Temple police and union battle tensions about transparency

Temple’s Police Association posted in mid-December that they were uncertain with the department’s future under its current leadership.

The Temple University Police Department has been dealing with significant turnover in the last two years. | JARED TATZ / THE TEMPLE NEWS

Updated Feb. 3 at 1:32 p.m. EST

On Dec. 10, the Temple University Police Association released a statement highlighting a list of grievances with the Department of Public Safety while also calling for “significant changes” to its leadership.

The union pointed to a high officer turnover rate and “deliberately withheld” communication to the community as reasons for concern.

The Temple University Police Department has shrunk by 55 officers in the past two years and only hired 13 new officers for a total of 41 officers coming into the Spring 2025 semester, according to TUPA. DPS has not confirmed these numbers and will not do so until an independent staffing study is completed.

Officers who left stated they were dissatisfied with the department’s overall direction, said TUPA Vice President Andrew Lanetti.

“We work together [with DPS] to try to figure things out, make this place a better place,” said Officer Sean Quinn, the president of TUPA. “The police work nowadays, the competition is unbelievable. Nobody wants to start, so to hire them you have to have things other places don’t. We don’t have all of that here.”

A January 2025 poll conducted by The Temple News found that 44% of surveyed students believe that TUPD does not have enough officers on or near campus to keep students safe.

“I’ve never used ‘downsizing’ as it means an intentional intent to make something smaller – we have no intentional intent of making the agency smaller,” said Vice President of Public Safety Jennifer Griffin. “The challenge was that recruitment and retention have decreased our numbers in that aspect.”

Prior to Griffin’s hiring, Temple assessed campus safety through an audit conducted by 21CP Solutions, a team of police leaders who help departments implement “21st Century Policing.” 

Out of the 75 policies that 21CP recommended to DPS, a few are still marked incomplete. They include tasks like “Improve Accessibility of TUPD Policies,” “Explore Creating a Disciplinary Matrix for Fair Corrective Action” and “Regularly Analyze Officer and Department Performance for Disproportionate Impacts.” 

Before winter break, President John Fry also announced an array of new changes, including a staffing study on the Department of Public Safety as part of the 21CP audit results. The result will include how many officers DPS should be staffing versus their current size, Griffin said.

Across Main Campus, the Health Sciences campus and Temple Ambler, TUPD officers respond to one to one-and-a-half complaints an hour during the academic year, Griffin said. Temple also has Philadelphia Police Department officers on supplementary patrols within TUPD’s coverage zone.

TUPD officers also work in congruence with agencies like PPD’s 22nd District, the Philadelphia Housing Authority police agency, SEPTA police, the state Liquor Control Enforcement agency and other organizations in Philadelphia. 

However, some officers believe the support isn’t enough to maintain a sense of security around Temple’s campuses, Lanetti said.

“When Chief Griffin talks about one to one and a half jobs per hour, it’s a slightly disingenuous number in and of itself, but just the fact that you’re trying to boil down policing to a numerical value is disingenuous,” Lanetti said. “Just our presence alone within a certain area can lower crime, so the more officers that we have, the lower crime could possibly be.”

Having more officers on duty for each shift can help with responding to each incident reported in the area, Lanetti said. If there is a robbery and three officers respond, then the rest of the officers on duty that night are short-staffed if they have to respond to a separate incident.

DPS’ staffing shrinkage follows a larger local trend and is not an issue exclusive to just TUPD. In 2024, PPD hired 369 officers and lost 500. The International Association of Chiefs of Police surveyed 1,158 U.S. agencies and found that the most common reason officers resigned from their department was for a higher salary at a different agency.

However, not all smaller departments have been on a decline.  An April 2024 Police Executive Research Forum survey of 214 departments showed that small and medium agencies are increasing their officer force to be larger than their January 2020 numbers.

TUPA outlined their grievances with staffing and department leadership in their Dec. 10 social media post. The most recent union contract was updated in the wake of former Temple Sgt. Christopher Fitzgerald’s murder in February 2023. The two sides will not return to negotiations until 2027.

TUPA’s claim of the department’s 41-police-officer patrol force implies that TUPD would have a smaller force compared to other university police departments. 

The police department at the University of Pennsylvania, which has 6,000 less full-time students than Temple, reported they employed 121 officers in 2023. The University of Pittsburgh’s law enforcement agency also reports around 100 commissioned officers, according to its website. Pitt enrolls a total of 33,771 as of Fall 2023, almost 3,000 more than Temple.

TUPA wrote in the December social media post that with the reduction in forces and a 12-hour shift model in place, there are an average of five patrol officers at a time within the patrol zone across Main Campus, Ambler and the Health Sciences campus. They also claim there has been a 40% reduction in police officers at the TUH campus. The Health Sciences Center campus reported a total of 232 non-Clery crimes in 2023, including 91 counts of harassment and 79 counts of theft. 

“Clery crimes,” or crimes universities are required to report under the Jeanne Clery Act, include homicide, aggravated assault, sexual assault, robbery and arson. Non-Clery crimes include hate crimes, alcohol or drug violations, conduct offenses and fraudulent activity.

“We want to see the area and the community that we serve become safer, but we need police officers for that, we need security officers,” Lanetti said. “And with those things comes the expansion of the university itself that’s been talked about publicly, from the new president on down. If expansion is going to happen, we need more police officers to serve the new areas.”

CORRECTION: 
This article previously stated that TUPA claimed TUPD had a 41-officer police force. TUPA had instead claimed the force contained 41 patrol officers. The article also misstated the function of PPD’s supplemental patrols within TUPD’s patrol zone. It has since been corrected.

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.


*