The Recent External Review of SLU’s Department of Public Safety

10/08/2021

Dear members of the SLU community,

I want to thank the more than 100 people who met with an external review team in July who came to help us conduct an external review of our Department of Public Safety. That report is finished and I am eager to share it with you.

As many of you know, we invited the Riseling Group, led by Sue Riseling, longtime Associate Vice Chancellor and retired Chief of Police from the University of Wisconsin, and her team to campus for their site visit and interviews with stakeholders from all three St. Louis campuses. Prior to that, we supplied the team with policies and other documents that were critical to their review. The main goal of this review was to get outside, expert eyes on our policies and practices as we work to understand our opportunities within DPS.

We shared the report with our DPS colleagues last week and President Pestello, Provost Lewis and I then met with them to answer their questions, hear their ideas and, frankly, to thank them for their work during a particularly difficult few weeks on campus. I have learned from Provost Lewis that sharing such external review reports (such as those conducted for academic programs) with the entire community has not been the norm at SLU. However, given the importance of DPS to our community, we thought it important to share the results with everyone. Going forward, we plan to expand how we share the details of external reviews because we understand transparency is a key step towards building trust and inclusive excellence. 

You can review the full report here (Note: You must be logged into your SLU Google Suite account to access the full report), but I want to highlight a few of the recommendations from the Riseling Group in this message.

This fall, Provost Lewis and I will name a group of campus stakeholders to serve on a working group to help us implement the recommendations that make sense for SLU, thinking creatively and acting collaboratively in the process. This will be a working group of students, faculty and staff. We will launch this group during the fall so SLU’s next Assistant Vice President for Public Safety can be involved in the early stages of the working group. We expect to have this new leader named before Thanksgiving.

Key Details from the Recommendations

• Review and update the use-of-force policy to include de-escalation
• Start exploring the adoption of body cameras
• A complete review of the field training officer program
• Hire additional supervisors for patrol operations and additional dispatchers so there are at least two people working in the dispatch office at all times
• Have senior-level discussions about salaries within DPS and how to address increases to improve retention
• Conduct a review of department turnover and hiring practices and develop strategies for recruitment
• Improved marketing and communications around DPS that increases a mutual understanding of what the department does, personifies the officers and increases community engagement
• Consider separating the Clery Act compliance officer and emergency preparedness into two separate positions, and having the Clery Act work happen under the Office of Compliance

We look forward to working with you, our partners, to carry this work forward. And we thank the Riseling Group for the many conversations they participated in to make this work possible.

Please email studev@slu.edu with any questions.

Sincerely, 
Sarah

Sarah Cunningham
Vice President for Student Development