“relatively safe with a couple of caveats”

Still more changes are on the horizon as the university searches for a new Chief of Police and moves forward with plans to reorganize the department under a new Division of Campus Community Safety. 

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I met with Stewart to hear about his perspective on campus safety and get a closer look at how the UWPD responds to incidents committed in its jurisdiction.  

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Disclaimer: This interview was edited for clarity.

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JULIA PARK: What do you love about your job, what do you not like about your job, and what would you change about it if you could?

 

ANTHONY STEWART: Okay. Well, what I like about my current position is making victims whole as best we can. In some cases, that’s recovering items that have been stolen from them; in others it’s helping them bring the suspect, or the person who’s harmed them, to justice. So I enjoy that. 

I don’t really have anything I don’t like. If I had anything that I would say that kind of makes things negative, it’s maybe commuting here, that kind of thing. So it’s not so much the job. 

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PARK: Has there been any big challenges of serving as an officer at UW specifically?

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STEWART: I think the only challenge is that this is a migratory population, so students come and go. So you don’t have the traditional relationships you would with a neighborhood, where people have been there their entire lives, that kind of thing. So that makes it a little more challenging. I have made some really good connections here. I have a mentoring relationship with a former student. He’s graduated now; he’s been gone for about 3 years. We get together once a month, talk about life issues, challenges, that kind of thing. So I'm grateful for being in a position to meet him.

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PARK: That’s really cool. So you met him while he was a student here. 

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STEWART: Yes, he was interested in becoming a police officer. And I convinced him otherwise to take an internship with a company and he now works for that company. 

 

PARK: Why did you advise him against going into the police force? 

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STEWART: I suggested he needed to get a little more life experience working with people, diverse people. And kind of get a taste of what life is before he becomes a police officer.

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PARK: How was the transition going from the Army to becoming a police officer?

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STEWART: Well, that’s a good question. I found it to be a pretty smooth transition because they are both centered on service. Just different scales of economy. So rather than representing a country, I’m representing an institution.

 

PARK: For some context, I’ve been talking to several students and just hearing about what their opinions of safety are on campus, and what services they use that are offered by UWPD like Husky Nightwalk or NightRide. I’m wondering what your opinion is on how safe it is on campus.

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STEWART: I think it’s relatively safe with a couple of caveats. The first being, being attentive to what’s going on around you. And second, your state of mind. And what I’m getting at is if you are high or drunk, odds are you’re not as safe as you would be as being sober.

 

PARK: So it’s often about being alert and just keeping tabs on yourself.

 

STEWART: Yes, there's no fences around campus per se, so things that occur away from campus can sometimes come onto campus. My analogy would be going out for a swim. If a shark attacks you, it’s not personal, right, it’s just you guys are coming together. Otherwise, you can swim and have a good day, right? I think it’s the same thing here on campus. Most of our crimes are opportunistic and sometimes it’s the victim not being aware of what’s going on around them.  

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PARK: Since you joined the UWPD several years ago, how safe do you think it is now relative to then, or do you think it has stayed relatively consistent? 

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STEWART: I think it has stayed relatively consistent. 

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PARK: Any particular reason why you think that? 

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STEWART: I think this region of the country in of itself doesn’t have very high violent crime rates, is one reason. The other reason is I don’t think the students prey on each other, if that makes sense. 

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PARK: Do you know how frequently or heavily students seem to rely on services like Husky Nightwalk or Nightride? Is it less than you would expect or more?

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STEWART: That’s a good question. I think it’s changed over time, so I don’t know if it’s as popular as it was when it was first conceived. It seems now that more students have cars and there are scooters. There are more ways of getting around than when that program first started.

 

PARK: Yeah, I think my mom has told me many times about her using [services like that] at her school when she was younger, but I feel like in talking to students there doesn’t seem to be as much interest in using them, or they feel safe not using them as much.  

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STEWART: Well, [the students] are traveling in groups, you know, that’s a good thing. I do sometimes encounter parents, or I’ll get a call or an email from a parent who’s concerned about their student being out at night, that sort of thing and I often just offer a fairly simple tip and that is, if they have to be out at night, be out with friends and to be alert at where they are and what they’re doing. 

 

PARK: Can you walk me through the process of how the UWPD responds when a report of a crime comes in? I feel like students will get a UW Alert notification and we don’t know what goes on –

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STEWART: That’s on the back end. So normally a call will start either by someone witnessing a crime or the victim calling. Once that’s done, depending on the situation, the officers may respond with lights and sirens or they may just get over to that person in due course so it just depends on the urgency of the situation. Once the officers get there, the standard protocols are to make the scene safe and then identify the victim, witnesses, and then do the process of the investigation. 

 

PARK: How long will that – I guess it must depend on the specific case – but how long will that investigation kind of run for? Is there ever a point where you abandon a case?

 

STEWART: It’s not so much we abandon it, we exhaust all tangible leads. So you can ask a lot of questions and get very few answers. In some cases we have video evidence that we process and then we go through the process of identifying the people in the videos and then hopefully contacting them and putting them and the situation into kind of a case file.

 

PARK: Can you tell me a little more about the UWPD’s relationship with SPD, how those lines are drawn?

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STEWART: Oh, we don’t have a partnership or anything like that. It is a standard protocol to support agencies. So if they have an incident that’s headed toward campus, they will give us a notification saying ‘Hey, this is an ongoing moving issue,’ and at that point, we ask if they need assistance and if we can provide it, we do.

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PARK: As UW moves to reorganize the UWPD under a new Division of Campus Community Safety, how do you feel about the changes coming to the department?

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STEWART: Well, change is funny because you don’t know it until it happens. So I have really no idea what that’s going to look like. There are probably lots of ideas on papers floating around the administration but until they actually put it together you really don’t know what to expect. 

 

PARK: Do you think that there are any misunderstandings or ideas that UW students have about the police department here? If you could tell students anything that they don’t seem to understand, is there anything like that?

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STEWART: Well, most of my interactions with students are positive. I do know there are some that have a concern about policing, policing in general. There are folks who feel that campuses don’t necessarily need their own police force. But there are reasons for that that are above my head, but I would say this to just about anyone: It’s – in my opinion, you have to hold agencies and its people accountable. So if an agency isn’t operating fairly or within the confines of law, i.e. they’re violating people’s rights, then I think the people in that agency should be held accountable. I think the agencies that are doing the right things should be supported.