USM Police have secured the ability to work outside of University property in Gorham under special circumstances and USM Police Chief Lisa Beecher says she is working to extend that arrangement to Portland and the other towns that lie between the two campuses. USM Police have since been called to assist Gorham Police on several occasions.
In the latest example of USM Police working alongside their counterparts in Gorham, a USM officer helped Gorham’s police chief, Ronald Shepard, pacify a bus full of violent high school students in Gorham on March 5. It was a busy day for the Gorham police – all of Shepard’s officers were already responding to other calls, so Shepard responded to the call personally. The new agreement with USM Police worked as transparently for him as it was meant to. “I was informed on the way [by Gorham’s dispatcher] that USM would be backing me up.”
USM routinely asks for help from the Gorham and Portland police. The town police show up each week on USM Police’s radio logs helping out when students got violent, intoxicated, avaricious or otherwise in need of police attention. They also provide a jail and a crime lab, which USM Police do not have.
“Up until this point,” said Shepard, “we needed to call Windham or Scarborough. If there’s an officer right on top of the hill, now we can use him.”
A mutual aid agreement allows a police force from one jurisdiction to “assist” the police in another jurisdiction, in other words, to act with the rights and responsibilities of a police officer in the neighboring territory. It took a long time to secure these agreements because state laws classify police forces into municipal, county and state jurisdictions. Even though University police forces have full police powers on campus, they are not mentioned in many laws, including the mechanism for forming mutual aid agreements. There are three university police forces in Maine. They serve UMS campuses at Farmington, Orono and here at USM.
The agreement, signed by USM President Richard Pattenaude and Gorham Town Manager David Cole, has worked well in Gorham because it serves both the University and the town. According to the document, Gorham was “desirous of obtaining additional law enforcement protection” and USM was “desirous of providing protection and other law enforcement services [in Gorham] for its own purposes.” USM Police will now be able to do their job to protect students when they leave the campus – for instance, to visit fraternities. USM Police guidelines attached to the agreement advise officers to fill out extra documentation when responding to “off-campus fraternities.”
The Gorham agreement allows USM Police to operate in that town only if they are asked to do so by Gorham’s dispatcher. If USM shapes a similar agreement with the Portland Police, officers in Portland Hall and other isolated USM property will have to make a call to the USM Police dispatcher before responding to crimes they see committed outside the building. Their dispatcher will, in turn, have to report the incident to the Portland police, who would then have to request assistance.
“It doesn’t fit everything we were hoping to do,” said Beecher. She said she plans to ask for a standing request from Portland Police to assist with policing certain areas, like the sidewalk in front of Portland Hall where a resident was hurt by a brick-throwing assailant last August. “Our whole reason for doing this is to be responsive,” she said.
John Bronson can be contacted at [email protected]