New England Public Radio

New UMass Amherst Police Chief Has Dual Role On Campus

Tyrone Parham was sworn in Friday as chief of police at UMass Amherst.

It’s a dichotomous position for the 44- year old former Penn State police chief.  Parham is also now an assistant vice chancellor. He says this will allow him to bridge between policing students and advising them, as there’s a lot of risk taking at this age. Mix in typical Saturday night behavior, he says, and safety on campus becomes a problem.

Parham would like to see police taking a more pro-active role, for instance, when it comes to stopping sexual assaults.

“I’d much rather spend most of our efforts on prevention and awareness,” Parham says. “Obviously we have a role in the accountability and the investigation piece. I also think we have a role in the outreach and prevention to perpetrators, like ‘no  meaning no.’ I think we spend a lot of time in general, the profession, on kind of a victim perspective of what not to do.”

Before coming to Amherst, Parham spent more than 20 years in law enforcement at Penn State.

Updated: An earlier version of this story misspelled “dual” in the headline.

Will A Snow Record-Shattering Winter Turn Into Spring Ice Jams?

This winter will eventually end — the calendar turns the page to Spring on March 19th — but the spring thaw may come even sooner. Michael Rawlins is head of the Climate System Research Center at UMass Amherst. He says when New England’s record-setting snowfall this winter melts, it may bring a host of problems.

UMass Student Sues Amherst Police For Assault, False Arrest At Blarney Blowout

A UMass senior has filed a civil rights lawsuit against five members of the Amherst Police Department, claiming he was assaulted and falsely arrested while video-taping police during last year’s Blarney Blowout.

According to the complaint filed in Federal Court in Springfield, Thomas Donovan was recording an incident on his smart phone in which several police officers appeared to use excessive force arresting a person at the off campus spring celebration. Donovan refused police orders to stop recording. A videotape that was released along with the complaint then seems to show police knocking Donovan’s phone down and repeatedly stomping on it in a failed attempt to destroy it.

David Milton, Donovan’s attorney, says his client was “ gratuitously pepper sprayed, assaulted, arrested on false charges, suspended as a result of those charges, and having his life be turned upside down merely for exercising a basic and well established first amendment right.”

The criminal charges and suspension from school were later dropped. Calls to Amherst Police and the town have not been returned.

 

Reaction: UMass Reverses Decision To Bar Iranian Students

After consulting with the State Department, UMass Amherst announced on Wednesday it is reversing a decision to bar Iranian students from entering some engineering and science programs.

The ban on Iranian applicants to these programs is gone, but there are still restrictions. UMass says they’re necessary to comply with U.S. sanctions. The university will develop individual courses of study for Iranians.

“They have moved firmly in the right direction by reversing this outright ban,” says Jamal Abdi with the National Iranian American Council. “We’re going to be talking to students and reviewing the new policy closely to learn exactly how it ensures that there’s no discrimination taking place.”

Abdi credits widespread public backlash for the reversal in university policy.

Despite the change, a pair of UMass student organizations are going ahead with a public forum scheduled for Wednesday night to keep discussing the issue.

UMass Amherst Announces Policy Limiting Admission Of Iranian Students

A new UMass Amherst policy that denies college admission to many Iranian students has sparked anger.

The policy says Iranians will no longer be admitted to certain engineering, natural science, and other programs because of a federal law designed to discourage nuclear and energy research by Iranians.

Jamal Abdi with the National Iranian American Council says UMass overstepped its bounds:

“I think that there’s a possibility that the university read the law, saw the regulations, and believed that it was supposed to be the one policing the sanctions instead of the U.S. government.”

UMass-Amherst spokesperson Ed Blaguszewski says the university is just trying to clarify its admissions policy so Iranian students are not misled. The university posted the new rules online on February 6th, took them down today after getting many calls, and then put them back up again.

UMass-Amherst: Crowd-Limiting Policies Led To Peaceful Super Bowl Celebrations

UMass-Amherst is crediting policies that limited the size of gatherings for the more peaceful student celebrations following the Patriots’ Super Bowl win.

UMass spokesperson Ed Blaguszewski says the school heeded recommendations by former Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis, limiting guests on campus and expanding the number of Super Bowl viewing parties. As a result, he says, there were fewer students celebrating at Southwest Residential area, the site of large disturbances in the past.

“And because the crowd was much smaller, those crowd dynamics changed and there was never a need for the police to don riot gear or forcibly issue a dispersal order,” says Blaguszewski.

However, one student says a change in tone by police is more likely responsible. Zac Bears, an editor at the campus newspaper, the Daily Collegian, says police surrounding the gathering at Southwest were less combative with students. He says that’s in contrast to disturbances in past years.

“I think when you come on horses and you come in riot gear and you’re armed with pepper balls; that presents a much more confrontational message to the students that are gathered. And we didn’t see that [Sunday],” says Bears.

There was just one arrest and two injuries reported on campus Sunday night.