On Tuesday in Red Square, Georgetown Solidarity Committee students banged bongos, shook tambourines, stood on milk crates and shouted slogans. They were trying to raise awareness for the struggle of Department of Public Safety officers to receive better wages and benefits from the University. For all that they do to ensure our safety, the least DPS officers deserve is a fair wage, one that will meet the high cost of living in for the District of Columbia.
Currently, the starting pay for DPS patrol officers is around $12.50 an hour, too close to the $11 per hour a student employee at Yates Field House could earn in a part-time work-study job. Patrol officers at George Washington University receive around $15.18 an hour after seven weeks of work and campus safety officers at American University garner $15-17 an hour from the start. Allan Compagnon, the attorney representing the bargaining unit for DPS officers, asserts that wages paid to campus security have “fallen way behind other campuses” in the area.
Compagnon points to the tremendous turnover rate of patrol officers as a direct result of the poor pay given to DPS officers. Since January of 2006, 26 officers have left the force. Higher wages would mean both retaining more officers and attracting well-qualifed new ones. Loss of officers means more time spent training new hires, though such training is hardly adequate. All officers are required to attend a training academy within their first year on the job, but many officers simply never attend since they quit before the end of a year’s time.
Along with their demands for higher pay, DPS officers also seek to be equipped with bulletproof vests, mace and batons, equipment used by campus police at GW and American. Compagnon says that the University has already agreed to set up a committee to examine the feasibility of arming officers, but only after wage negotiations have been ironed out.
The University is wise to separate these rounds of negotiations because they should say “yes” to a wage hike and “no” to weapons. Arming DPS officers won’t make violence less likely, especially if they don’t go through appropriate training to know how to use weapons. DPS officers were badly hurt in last September’s Reiss brawl, but this was an isolated incident and adding more weapons into brawl would only have made it bloodier. Not to mention that another armed police force already works in Georgetown: the Metropolitan Police Department
The University should agree to raise DPS officers’ starting salary—so that they earn a fair wage and don’t leave their jobs. If not, the University may get a dose of GSC protests in the vein of the 2005 living wage campaign for workers, and all the fasting, tambourines and media attention that comes with it.
