow process, and we’re OK with having that time if it’s worth it in the long run,” Valerius said.