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The chief of SUNY Fredonia police thinks the campus is very safe -- so safe, in fact, that it should be marketed to prospective students.
To kids from high-crime areas, "this is sort of Mayberry," Brent Isaacson said during a recent presentation on campus safety to the College Council. "There's a message there that I want to get out, that this is the place to come."
Isaacson said he had the numbers to back up his contention.
In his 3 1/2 years as top cop on campus, he said SUNY Fredonia has issued just two "timely warnings" to students of possible safety issues.
The first case was in 2021 when a non-campus resident got into a female dorm and allegedly stared at a few students while they were sleeping. The intruder was arrested and banned from campus. The second case was earlier this school year, when a student made a threat of bringing a gun to Thompson Hall. The student did not bring the weapon but was later banned from campus over the threat.
Issacson said police have found one weapon on campus in the last three years, when a student was caught with an expandable metal baton in his car.
He added there have been no physical injury crimes, aggravated assaults, robberies or hate crimes reported during his time on campus.
Isaacson is a former FBI behavioral analysis agent. He said he also uses his experience in violence prevention, and threat assessment and mitigation, in his SUNY Fredonia job.
"It's important, from my chair, that we focus on prevention," he said. "Let's do what we can to make sure those kinds of events never happen."
To that end, Isaacson and his department have trained more than 400 campus employees in looking for pre-attack indicators of violence.
"We're trying to build a community of upstanders where most people, most campuses, have communities of bystanders," he said.
SUNY Fredonia officers have interacted with students 831 times in 2022 in non-emergency circumstances, he continued. The goal is "to be seen and make those connections," he said.
Isaacson said there are 134 emergency phones, many with the distinctive "blue lights" that have marked call boxes on the campus since the mid-1980s. The blue light kiosks "were hardly ever used over the last five years," he said. "There's only been a couple real-world activations of those phones."
In addition, Isaacson said there are some 297 security cameras on campus. They cover 98% of the site.
The cameras "put Las Vegas to shame," he said. "The cameras on Maytum Tower can read license plates across the campus."
If the density of security cameras on campus was expanded to all of Fredonia, there would be 3,800 cameras in the village, he added.
College Council President Frank Pagano wanted to know more about the cameras' recordings. "We can go back for two months, we hold videos for two months before they overwrite," Isaacson said.
Isaacson said he wanted students to feel safe in reporting a fellow student who, for example, suddenly shows an interest in the 1999 Columbine High School shootings, or other mass murder events.
Council member Joann Niebel had several questions for Isaacson. She started with a query about online threats.
"It's a judgment call as to whether it's credible and imminent." Isaacson said. He noted that in the case of the Thompson Hall gun threat, "that's criminal. That's not protected speech."
However, he said cyberbullying is not necessarily a crime.
"We're not going to have legal authority to go to social media platforms," he said. "This is more of a campus culture issue, right? Our students are not very kind to each other on social media." Isaacson said it was "an opportunity and a challenge" to get students to be as nice to each online as they are in the real world.
Niebel also wondered how SUNY Fredonia officers were handling cannabis.
"I've told my officers, 'treat it like tobacco,'" Isaacson said. "For younger people there's more permissible possession laws for cannabis than tobacco. It's crazy."
He added that there have been a few unintentional overdoses on edibles, which surprised Pagano. "On marijuana?" he said. It was pointed out to him that edibles can be more potent than traditional cannabis that is smoked.
Isaacson's presentation could be seen as a reply to Niebel, who questioned the safety of students on campus at another council meeting earlier this year.
During his statement to close the most recent meeting, Pagano called SUNY Fredonia's campus "one of the safest places you could be in Chautauqua County and possibly New York State."