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While driving her friend to a dinner in May, SU senior Donna-Nicole Zaiens approached a stop sign on Walnut Avenue just off Syracuse University’s campus. As she was pulling away, a car crashed into the front of her car. She immediately called SPD following the accident, but said it took them two hours to arrive.

“I don’t know why it took so long for them to come,” Zaines said. “They didn’t give an explanation. We were basically just sitting on the side of the road waiting for it to be handled even though there were pieces of my car in the road.”

Between 2020 and 2021, the Syracuse Police Department’s number of sworn officers dropped from 425 to 387. Though SU’s Department of Public Safety handles on-campus security issues, some students are still feeling the effects of the SPD staff shortage. SPD did not respond to The Daily Orange’s request for comment regarding police response times in Syracuse.

Following a combination of resignations and retirements, the amount of officers in the city of Syracuse have dwindled to where SPD has to “order in,” or pay their current officers overtime, in order to function. Still, Spectrum News 1 reported that officers sometimes address less urgent calls 24 hours after they’re reported.

“We don’t want to have to order in,” SPD Deputy Chief Richard Trudell said in an interview with Spectrum News 1. “But we’re ordering in on shifts, we’re ordering in on CIDs, we’re ordering in on Dome games. We’re doing everything we can to limit that amount of ordering in.”

Stephanie Zaso | Design Editor

In a Sept. 8 briefing, SPD Chief Joe Cecile said burglaries in the city of Syracuse are up 48% from this time last year and have nearly doubled in the area of the city that includes SU and Le Moyne College.

Over the summer, SU student Natalie Sternlicht’s house was broken into while nobody was home. When she arrived on campus at the end of August to move in, Sternlicht was showing her roommate around the apartment on FaceTime, and her roommate noticed items missing from her room. Sternlicht later noticed that a flatscreen television in another room was also missing.

When she called Campus Hill, the property’s landlord, the company told her one of their maintenance workers had already called the police and filed a report.

Once Sternlicht and her roommate found out about the report, the pair followed up with the police. Sternlicht said when they inquired about the report, police told her they knocked on the door to the apartment, but left because nobody responded.

She said her roommate decided to file a new report and called SPD to their Syracuse apartment to meet with Sternlicht. Police arrived 30 minutes after being called, she said. They asked Sternlicht questions, gave her a card with the case number on it and told her to follow up with them. But she hasn’t heard back in a month.

“The fact that they really haven’t handled this and we have to do so much and get nothing back is disappointing,” Sternlicht said.

Published on September 26, 2022 at 12:24 am

Contact Shantel: [email protected] | @shantelguzman2