Hamilton Students Take on the 90-miler

Campus Dad: Frank Coots, Director of Campus Safety

Isabella Di Pirro

Isabella Di Pirro: Can you tell me a bit about yourself?

Frank Coots: So I’m 61 years old, I have four children, and [I’ve been] retired from law enforcement for about 34 years.

I’ve been at Hamilton for five and a half. My prior employment is what brought me here. I was friends, or, I am friends with my predecessor here in Hamilton.

When [he] was getting ready to retire, he said, “Hey, maybe you want to think about this.” And it’s been a great transition away from law enforcement to the private sector. And as I said, my children are about college age - 38

twins that are both sophomores - . . . I think that’s probably why I like being here. . . I associate myself with all of you [as] having a parental responsibility.

ID: That’s really nice! What school did you go to? Coots: The college that I have my bachelor’s from is Elmira College, which is a very small private school down in southern New York State, [and] I majored in Criminal Justice.

ID: Are you from that area? Coots: No, I’m from outside of Boston, Mass. ID: Can you tell me a little bit more about your career with the New York State Police? Coots: So I rose to the ranks, I was a trooper for about eight years. I was a noncommissioned officer, or Sergeant, for about seven years. I was a commissioned officer, Lieutenant, Captain and a Major for roughly 17 years. The difference between being a noncommissioned officer and commissioned officer is that you’re more apt to be a first-line supervisor and as a division officer or sergeant, second-line supervisor, you tend to be more of the think tank. My last rank was a troop commander in central New York, so it was a seven-county area, in which I was responsible for all the state police investigations and personnel and assignments and everything that they did here in this area.

ID: What was your favorite part of working in that industry? Coots: . . .Working with the public, working with individuals, and not to sound too corny, but making a difference in at least a few peoples’ lives.

ID: Do you have a favorite memory from working in that industry? Coots: So favorite probably wouldn’t be the way to put it. Impactful? Yes. You know, over the course of my 34 year career, you certainly see a lot of tragedies, but you see a lot of positive things and when you see someone later on and they’re doing well, you know, because I’m not saying that all of my encounters with the public are bad or adversarial. I’m just saying that, unfortunately. . .generally speaking, they’re in probably one of the worst times of their lives. They somehow need assistance, and they don’t know who to turn to. So it is nice to go from something that’s somewhat negative, and then you see them years later. . .and their life is very positive. And that’s probably the most important thing that you can see.

ID: Do you have any examples of anyone you recall specifically? Coots: I do actually. I was a brand new trooper, and she was hav-

“We’re there to assist, we’re there to serve, and [there] to make you feel safe.”

ing a lot of psychological issues. She had to be taken into custody because she was a harm to herself. And several years later, I was sitting at a local diner. . . and this young woman walks up to me, she says, “Are you Frank Coots?” And I said, “yes, yes I am,” and she says “You probably don’t remember me, but I’m [redacted]. I just wanna let you know, I’m doing much better.”

ID: What led you to transition into a position in campus safety? Coots: So you know, my predecessor, he was leaving. Coincidentally, at this exact same time in my life, I was going to be transferred to our headquarters in Albany, and I live in Syracuse, and that’s a two-hour commute one way every day. And then you look at this opportunity. As I said, Syracuse, it’s about an hour. And I worked right here. So there were a lot of people in this community that I knew. There were just so many positives, and then I realized I was getting to that point in my life and was about to retire anyway. And this is a great opportunity, something where I could transition into a different lifestyle, you know, where I wasn’t away from home anymore. And it was really positive. And I say it’s positive, because as I stated earlier, I really have such a positive kinship towards the students. . .

Students also recognize that as long as I treat them with respect, I think they walk out of the room here and they say, “That was a positive experience. I may not like the outcome because I might get disciplined, or I might get held accountable for some of my actions,” but I always think that it’s always a learning experience. Doesn’t matter what you’ve done, it’s all a good learning experience. If you can convey that to the students, and you can have a positive direction like this and that they feel comfortable to ask questions, and then they can learn from them, I think that’s a positive thing. And that’s what I tried to strive for. And I think by and large, I think the student body respects me, even if they don’t know me, or if we had something adversarial, They may say, “I don’t agree with him”, or, ”what happened between him and me was adversarial, but he still treated me with respect.”

ID: What does your normal day to day look like here? Coots: Very administrative. When you get into a position of responsibility, when you’re a leader, sometimes you’re going to find that most of your time is dealing with personnel. It’s just a fact of life, as much as you’re gonna say, you know, “I’m going to change the world in so many different ways,” but when you have people working for you, they have their needs. And it’s just a fact. And so a lot of your time is dealing with personnel. But my main concern is, “How do I make students feel safe on campus?” That’s my biggest chore. It’s one that’s never ending, it’s one that’s always changing.

ID: How do you think your role is different at Hamilton - a small college - than it would be at a larger university? Coots: So we have no law enforcement powers. We investigate everything on campus, even things that are not policy-oriented, for example, medical causes, so we assist HCEMS, we transport HCEMS, we retain their equipment in our patrol vehicles so they can get to it safely and efficiently. When students get locked out of their residence halls, we take care of that. When you are parked in North Lot because you can’t find a parking spot on the South side, and you need an escort to your residence hall, we’re here for that. We’re there to assist, we’re there to serve, and there [to] make you feel safe. I think that in a large institution. . .they generally have a police department. And a police department is generally investigating violations of law, and not that we don’t do that, but we don’t have arrest powers. As a matter of fact, we don’t even patrol residence halls as a course of action. We don’t take any type of proactive enforcement when it comes to patrolling our residence halls, because it’s your home, that’s where you should feel a sense of privacy, a sense of being able to unwind without an administrator at this institution going saying, “What are you doing?” It’s still a simplification, because of course, it’s secure. And we want you to report when something isn’t right.

ID: What was the most difficult issue that you and the Campus Safety Office had to work through since the pandemic began? Coots: We became the COVID police. I didn’t want to do that. But when we were the only office on campus here, 24 hours a day campus safety was there. And when you saw something that was a violation of either the COVID policy or something that was unsafe, who are you going to call? You’re certainly not calling the Dean of Students at nine o’clock in the evening. So we became the COVID police. I didn’t like it, but if not us then who? Another big thing that we encountered was the societal demand for justice, especially after George Floyd was murdered. We’re not campus police, however, I think a number of people think that we have some type of police authority on this campus. So I think that that’s something that we had to encounter. And a couple of things came out of it. You know, it really was a student led organization. They wanted to have all of our policies printed and published on the Internet, which we did. We got away from the typical police looking uniform, it’s much more casual, you know, so in an emergency, you can still find campus safety because they’ll be wearing something a little bit different. But it’s not a law enforcement type of uniform.

ID: How do you think those officers adapted to those changes? Coots: When the students returned in the fall 2020 semester, it was a different world. Everyone was wearing masks and everyone had to social distance, you couldn’t have parties, you couldn’t go downtown, and there were just so many different things. And I think that the office has adapted to that fairly well. The biggest problem was when something was happening at Babbit Pavillion and we would get contacted by the students, we would get there and everyone would scatter. It was unsafe, because I don’t want to keep going into the woods… So it was that: I wanted you to be safe, I wanted you to socialize, still go to make friends and things like that. But of course, then we had our policy with our social distancing, asking everything of that nature. So I encouraged my officers to encourage the students to do all of those things without saying, “Okay, you have to go see conduct or you have to go see community standards.” I don’t want everything to be adversarial. On the other side of things, the social justice side of things, we had to remember that our constituents, students. . . we had to conform to what they want, as long as it wasn’t violating policy. We worked for the college, we worked for the students. And if this is what the majority wanted, we could create policy. I think that it was a positive relationship that went on between campus safety and the student body, when it came to social justice. I can’t say [it] was positive when it came to COVID, but I think we all kind of learn to coexist.

ID: What was your favorite part of working at Hamilton in the past 5 years? Coots: I think the thing that gives me the most joy is graduation day, when the students walk across the stage, and I get to be at the stage because of my role to ensure this remains safe. But when a student comes up and shakes my hand, or gives me a hug and says thank you, because we’ve developed the relationship throughout the course of the years, that’s the most rewarding thing that I can have.