Bridging the Gap Podcast

[00:00:00] Darryn Chenault: Hey. Hello. I am Police Officer Darren Chenault.

[00:00:03] Kelly Cantwell: And I'm Public Information Officer Kelly Cantwell. And we are the hosts of the University of Cincinnati Public Safety Department's podcast, Bridging the Gap.

[00:00:13] Darryn Chenault: Bridging the gap, indeed. Bridging the gap means furthering our connections with our community.

We hope that this podcast will be another way in which we can connect with you, the students, faculty, parents, and the community members so that we can share more about what we do and why we do it and learn more about our community needs.

[00:00:38] [Upbeat music]

[00:00:47] Darryn Chenault: So we're here. I'm glad to be here. We're here. Bridging the gap. I love that term, don't you, Kelly?

[00:00:54] Kelly Cantwell: I do.

[00:00:54] Darryn Chenault: Bridging the gap. Bridging the gap is between the University of Cincinnati Police Department and the UC community.

So we're thrilled to be here today with our first podcast. My host over here, Kelly Cantwell, Public Information Officer. I'm glad you're here to join us today.

[00:01:12] Kelly Cantwell: Absolutely. And you need to introduce yourself.

[00:01:15] Darryn Chenault: Obviously. Darryn Chenault. 20 years plus law enforcement with the University of Cincinnati. So great to be here. I'm joined by a crew today that I. Oh, I'm so proud of. I actually work with these guys, so. Community engagement, University of Cincinnati. Community engagement.

So I'm gonna let these guys introduce themselves, starting over here with Mr. Officer Valerius.

[00:01:40] Greg Valerius: Yeah, Officer Greg Valerius. I've been with UC for over 10 years now. Started out on patrol to eight years on night shift.

Got my master's degree while I was coming here to take advantage of the tuition, really like a lot of the benefits UC has to offer and, you know, the advantages we have working for such a big institution.

Spent our times at Blue Ash campus second shift patrol, and I've been in this assignment for the last year or so. Community engagement is a lot of community outreach, a lot of presentations, a lot of problem solving. We pretty much are the catch all the department. You know, wherever there's an issue, our office gets pretty busy.

[00:02:17] Carra Sparks: Carra Sparks.

I started here in 2009 as a security officer. I had just turned 19.

I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I just knew it paid a little bit more than I was currently making.

And it was retirement, full health benefits. And I text my dad and he said, apply ASAP. Free tuition.

So I've worked here 15 years now. I went to UC Clermont Police Academy in 2012, bumped up to full time police in 2014.

So I've been a police officer for over 10 years now, and I've been in community engagement for five years. I really just love our community meetings and giving presentations to our students, faculty, and staff and trying to educate everyone on how to be safe on and off campus.

[00:03:02] David Brinker: These guys, they really do a great job. So I'm David Brinker. I've been here for 21 years.

You know, when I was a kid, you know, some. Some officers, they dream they want to be an officer when they grow up. When I was growing up, I had really no idea what I wanted to do. You know, my biggest dream was being a garbage man. I thought that was the coolest thing in the world. Running around on the back of a garbage truck, throwing stuff in there. Back in the day, you had to pick it up and throw it in.

[00:03:23] Carra Sparks: I still want to do that now.

[00:03:23] David Brinker: It's all automatic.

[00:03:24] Carra Sparks: Yeah, I still want to do that.

[00:03:25] David Brinker: But I went to school and I actually got a degree in accounting and sitting behind a desk for, you know, a couple years, like, I don't know if I want to do this, you know, just doing a lot of, you know, numbers and paperwork. I was like, you know, I really want to get out and help people.

So I decided to go to the police academy. You know, I thought about fire service a little bit, but, man, you know, putting on that scva, too claustrophobic. That's not for me. I'd rather get shot at. But I'll never forget the day my dad was up cleaning the gutters. I was like, dad, I quit my job and I'm gonna go to the police academy. He's like, you did what?

So I went to the police academy.

Long story short, after some ins and outs, I ended up here. I've been here for 21 years.

I really like that analytical side. So I've done a lot of work in our investigative section at the time. Oversaw our investigative section. I really like that kind of puzzle work. Figuring things out and, you know, solving that puzzle and then helping people, you know, get their property back or, you know, helping them with whatever it is they want to accomplish.

But over the last couple years, I oversaw our community engagement unit. We did this big problem solving project with burglaries off campus. And with that, I got involved in community engagement side and really saw, like, the prevention. So really, in law enforcement, we want to try to prevent crime, not just respond to it. I really enjoyed that prevention piece, and I kind of got my foot in the door in community engagement. So here I am now.

[00:04:49] Darryn Chenault: That's awesome. Before I jump into my special, special guest today, I just want to make sure everybody knows that we're going to talk about safety on and off the campus. As a dad who has two daughters here at the university, that's been a big old concern of ours. So today I want to take the time to introduce our special guest, Ms. Heather Tenney. I'm going to let Heather talk about herself a little bit and shine that light on everything.

[00:05:18] Heather Tenney: Well, hi, I am Heather Tenney. I. I've been around UC in some form or another for about 25 years, either coming to hang out up here as a college kid myself, or my husband works here, or my kids go here.

And I run the UC Parents group on Facebook. We have about 10,000 parents who have students here at UC, and I hear a lot of what they're concerned about.

I hear a lot of what new parents are concerned about, what they want to know.

And I love this idea of getting together to figure out what we can do to prepare our students and what our students can be doing to be safer, what we as parents can do to help steward them as they make those transitions from being at home to being in college.

[00:06:07] Darryn Chenault: I tell you what, when I dropped my oldest off at campus here, I was so terrified.

And it's kind of. It's funny because I work down here in community engagement, so I kind of know what's going on. So today I have to play parent, fellas. I'm gonna jump out of this whole officer role, and I'll play parent.

What are you guys doing as far as community engagement to keep my two daughters safe, Officer Valerius?

[00:06:32] Greg Valerius: Put me on the spot right off the bat.

[00:06:36] Darryn Chenault: I'm gonna put you right on the spot because it's the only way to get it started.

[00:06:40] Greg Valerius: I mean, I think to talk about what we're doing, we have to acknowledge our difficulties, too. You know, as a police department, crime is going to evolve. You know, our complications are going to evolve. You know, technology is not what anyone imagined would be 10, 15 years ago.

On top of that, we're a campus police department, so our population changes every single year. And with that, you know, I feel like just like the professors and the staff, we have to educate the freshmen every year, try to get them up to speed, because they're coming from all walks of life. We have a very large, as your husband knows, international student base, and they're not even familiar. You know, forget about what Cincinnati is. What is the United States of America, you know, and where are the.

What. What's the sort of climate and. And way that they go about their everyday life around here? Because it's it's not the same as the Middle east or in Asia or wherever else you could be coming from. So that from there, from the get go, we are a, we have big hill to climb. My viewpoint.

So really one of the big things we do is we just try and be consistent. We try to be constantly improving, constantly trying to get out in front of it as best we can, but we don't always know what we're going to be faced with. A lot of times we get complaints from some neighborhood civilians that have nothing to do with uc, but they live in the area. And I tell them, I was like, you know, we try and get information out to our students about how to be good neighbors and that sort of thing, but. But we don't know what the problem house is gonna be till they're already a problem.

So it's like, how do you get out in front of that? How do you actually reach who is gonna be the issue ahead of time? If I knew that, I'd be making a lot more money doing something else. Right.

Because that would be the ultimate solution. So as far as what we do, we work with our community partners as much as we possibly can. There's not a meeting opportunity that we turn down as a community engagement unit. We, we are there everywhere we can be because we want people to know, first and foremost, reach out to us. We're here for you. So many people are timid to reach out to the police department. They think either wasting our time or they don't trust law enforcement or really they don't even know what we could do for them. They don't know what their rights are. And so really just building that bond from the get go and having them feel more like we're a resource for them is how I think our unit works to try to get out in front of the crime off campus.

[00:09:01] Darryn Chenault: That's awesome.

[00:09:03] David Brinker: Greg's making me proud. Couldn't say any better. Great job, Greg.

[00:09:06] Darryn Chenault: Ms. Tenney. I mean, what do you think and as far as your group goes, what are some of the concerns out there?

[00:09:13] Heather Tenney: I hear a lot about car break ins. Actually, I'm hearing a lot less this year about car break ins than we have in previous years. So whatever you guys have done to fix the gates and fix that has been amazing. But yeah, car break ins, we hear a lot. I hear a lot of questions about how safe is it to walk across campus late at night.

Right.

Is it safe to walk to raising canes at night?

And you know, there have been earlier in the year until it got really cold. There was, we heard a lot about some gun crime in the neighborhood. And so those are kinds of the things that I think our parents are most worried about.

How do they stop their kids from being victims and how do they stop their kids from being dumb? Because, you know, we all do dumb things when we're 18, 19, 20 years old, right?

[00:09:59] Kelly Cantwell: Absolutely.

[00:09:59] Heather Tenney: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:10:01] Carra Sparks: I'll hit on car break ins. The biggest thing that we tell our students whenever we get a chance to talk to a class of students, I talked to 30 yesterday in CCM.

If you have a car on campus or you live off campus and you park off campus, I should be able to look into your car and not see anything.

I don't want to see two quarters in a cup holder. I don't want to see a charging cord, an old pair of shoes on your backseat, a hoodie in your backseat. Because some of our local clientele, they could really use a hoodie.

If they're homeless or if they're an addict, that 50 cents could really help them out with whatever they're wanting to get. So don't make yourself an easy target.

Most of the time these bad guys will walk the street and they'll try door handles. So lock your car and then don't give them a reason to break the window to get into the car. And then once they're in your car, they go through the center console in the glove box looking for stuff. So keep as little amount of things in your car as possible.

[00:11:02] Heather Tenney: So a question that I've had, do dash cams help with that at all? Having a dash cam, does that prevent anything or do you see it not really effective?

[00:11:12] Carra Sparks: I'm not too familiar with dash cams. I don't have any, any knowledge on if that would prevent it. I would say probably not.

You know, especially if they're homeless or if they're an addict or if they're just a criminal. There's cameras everywhere. People don't care. Crime's still going to happen.

I think for a normal good citizen, they see a camera and they're like, oh, okay, good, that's nice. But the bad guys don't really care about cameras.

[00:11:39] Kelly Cantwell: So on that line, there are the things you shouldn't be doing. But what about like, are there any other products? I mean, there are steering wheel locks, but that's more for auto theft versus theft from autos, actually stealing a car. But is there anything parents can provide for their children if they're worried? Have you seen anything that's effective or is it more just Keeping your car clean and locked?

[00:12:02] Carra Sparks: Yeah, I don't think there's. Unless you know of something. I don't know of any products. I mean, I have tinted windows on my truck. They should be legal. But if that reduces the opportunity for the bad guy to look in and not see anything that could help you out.

But yeah, I think the biggest thing is just don't leave anything in plain view. Use the trunk, lock your door, and even the change in the cup holder, a charging cord, sunglasses on the dash, something like that.

They could easily sell something like that and get some cash.

[00:12:36] David Brinker: And the key here is opportunity. We want to take the opportunity away.

Greg, we had some videos recently for some off campus residents where they have like some ring doorbell cameras and it perfectly shows a bad guy walking up the driveway. As he's walking up, he's trying the door handles on the car. Right. He's looking for that opportunity to get in. This particular guy, he didn't want to create noise and attract himself by smashing a window, but he was looking for that opportunity just by.

So the biggest thing is to take that opportunity away. Don't have anything in the car. This is a constant battle for me with my kids and wife. You know, most cars today, a lot of the newer cars are a push button start, right. So what do people do? Just throw their keys in the cup holder or whatever. They get in, get out as they please. And I constantly preach to them, do not leave your keys in the car. And my daughter, she's young, she leaves her purse on the seat, gift cards laying around, and I try to tell her, please stop doing that. You know, as a dad, I'll take the stuff and I'll hide it for a day, see if she misses it. Half the time she doesn't even know I took it.

So it's a constant battle. But the key is education. And I like what you touched on earlier is prepare our students. So the key is try to educate them, prepare them as much as possible.

It's the old saying, you can take a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. Right. But we can just keep trying to educate them as best as we can and hopefully eventually it'll sink in.

[00:13:55] Darryn Chenault: We talked about some safety issues with walking at night.

What are some of the things we can do to walk at night? I know we talk about apps.

You see students have apps on their phones.

[00:14:06] Kelly Cantwell: Yeah, I can hit on that a little bit because I work a lot with our campus safety app. It's called Bearcat Guardian. We really try to push that out to students as much as possible and also parents to make them aware.

But that has a lot of really nice features. It has one that I think I would have used a lot as a college student. You know, my friends and I were always like, well, text me when you get back from the library. Because we would walk to our rooms at midnight or one in the morning.

And the Guardian app lets you select someone to watch you walk home. So it'll send them a text message. It can be anyone with a cell phone.

It'll send them a text message with a link. They can click on the link and then they can just watch you walk home. So a student can have their parent or their friend or anyone they want watching them walk home. It also lets you pick UC Police as a person that you can be notified.

And if you pick UC police, the police officers are not going to watch you walk home.

And I think generally, police speaking, students don't want that. But what it does do if you pick UC police is it notifies our dispatch if you don't turn off your safety timer in time. So they will get, if, if they're notified that you haven't turned off your safety timer, they get all your information from your Guardian profile. So I can't just go in and say, hey, this is Greg's phone number and he's currently using a timer. But if Greg's timer goes off because he didn't turn it off in time, I'm going to get his phone number and I'm going to get his safety profile information so I'll know if he has a medical condition that maybe our police officers should be aware of.

I'm going to know his local address. If he's filled that out, what his car looks like, you know, anything that he wants to provide, we would receive that. If he's not turning off his safety time or time.

So that's really nice because our officers get all that information before they respond. And our dispatcher can take that person's phone number and try to contact them. You know, maybe they just forgot to turn off their timer so they can try and contact them. But then we have an idea of where they might be because we would then have their location.

And it does remind you, the app reminds you to turn it off if you might have, like, gotten home and just kind of forgotten about it. But if, you know, if your daughter or your son picked you as the guardian, it would text you and tell you that they hadn't turned off their timer in time.

[00:16:40] Heather Tenney: Well, and I think that's. I didn't know that it had that feature. I think that's a brilliant idea.

Life360 is so popular amongst college students. They watch each other as they go places. I didn't know the Bearcat Guardian app did that. And also having a chance child on the spectrum. Right. And I know a lot of our parents have children on the spectrum or neurodivergent or anxious that having that feature where they know somebody is keeping track of them for that time and can call and check in. I think that's a really brilliant feature. I love that you guys do that. I didn't know that.

[00:17:14] Kelly Cantwell: Yeah.

Other thing that I really love about the app is it lets you have a conversation with UC police.

You know, it's. It can be hard to get a college student to make a phone call or someone might be in a situation where they cannot make a phone call, where they might escalate the situation that they're in by making a phone call.

So you can send UC police a message and it will go right into our dispatch center. It makes this obnoxious blaring noise on their computer. Like, there's no way our dispatcher is not going to know that your message just came through.

And it allows you to share your location in that message. It allows you to send pictures or videos in that message. So you can be providing us with all this information in real time. And it has an anonymous feature. So if someone is concerned, I mean, we always ask people to not use that if at all possible. But if the option is don't give us information or turn on anonymous, we would like the information.

So it has that feature too to allow people to share things with us. And we have had a couple situations where our dispatchers have received awards from the company that we use for this app because of how they've handled situations with that chat feature where they've been able to get help to students who have needed it through using that chat. You know, students who were in moments of crisis, they were able to get that help without escalating the. The situation. Because of that chat feature.

[00:18:43] Darryn Chenault: It sounds like we're doing a lot to protect our kids.

I'm impressed. I'm impressed.

Ms. Tenney, do you have any other questions?

[00:18:54] Heather Tenney: I think that. So one of the big questions we have in our group often is where is your jurisdiction in. So, for example, we have a rule in our group that we only allow published reports or UC reports when we talk about crime. But I had a parent contact me just two days ago. About a attempted break in at VP3 and they weren't sure whether to call UC Police or whether to call Cincinnati police on that.

[00:19:23] Darryn Chenault: My daughter stays in VP3. Hopefully that wasn't my wife calling.

I'm sure Lt. Brinker can probably address that.

[00:19:30] David Brinker: Yeah, that's a great question. We get that all the time. So our jurisdiction is university owned property.

[00:19:35] Heather Tenney: Okay.

[00:19:35] David Brinker: But it gets muddy because university right now there's a housing shortage on campus. So the university, we put students out in what's called block leases in apartments and different facilities just off campus.

So in that case, say VP3. And I don't know if we currently have a block lease of VP3 or not, but say the university puts Greg and Carra in an apartment in VP3 as part of a block lease. Technically they're off campus, but UC play. So that causes even more confusion. So I'll be calling UC police. Should I call some society police? You know, the biggest thing we say is if it's an emergency, you just call 911. Right? Call 911. And all you have to worry about is, you know, we're going to get resources to you and you don't care where it's coming from, whether it's Cincinnati or UC police, resources will get to you.

If it's a non emergency, say you know, you had your walk out to your car in the garage. Next thing you know you see the window bus there. Right. If you're unsure, I always advocate call UC police. You know, because we want to really pride ourselves on being resourceful for our students, faculty and staff. So call us and we can make that determination if it's our primary jurisdiction or not. And if it's not, we'll stay there with you. Call Cincinnati police, ask them to come over and get you the resources to help you out. So the number one thing is call 911 if it's an emergency. If you're unsure, call UC Police and we can help navigate that for you and help get you the resource that does come up a lot. So just on campus, again, our jurisdiction is your university owned property, but we have a lot of students that live just off campus and it's an area that we call our CSR. Have you ever heard that term before?

So the CSR stands for concentration of student residents. So many years ago the university did a survey and realized that, hey, you know, just off campus on Wheeler or Stratford Chickasaw, just be a short vine area.

We have a lot of kids that live in that area. Right, but technically it's not University owned property. But we have students living there, so we have a vested interest to make sure you know they're safe and be resourceful and help them out. So we created the CSR, which is don't hold me to the numbers here, but about a two mile radius around campus where we know there's a large concentration of students that live and in that area we tried to provide as much resources as possible to help serve those students.

Was you aware of that, Darryn?

[00:21:49] Darryn Chenault: I was a little bit.

Not so much in detail like that.

Remember, I'm new to the unit. No, that's awesome.

[00:21:56] David Brinker: Want to make those dads out there, you know, the goal is to inform those dads and make sure you have all the information.

[00:22:02] Darryn Chenault: I guess we're doing all right with our kids, huh?

[00:22:04] Heather Tenney: We're doing all right.

[00:22:05] Greg Valerius: I always push my presentations. Just because it's not our jurisdiction doesn't mean we don't care.

So you know, that's where, especially on seconds and third shift, that's where officers are patrolling. A lot of times we're driving around, we're actually have eyes and ears. If something's happening in that moment, 100% we're going to interfere. We're going to stop that crime from happening. We have mutual aid agreements with City of Cincinnati. We can make that stop. We can hold it and figure it out with our city partners. But we do a lot of community stuff off campus. We do a lot of flyer events, get information out there.

I've had landlords reach out to me. It's like saying, hey, I have some issues with my house. House. Tips for how the bear is cured. Better to work with the students to make sure they're not going to be victimized as much.

We've been involved in site planning and like a local church that's being redeveloped in Corryville, we're off campus a lot more people realize campus is always going to be our primary concern, of course, but our community is off campus, so we have to be out there. I don't want people to think that. Just because it's not our jurisdiction doesn't mean it's not our priority.

[00:23:06] Darryn Chenault: As a dad, do you guys often collaborate with the university and. Sorry, Cincinnati PD, 100%.

[00:23:14] Greg Valerius: I mean all of our officers have a number of Cincinnati officers personal cell phone numbers in their phones. We text each other constantly. We hang out outside of work. We work on projects all the time. I have a number of friends in that department.

There's a very strong bond between our officers and their officers. It's not this Strict wall where we won't talk or socialize with the other department.

[00:23:36] Heather Tenney: Well, and I just want to say that I know that, you know, warmer months bring higher crime rates. Right. And my kids noticed that when the crime was a little bit higher, they noticed your all's presence come up. They told me they noticed yours and Cincinnati police patrolling the Wheeler McMillan area a lot more. They said it was almost four times more from what they were used to. So they noticed that they noticed you guys recognizing that.

[00:24:00] Kelly Cantwell: So maybe someone could talk a little bit about how we use data and directive patrols.

[00:24:06] David Brinker: Sure. Carra, you good or you want me to go with it?

[00:24:08] Carra Sparks: I think that's a lieutenant talking.

[00:24:11] Darryn Chenault: That's the way to do that one.

[00:24:13] David Brinker: All right, I appreciate, Appreciate that.

[00:24:15] Darryn Chenault: Team makes the dream work right there.

[00:24:18] David Brinker: So, Heather, at the university, we collaborate very frequently with the city of Cincinnati.

So if you weren't aware or for our listeners out there that aren't aware, we have a monthly meeting called crime reduction. Have you ever heard of a crime reduction meeting?

[00:24:29] Heather Tenney: None of that one.

[00:24:30] David Brinker: So we have a monthly meeting with the Cincinnati Police Department. We actually just added earlier this week, Kelly. Right. Where we have the two districts that border UC, so we have District 4 and District 1. We have people from their command staff, from their investigative units, from their neighborhood liaison unit come to our department, and we actually go over all the crime data. So here at the University of Cincinnati, we have a crime analyst, and she looks at all the crime data and she provides us all the number to keep us abreast of what's going on, what the issues are, what could be trending, what's going down, so we can adjust our resources accordingly.

So based upon crime trends, we'll allocate those resources accordingly. So here at the University of Cincinnati, we actually contract with the city of Cincinnati to provide additional patrols in the areas based upon what's on, going, going on. So if we notice an uptick of vehicles being broken into or houses being broken into or whatever it is, we'll try to adjust those resources accordingly to provide some visibility. Because the key is we want to prevent crime from happening to begin with. So the key is to provide those what we call visibility patrols in the area. So hopefully it'll, you know, keep the bad guys or bad gals from doing things that are, you know, shouldn't be done and keep them from committing those crimes that begin with. So really pride herself on being data driven, looking at the data, looking at the trends to see what's going on, then adjusting our resources accordingly to try to prevent that crime from happening to begin with. Now, we gotta be realistic. We're all human beings, you know, we're living in a real world. So stuff's gonna happen, right? The crime's not gonna go away? Ideally, yeah, it would be nice to have no crime. But unfortunately, things happen. There is gonna be crime no matter where you're at in the world.

But the key is to try to be preventative as much as possible and look at that data and allocate resources accordingly to prevent things from happening.

[00:26:14] [Upbeat music]

[00:26:20] Kelly Cantwell: Thank you for listening to part one of our conversation with Heather Tenney. Head to our channel to hear part two.

[00:26:26] Darryn Chenault: Bridging the Gap.

[00:00:00] Darryn Chenault: Safety matters, whether you are a University of Cincinnati student, parent or employee.

[00:00:05] Kelly Cantwell: Ever wonder what UC Public Safety does to protect our campus?

[00:00:09] Darryn Chenault: Or how you can stay ahead of potential risks? Join us each month for Bridging the Gap, the podcast that connects you to the people, programs, and tips that keep UC safe.

[00:00:21] Kelly Cantwell: Stay informed, stay prepared. Listen now at uc.edu/publicsafety or find Bridging the Gap wherever you stream your podcasts.