One of the important action steps identified as part of our campus effort to address systemic racism was the creation of a Task Force on Community Safety and Policing. This team, which convened in September 2020, was asked to examine the effectiveness of our University Police Department’s policies, protocols and community engagement strategies, and to do so with an equity lens.
The Task Force’s initial charge was to examine the critical safety issues of our campus and the roles UPD and other campus departments, student and community organizations, neighborhood associations and other groups have in ensuring an environment conducive to learning, racial justice and equity.
Today, I am pleased to share the Task Force’s final report. It is a comprehensive and thoughtful work, one that provides an important framework for addressing critical issues of campus safety and policing.
The work detailed in this report, a critical component of our broader efforts to address systemic racism and equity matters at SJSU, cannot be completed with any single report or initiative. My hope is that SJSU’s leadership will, as an ongoing priority, continue with deliberate, meaningful dialogue with students, faculty, staff and others in our campus community as we work to make SJSU a safe and welcoming place for all stakeholders as they travel to and from campus and go about their daily activities here.
So this report is not an endpoint. Instead, it represents the beginning of ongoing conversations with various subsets of our campus community on important issues of community safety on our campus. As such, it is a vital document that offers a variety of observations and recommendations, and I hope you will join me in reading the report and considering its insights.
Finally, I very much appreciate the work of our Task Force on Community Safety and Policing co-chairs and committee members in developing this report. I am grateful for the time, effort and energy they and many others continue to put forth to make our campus a better and more equitable place for all.
Sincerely,
Dr. Mary A. Papazian
President