I’m writing to you as a graduate of Hofstra in the hope my experience on Tuesday, April 17 may offer a sense of security to Hofstra students. However, if I were a student at Stony Brook University, I’d feel extremely disappointed in the way my school’s security officers handled unusual situations.

I attended a workshop sponsored by the L.I. Music Hall of Fame on the campus of Stony Brook University, which ended at approximately 11:15 p.m. Upon returning to my car, which I had parked in a pay-for-parking garage, I discovered that the garage had been locked for the night, and that my car was stuck in the garage.

I began walking around the campus to try and find assistance. To my dismay I could not locate any “blue light” emergency phones, which I knew of from my days as a Hofstra University undergraduate. I was able to walk into several buildings, no swipe-card required, to try and find assistance. When I was a student at Hofstra, I needed to swipe my student ID to access almost every building on campus – right down to the Student Center and the radio station.

At about 11:45 p.m., I walked into the library. At the front desk, a student clerk dialed the campus police and handed me the phone. I finished asking for help, and then chatted with the student for a few minutes. “The officer said they were in the middle of a shift change,” I told the student. “He said it would probably be a little while before they can send someone to help me.”

Laughing a little, the student responded, “Yeah, I’m not surprised. That’s what they always say.”

I returned to my car by midnight, locked the doors and pulled up to the exit gate to await my officer-in-shiningarmor. I watched people come and go, students walking in pairs or by themselves, cars passing the garage on a nearby road. At 1 a.m., I was still waiting for assistance. I called the campus police again, and was told to continue waiting.

“This is a police department, miss,” the officer said. “We have emergency situations to attend to.”

To me, this was an emergency. Just the previous day, a student at Virginia Tech decided to make a statement by shooting 32 people. As a young lady marooned in that parking garage while the campus police successfully completed their “shift change” – well, I felt like a sitting duck.

At about 1:30 a.m., an officer pulled up and attempted to open the gate with an access card. He was unsuccessful, and called another officer for assistance. A few minutes later the second officer arrived and tried his own access card. This too failed. They made another call and talked amongst themselves for a moment.

Finally, their solution was to tell me how to have my car jump the curb and maneuver around the gate, which I was reluctant to do in my little Toyota Corolla. However, I was had no other alternative. Had my car been damaged in any way, I’d have been stranded again, an hour’s drive from home without a car.

The overall picture painted by the Stony Brook campus police was their shift change was more important than the fact that a young woman was stuck in a parking garage.

I got the impression that Stony Brook is a collection of fragmented pieces, rather than one whole unit that works together for a common goal. Additionally, it really made me appreciate the ways that Hofstra University made me feel safe when I was a student there.

——————————————-Christine Sampson is a 2002 Hofstra alumna and former Editor-in-Chief of The Chronicle.