Vincent Beatty, the Pace University executive director of security, hosted a news conference on September 27, 2023, to discuss the annual Safety and Security Report. This year’s report was shared in a university-wide email on September 29.
Beatty explained the significance behind the report at a news conference Wednesday.
“The annual security report is required by the Department of Education for any institution in the United States that receives federal funding,” He follows his statement up with, “If you don’t file these reports you can become uneligible to get federal funding.”
Beatty has been responsible for doing the university’s Safety and Security report for the last 20 years. This report gets longer and longer over the years. It is currently around 85 pages, but when Beatty first started it was only about 35.
When doing these reports Pace University sends a request for information every January under the Freedom of Information Law. They send it to three different jurisdictions. Those are The Mount Pleasant Police Department, the White Plains Police Department, and the New York City police department. These three places all have locations for the University. Pace’s Safety and Security Report has three separate reports. One for each location. Pace’s Safety and Security produces three separate reports, one for each campus.
Beatty said, “We actually provide them with a geographical area of the buildings that we need.”
The school also has its own database that they use when incidents get reported to security. Although not every incident gets reported. That is why the school uses outside sources to create its own report. After the crime statistics are finished, the Pace Security Department sends them to the legal counsel, and they have the final oversight for approval or not.
The Annual Security Report’s statistics vary depending on the actions of the students within campus and the year. One year had reported arsonists, another year had more underage drinking, and other years had domestic violence cases.
The Pace University Pleasantville Campus has a high amount of security for a suburban school. The university has three gated entrances and security officers doing multiple rounds a day around campus.
On this, Beatty said, “From six o’clock in the morning to ten o’clock at night entrances one, two, and three are opened, and after entrances one and two close…at 10 o’clock the residence side is the only one open for eight hours.”
Many of these security precautions were established during the COVID-19 pandemic, but they were kept around to reinforce student safety.