RSS
|
Mobile
|
Daily Emails
|
We Twitter
| Make us your home page
Blinn College will spend $70,000 for radios that will allow campus police officers to communicate with their neighboring counterparts, but it will be more than a year before the new system is in place.
In the interim, Blinn police Chief Claud Free said, he plans to meet with fellow police department leaders in Bryan and College Station and at Texas A&M University.
The news comes after Blinn police officials acknowledged last week that they had no way of communicating with officers from other departments when the path of an escaped jail inmate led to the Bryan campus.
But Free said Friday that he didn't expect major developments or changes because the police captains who oversee the Bryan and Brenham campuses seem "fairly satisfied" with their resources.
"There is concern that we need to modernize and move forward and do the best job we can protecting our students and faculty and staff. I believe we're on a fast pace on that," Free said. Administrators have not turned down any reasonable request he has made since coming on board six months ago, he said.
"These issues, they're not going to go away. We have the safety and concerns of all the people at the highest right now and all the time. This is something we're not putting on the back burner and haven't put on the back burner."
The new 800 MHz radios will operate on the Brazos Valley Wide Area Communication System, a network that will link six area agencies -- the Bryan, College Station Brenham and Texas A&M University police departments and the Brazos and Washington county sheriff's departments.
The infrastructure for the system is being funded by a $2.8 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security, according to Ron Mayworm, radio system engineer for the city of Bryan and interim project director. The Blinn College Police Department plans to buy a similar radio system and piggyback onto the system, which also will be linked to Harris County.
It likely will be a year before the infrastructure is installed, Mayworm said, adding that area officials had been working on the grant for nearly two years. Ultimately, he said, the goal is to obtain enough funding to extend the project to Burleson, Robertson, Grimes, Madison and Leon counties.
The new system will allow for both internal and external department communication. Currently, the six agencies involved have limited officer-to-officer communication, Mayworm said.
Blinn officers currently communicate via a basic two-way repeater system that Free said is common among smaller agencies. Bryan police donated to Blinn a mobile radio station that allows dispatchers from the two agencies to communicate, but Blinn police don't have officer-to-officer communication with surrounding agencies, the chief said.
Available resources
It has been a week since 44-year-old Patrick Bigelow -- an escaped inmate whom police described as armed and dangerous -- apparently robbed two College Station banks and then ditched a stolen Suburban in the parking lot of the Blinn campus in Bryan before taking a cab to Houston, where he was arrested.
Though police don't believe Bigelow lingered on the campus and no students were hurt, Blinn officials faced scrutiny after the incident because they didn't notify students of the potential danger.
Texas A&M activated its Code Maroon emergency warning system, sending out 30,000 text messages and 20,000 e-mails around 10 a.m., about an hour after the first robbery. The messages warned of the two incidents and provided a description of the robber.
Blinn trustees authorized administrators in May to begin requesting proposals for such a system. But the campus doesn't have one in place. So when Bryan police found the vehicle in the Blinn parking lot about 11 a.m., college administrators and members of the campus critical incident response team were notified, but students and faculty were not.
Blinn officials said last week that they decided against a door-to-door classroom notification because it didn't appear that there was an imminent threat to anyone's safety.
Six officers are stationed at the Bryan campus, eight in Brenham. Though it is significantly smaller, the Washington County campus has a greater police presence because it has residence halls and, thus, students on campus at all times. The Brazos County site, Free said, is considered a commuter campus, which means the facilities usually are empty late at night and on the weekends.
As a general rule, Free said, Blinn police are instructed to call surrounding police or sheriff's departments for help any time a major incident occurs on either campus. Both Bryan and Brenham assign a captain to their campus, and that person would decide if students, faculty and staff need to "shelter in place."
The captains also have the authority to activate the critical incident response team, members of which undergo monthly training and would be responsible for door-to-door notification in an emergency. There are no hard and fast rules for activating the team or issuing a shelter-in-place order because each situation is different. The chief said he depends on the judgment of his captains, both seasoned law officers.
After issuing the order, the captain is required to report to Free. But he does not have to seek prior authorization because doing so could waste time during an emergency, the chief said.
"The rule of thumb is err on the side of caution. If you think you need them, call them out," Free said. "Something can happen, and 15 seconds later the whole thing can change for the better or the worse."
Free said he also had a rule preventing his officers from locking down the campus. Research and training has indicated that such a move could end up locking an attacker or shooter inside, giving him or her control over the building and any people who might be inside, he explained.
The chief said he had been working to schedule training for his officers with area tactical teams. Soon, Blinn officers in Brenham will undergo building searches with Brenham police, and Free said he hoped to conduct the same training in Bryan. The biggest problem, he said, is finding a time when the campus buildings are vacant.
A campus abuzz
Despite the lack of formal notification, the campus seemed abuzz Monday afternoon with news of the robberies. But even with police converging in the corner of the parking lot, many students had no idea that the man for whom police were searching had parked and left his car just yards away.
Blinn student Jesse Rosas, 20, had just finished his technical writing final and was walking through the parking lot to his car when he discovered it was surrounded by police. He wondered what he might have done wrong.
"I'm actually parked right next to him," Rosas said Monday afternoon, explaining that officers told him it would be an hour before he could get his car out of the crime scene. "It's such a coincidence. I couldn't help but laugh about it. It's just ridiculous."
Rosas said the white Suburban wasn't there when he arrived on campus shortly after 8 a.m. It wasn't until he was preparing to take his final almost four hours later that he heard about the robberies. Though no one knew then that the car had been left at Blinn, several of the women in his class were worried and even insisted on locking the classroom door, he said.
Other students weren't even aware of the crime spree that made a pit stop nearby. Classmates Stephanie Sams and Bradley Pointon, both 22 and enrolled in both A&M and Blinn, spent Monday morning in the library, studying for a final. Though they on campus for hours, neither had heard about the robberies or the manhunt.
Both said they didn't understand why there were no warning signs posted on doors or administrators stationed in common areas to answer questions.
"It'd be nice to have someone out here letting people know, even if the guy is gone," said Sams. "Who cares if he is gone? He could come back."
Free said Blinn officers were notified that the Suburban had been found in their parking lot shortly after it was discovered by Bryan police. As soon as it was confirmed as the vehicle in question, Blinn officers started combing the parking lot looking for Bigelow, the chief said.
During the search, they learned that a police dog had traced the man's scent to the edge of the campus, he said.
"We had just started going through -- without causing panic -- the buildings," Free said. "That's when they realized there was a high probability that he was no longer in that area."
Free wouldn't speculate on whether the Bryan police captain should have activated the emergency response team or ordered students to remain in buildings. Nor would he say what he might have done facing the same scenario.
"You're asking me something I can't do. That's like talking about a football game Monday morning," Free said, noting that federal, state and local authorities had converged on the campus that afternoon and all seemed relatively sure Bigelow wasn't on the campus. "That would really be a hard call to make."
• To read a message from the Blinn College president regarding emergency preparedness and communication, go to www.blinn.edu.
• Holly Huffman's e-mail address is holly.huffman@theeagle.com.
