A bill that would have improved campus security at South Carolina’s independent colleges and universities was vetoed by Governor Sanford on March 31. Sanford said that the legislation would have significantly expanded the jurisdiction of the police officers.
Efforts to override the Governor’s veto failed in the Senate. It is expected that another attempt at amending the law will be made during the legislative session that begins in January 2011.
Senate Bill 19 was introduced by Sen. Mike Fair (Greenville) at the beginning of the 2009 session. The purpose of the bill was to address specific gaps in the jurisdiction of campus police officers at private colleges.
As proposed in the legislation, the authority of campus police officers would have been extended to specific off-campus activities such as accompanying a school employee to make a bank deposit, patrolling off-campus property owned or leased by a college, travelling with an athletic team, or at institution-sponsored events like graduation ceremonies and concerts held in rented facilities. To address intimating and threatening behavior or imminent danger on the edge of a campus, jurisdiction would have been expanded no more than 100 yards from the campus’s property boundary.
Campus police officers at private colleges have the same training as other law enforcement officers, and even under the proposed legislation, they would have had far less authority than the statewide jurisdiction granted to campus police at public universities. The bill had the support of the S.C. Sheriff’s Association, the S.C. Law Enforcement Officers Association, and the S.C. Campus Law Enforcement Officers Association.