Temple defends its police staffing struggles after the shooting death of one of its officers

Temple University has fewer officers now than it did in the weeks after student Samuel Collington’s off-campus killing in 2021, despite President Jason Wingard’s pledge at that time to increase the force by 50%.

And in December, the school paused an agreement it had with the Philadelphia Police Department’s 22nd District to pay its officers overtime to patrol in the neighborhoods surrounding the campus.

But Jennifer Griffin, Temple’s vice president of public safety, this week defended the university in the wake of the Saturday shooting death of one of her officers, Christopher Fitzgerald.

She said in an interview it wasn’t for a lack of trying to hire more officers — a nationwide shortage is affecting police departments across America. And the agreement with the 22nd District had become largely ineffective: The school often couldn’t get the officers it needed because the 22nd District, too, is shorthanded and there were no guidelines or tactical or strategic plans on how the officers would be used. It was a problem, she said, that she flagged soon after she started in her position six months ago and is addressing as part of a larger restructuring of the department.

» READ MORE: Temple trustees raise over $450,000 for Fitzgerald family, pay for funeral, and promise free tuition for officer’s children

Still, she said, Temple continued to talk with the city police department on how to improve its agreement and has struck a new one, effective March 1, for up to 288 hours of overtime from officers a week. This time it will draw from a citywide pool — not just the 22nd — and be overseen by First Deputy Commissioner John Stanford.

“So we’ll have a better chance of actually getting officers to fulfill it,” Griffin said during a 50-minute interview late Thursday evening. “There will be higher levels of accountability because of the involvement of higher-level management.”

And there are guidelines on deployment and strategies to measure effectiveness, she said.

» READ MORE: Temple names Delaware State Police captain and educator as VP of public safety

Charles H. Ramsey, a former Philly police commissioner hired last year to conduct an audit of Temple’s police department, backed up Griffin. Ramsey, who retired from the Philadelphia department in 2016, said the prior arrangement with the 22nd was “spotty” at best and was something his team had already flagged as problematic and in need of improvement. There needed to be a strategic plan that examined the officers’ deployment, whether they were mobile or on foot, and the boundaries they covered, he said.

He also said his review, a report that is expected soon, uncovered nothing Temple’s police department “was doing or not doing” that could have prevented last Saturday’s tragedy.

“We didn’t see anything like that,” he said.

» READ MORE: The captain of a busy Philly police district is often absent, leading to 'chaos at the 22nd'

Griffin said the 22nd District continued to help when it could, even though the formal agreement with the district — which has been contending with an unrelated leadership scandal on top of staff shortages in recent months — had been on hold.

Collington, a senior political science major from Prospect Park, Delaware County, was gunned down in front of his off-campus residence in the 2200 block of North Park Avenue, less than two blocks from a campus building, after returning from Thanksgiving break November 2021. His killing shocked the campus community and brought pledges for more safety efforts, including Wingard’s announcement that the police force would be increased by 50%.

Yet this January there were 72 officers, compared to 79 less than two weeks after Collington’s murder and days after Wingard’s pledge. If sworn officers working in other capacities, such as supervisors, are included, there were 97 this January, compared to 110 in December 2021, Griffin said.

“I think he wanted that,” Deirdre Childress Hopkins, Temple’s senior director of communications, said of Wingard’s pledge. “But I think what the reality is right now is very difficult. This recruitment effort is as aggressive as we possibly can be.”

Ramsey said he is in contact with police chiefs nationally and very few are able to keep pace with attrition.

It’s difficult to get young people interested in policing especially amid a strong job market, both Ramsey and Griffin said. Policing has taken a hit, too, with the high-profile misconduct cases, including the 2020 murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. The job is demanding, stressful, and life-threatening, Griffin said.

“Even the people who love this job are starting to question, ‘Is it really worth putting my life on the line?’” she said.

Griffin said Temple has the money to hire more officers, but it’s not as simple as hiring anyone who applies. Candidates must go through police academy training and have skills in communication, de-escalation and empathy to work on a college campus, she said. The department expects to welcome eight new officers from the academy in March and already has reallocated five officers from the Ambler campus to main campus.

Griffin said she has formed a recruitment team and is in contact with Temple’s criminal justice department and an officer training program on Temple’s Ambler campus to recruit students. And in the current department reorganization she’s leading, she said she identified new positions that would improve operations, including a director of personnel and administration who will be focused solely on recruitment, hiring, onboarding, and retaining officers.

“Although we are down from where we were,” she said, referring to the lower number of officers, “we are moving in the right direction.”

Fitzgerald was patrolling alone the night he was killed, which Griffin said was customary and Ramsey said is standard in many police departments. But since Fitzgerald’s death, Temple has moved to two-officer cars. Griffin said that means fewer cars and less presence around the campus, so she’s not sure how long the department will maintain that protocol.

Ramsey said during his eight years as Philadelphia’s commissioner, when eight of his officers were killed, the department moved to two officers per car for a time.

“It can’t be sustained long term,” Ramsey said.

Yet the campus is on edge, as the area around the school has seen a rash of shootings, home invasions, and robberies in the last year. On Tuesday afternoon, around the time that Temple was holding a campus vigil for Fitzgerald, a 17-year-old boy and 13-year-old girl walking home from school were shot just blocks from where Fitzgerald was killed. Also in North Philadelphia Thursday night, seven people, including five teenagers and a 2-year-old girl, were shot outside of a school in Strawberry Mansion, also in the 22nd District.

Questions also have arisen over whether critical response time is delayed because Temple police and Philadelphia police aren’t on the same radio system. But Griffin maintained that the two departments are in constant conversation.

The Temple department’s dispatch center is able to monitor calls throughout the city, she said, and notifies Temple officers of necessary developments. The Temple department also has seven Philadelphia police radios, which are distributed among patrol supervisors and administrators, who monitor communications. On the night Fitzgerald was shot, Griffin said a Temple patrol supervisor communicated the situation on Philadelphia radio, leading a 22nd police district corporal to take two people into custody, which later led to the arrest of suspect Miles Pfeffer.

Griffin said the department continues to discuss whether it would be worth the upgrade required to coordinate the radio systems.

The arrangement with the 22nd District for a long time had been informal, but that changed in fall 2021, Griffin said. The overtime hours from city police fluctuated depending on what Temple needed and what the 22nd could give, she said.

The new process will offer more direction and data gathering, she said.

“We are going to give them priority areas and hot spots to focus their efforts,” Griffin said, adding that they will be asked to monitor Temple police radio and engage positively with the public. “We’ll track pedestrian contacts, vehicle stops, citations, business place checks, complaints handled, amount of time on foot patrol, so we can see what production is being done on the overtime.”

Staff writer Max Marin contributed to this article.