Sam Spade's San Francisco

Now that Chancellor Philip Day is leaving we have an opportunity to push for a new chancellor that will work with the Board of Trustees and put service weapons into the holsters of City College Police Officers. Currently they are completely unarmed - even though some students carry guns.

Chancellor Day has accepted a job heading an employee association. He will become head of the National Association of Student Aid Administrators. It is a sort of union for mid-level college employees. Day said he is taking the job to be closer to his family. The job will take him to Washington, DC.

The new job is a step down for Day who is currently Chancellor of the 100,000-plus student City College of San Francisco, one of the largest community colleges in the United States. It's win-win situation for everyone. Day's family will have him near, and we will have an opportunity to pound on the doors, flood the mailboxes and make telephone calls to the members of the CCSF Board of Trustees and urge them to hire a chancellor who will support the CCSF Police Department and work toward authorizing those officers to carry service firearms.

The CCSF Police carry no weapons. In event of a serious crime, the most they can do is throw rocks and call the SFPD. This is the current insane policy at City College.

Anyone who thinks none of the 100,000-plus CCSF students carry guns to school is brain dead. There are more guns at CCSF than there are at an NRA convention. Like it or not - it's fact!

Here is a reprise of a story published in this blog on April 24, 2007. Today it's meaning and message are more urgent than ever. At the end of the article I have listed the names and email addresses for the CCSF Board of Trustees:

(April 24,2007) SAN FRANCISCO. This morning a deranged student dressed in combat camouflage screamed at the students of a physics class at City College of San Francisco that he was going to kill everybody. According to a breaking story covered by the San Francisco Chronicle, CCSF Police Chief Carl Koehler said college police, who are not permitted by the college Board of Trustees to carry firearms, called San Francisco Police who arrived in approximately seven minutes.

(Update note: Carl Koehler resigned as CCSF Police Chief since this article was written. The new CCSF Chief of Police is Kenneth L. Baccetti)

SEVEN MINUTES!

While the response time for SFPD is acceptable, I cannot help ask the questions:

How many shots can be fired from an automatic weapon in seven minutes?

How many students can be shot and killed in seven minutes?

Seven minutes can cost dozens of lives.

And what about the CCSF police officers? Chancellor Day sent those men into a potentially deadly confrontation UNARMED. He was sending them to their potential deaths.

Chancellor Philip Day arrogantly told the Chronicle last week that "there is a preferred mode of dealing with students and faculty, and those methods do not include arming our police."

Evidently Chancellor Day is not aware of what can happen in seven minutes.

Unless Chancellor Day, with the full support of Dr. Anita Grier, President of the Board of Trustees, and with the agreement of the full board, immediately changes course and authorizes sworn POST-certified police officers to carry service weapons, then any future blood spilled at CCSF by a gunman will be clear and irrefutable evidence of their gross negligence and ineptitude.

If the policy does not change - and change DAMN SOON - Chancellor Day should be fired and the dissenting members of the Board of Trustees recalled.

In light of the Virginia Tech murders, City College of San Francisco Chancellor Philip Day defended his decision to keep campus police unarmed by telling Matthew Stannard and Tanya Shevitz of the San Francisco Chronicle, "There is a preferred mode of dealing with students and faculty, and those methods do not include arming our police."

Carl Koehler, the City College Police Chief, has another point of view. He said Day's policy leaves his department at a disadvantage. "When something happens, minutes are very important..."

Philip Day wants those minutes spent by unarmed campus police officers doing whatever they can to save lives when an emergency occurs. If those minutes are spent confronting a mentally disturbed gunman armed with a semi-automatic weapon it will result in the deaths of those unarmed police officers, students, staff, faculty members and anybody else who gets in the way.

The CCSF Police Department must have adequate funding to provide academy-trained POST-certified uniformed and armed sworn police officers on duty at all times in addition to whatever number of unarmed cadets are desired. Likewise, CCSF needs a chancellor willing to make the tough decisions and protect the sons and daughters of the people of San Francisco.

The political climate in San Francisco is definitely anti-gun. The members of the CCSF Board of Trustees are a group of people who are also predominantly anti-gun. It is an easy, safe, no-ruffles decision for Chancellor Day to keep the CCSF Police Department unarmed.

It is also an asinine decision.

Hopefully it will not take an insane gunman armed with a full clip and a semi-automatic weapon to prove that Day's decision is so completely irresponsible and negligent.

If you want to voice your opinion to the members of the CCSF Board of Trustees, or ask them to take a position, here are their email addresses:

Dr. Anita Grier, president -
Julio J. Ramos, vice-president -
Natalie Berg -
Milton Marks - (and)
John Rizzo -
Rodel E. Rodis -
Lawrence Wong -
Derick Brown -

.