Randall West: UH-Manoa’s chief of public safety promotes aloha while working to keep the campus safe

Randall West has been in law enforcement for more than 35 years, serving as a police officer for cities such as Laguna and Anaheim, Calif., and also — as deputy chief of police — for the entire University of Washington campus system, based in Seattle.

Now he’s chief of the University of Hawaii at Manoa Department of Public Safety, which he joined in August, at the beginning of the current semester. UH is like a city itself, with “citizens” of the 320-acre, 278-building campus consisting of almost 19,000 students — about 3,000 of whom live there — and the 5,000 or so faculty and staff. It even has its own set of crime statistics, compiled under the federal Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act of 1965.

The latest report, released in September, showed crime on campus in 2015 was generally down or roughly stable compared with 2014, with the exception mainly of drug-related violations, which zoomed from 417 to 509. Burglaries increased from nine to 12, but were down significantly from 2013, when they reached 52.

West grew up in Westminster, Calif. He graduated from Westminster High School, then obtained a bachelor’s degree in organizational management from University of La Verne, in La Verne, Calif., and a master’s degree in criminal justice from Chapman University, in Orange, Calif. He has certifications from the state of California and the FBI, and has taught classes at University of Phoenix and Everest College. Just prior to coming to Hawaii, he had been a consultant to 3SI, a company that markets GPS tracking devices to financial and commercial institutions and law enforcement agencies.

West, 58, lives in Manoa. His wife is a registered nurse still in Washington who will join him soon. Their son, following in his father’s footsteps, is graduating in November from Washington state’s Basic Law Enforcement Academy, and will become an officer in Kirkland, Wash.

Question: What brought you to Hawaii? Did you know somebody here already?

Answer: Well, I knew the previous (UH-Manoa DPS) chief, Charlie Noffsinger. Charlie and I went to the FBI National Academy together back in 2006. So, when he came over here about three years ago now, I was kind of following his progress here. I was at the University of Washington, the deputy chief of police there. And as I wrapped up my time over at “U-dub,” he and I were talking about the possibility of my coming over here to help him with some of the work he was doing here. And then, lo and behold, he takes on another job (assistant vice president for university police and public safety at Pennsylvania State University) and leaves. So I didn’t get to come work with him. But I just continued the path and put in for his job once he vacated it (in April).

Q: How big is your staff?

A: It’s supposed to be about 50, but we’ve got about 10 vacancies right now that we’re trying to fill. … We have a safety staff here at the Manoa campus, and we’re also responsible for the John A. Burns School of Medicine and the Cancer Center over at Kakaako.

Q: Are any of your officers armed?

A: Right now we are not. We are a public safety agency and all of our folks are considered non-sworn, if you will. They’re not police officers. They don’t have powers of arrest like police officers.

Q: Is there a push to have that happen?

A: Well, Charlie was working toward a long-range goal of having police officers here on campus, and that’s still the long-range goal … but right now for any law enforcement need, we partner with HPD (the Honolulu Police Department). For things that are more planned events, we work with state Sheriff Division, since we are a state agency as well.

Q: “Planned events” — like games at Stan Sheriff Center?

A: Yep. So we work with HPD for traffic, and then we also work with the sheriffs for law enforcement capabilities in terms of any longer-term investigations that may have to take place on campus, like any white-collar issues or things like that. But for anything requiring an immediate 911 response, we use HPD and HPD dispatch.

Q: These latest crime figures — mostly positive — are they a legacy of Noffsinger’s tenure, or are there some broader factors at work here?

A: I think the broader factors were a direct result of some of the work that Noffsinger did, in terms of starting our community-policing program and being more interactive and collaborative with other partners on campus.

We’ve got the Pau Violence Center; we got our Sexual Assault Task Force; the campus community has been very supportive in terms of providing the necessary resources to get in front of our federal mandates and requirements in terms of Title IX, VAWA (the Violence Against Women Act) …

And then, you know, our Jeanne Clery responsibilities are the reporting factors that you see in that report.

The statistics kind of ebb and flow, much like our population. As you know, the campus population is very transient. You have new students coming in every year and you have seniors graduating and leaving. So what we see on campus mirrors a lot of times what’s going on out in our communities, in terms of the social issues that are the hot-button topics at the time.

Q: One of the insights into the figures as reported in the Star-Advertiser was that, “the most frequent incidences of misbehavior are self-directed,” meaning the liquor and drug violations. What would be some other “self-directed misbehaviors” considered worthy of some sort of a citation?

A: Those are mostly the types of issues that are more self-directed. And we can correct those types of things with the administrative process that we have here on campus. But when an event crosses the line into becoming a criminal incident, then, like I said before, it becomes more of an issue that’s dealt with by the criminal justice system.

Q: What usually are the penalties for the students?

A: I think it varies. Depending on how egregious and how many times it happened, it’s a progressive situation.

For example, if the student is caught with alcohol or a misdemeanor-level type of a drug situation, the sanctions could be that they would be put on probationary status in terms of their academics tenure on campus. If they’re living in student housing, sanctions could be placed on them so that if they have another violation, they could literally be in violation of their contract with student housing, just like you would be if you were living someplace else.

And then, of course, if it ramps up, and the behavior becomes more egregious, then, you know, it could move all the way up to suspension or other academic sanctions or also housing sanctions.

Q: Why do you think there were more drug violations in 2015 versus 2014?

A: The numbers are a bit misleading, … and I’ll give you just an example: If an RA (a resident assistant in student housing) has a report of marijuana in a particular student housing room and they do not get access to the room but they find out that there’s two people there, they have to count the number of stats based on what they observed. So if they walk to the room and they’re outside and smell marijuana and it’s coming from that room, and there are two people in there but they can’t verify who is at fault, then it counts for two.

And it’s not like an arrest stat, per se. … There may not be any interaction by us in terms of safety issues. Instead, housing takes steps to mitigate those issues on their own, through our Judicial Affairs Office.

Q: What are the most disturbing types of crimes that occur on campus, in your view?

A: I think still the most disturbing things we have to deal with are domestic violence or sexual assault issues, obviously because they’re very impactful when it comes to not only the victim, but, you know, the people who are in the victim’s circle, and even the alleged suspect’s family and associates on campus. The student-on-student issues that we have there, they have kind of a ripple effect, if you will, in terms of the impact that they have on campus. Those can be very devastating to the victims.

But we also have to deal with the other side of the coin, and provide support in terms of the greater community. So we have these things in place on campus to support those who have that need.

But fundamentally we need to work on trying to get those things reported. … We want people — the victims — to report these things, so that even if it’s not a criminal case, they can get the support they need in terms of recovery, mentally and physically. We have places on campus that folks can turn to and report these types of things that may or may not reach our desk or HPD, in terms of a criminal investigation.

Q: How would you assess the severity of that issue? Is it mild at UH?

A: (Sigh) I hate to use the word “mild” when we’re talking about this because it’s such a serious issue, and what I always say is, we don’t know what we don’t know. So we really try to encourage people to report these types of incidents, because, as you know, the data tells us that typically in these types of sexual assaults, on campuses or off campuses, in bars or what have you, the victims and the suspects know each other, more often than not. So it’s an issue that if we can get people to report it, then we can get them the help that they need, but so many of them go unreported.

Q: What about this trend on campuses toward “trigger warnings” — where if somebody’s going to give a speech or show a movie, and words might be used that might offend the sensibilities of certain students, then they’re supposed to notify the students?

A: Well, certainly we have some hot topics and some hot speakers, so we try to be cognizant of that, and we try to provide folks who are going to attend with some guidelines in terms of being respectful and allowing people to do their presentations. So we are aware, but … as you know, things happen so quickly on social media that we literally cannot monitor it 24/7, and you almost have to have people dedicated to do that, to really keep up on what’s happening every minute.

Q: Is there a way for you to monitor things like that?

A: Yeah, a little bit. We have a couple people on my staff who are trained to kind of monitor that stuff, and they watch for certain things periodically. But what happens more often than not is we have our communications folks on campus. They’re the communications experts, and they often will tip us off to things that they’re hearing or seeing out there. So it’s kind of a collective effort, everybody just keeping an eye on it and relaying anything important that happens.

Q: Do you have trouble with homeless people trespassing on campus?

A: Well, we’re a public university, so we do have folks who are on campus every day. We do have some trespassing issues at times, but nothing significant.

Q: Considering the type of “citizens” that you have in your little city — students, basically — what is your basic idea about how your officers should conduct themselves? Is it more in the laid-back, forgiving, Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry style of policing or the persnickety, by-the-rulebook Deputy Barney Fife style?

A: (Laughter) Interesting analogy.

We try to conduct ourselves with professionalism. I like to say everybody does their job — or hopefully they do their job — with aloha.

So with that, I don’t want to say laid-back. The things we’re dealing with, they’re serious issues in terms of keeping people safe, and that’s our responsibility. We try to be proactive and help people be safe.

When you talk about taking a hard line, I’m just thinking about a lot of the traffic issues. We have moped issues and bicycle issues, people moving about by foot and by bike and on mopeds. Sometimes that can get a bit dangerous. So we try to focus on keeping people moving safely and then be there to help them in terms of their environment to plan for safety.

Q: Do foreign students ever pose a problem for you, in terms of cultural misunderstandings, perhaps?

A: We do have those from time to time, so like many campuses, because we have such a diverse population, we’re trying to focus more on interfacing with some of those populations in being able to communicate our safety messages with them.

For example, we’ve got a safety brochure that we’re in the process right now, in fact, of creating in multiple languages. We just finished the brochure and are getting ready to roll it out for … Vietnamese, but we want to continue and do it for Chinese and Korean, and hopefully some other languages as well.

Q: What do you do when you have time off? You grew up in the L.A. area; do you surf?

A: No, I don’t surf. And I don’t have a lot of time off. I’ve been really jumping into trying to learn more about the culture and the campus; every community, every campus is unique. But, yeah, I golf a little bit. And I left my Harley back in Washington state, and I’m missing that.

Q: You ride a Harley-Davidson?

A: I’ve been riding motorcycles for a long time. When I was in the Anaheim PD, I rode motors for 11 years, so I’ve got quite a bit of experience with motorcycles.