By Aubrey Hayes and Anna Reisman
Many undergraduates view University Police as party poopers whose only job is to stop students from urinating on campus buildings or from carrying a 30-rack of Coors on a Friday night to a frat house.
But in reality, these officers actively contribute to campus life and actually do want students to have fun.
Take 36-year-old Officer Zachary Reese, one of 12 staff in the University Police department. A constant presence on campus since he joined in 2021, Reese has seen it all, from rowdy weekends to late-night emergencies. He has also been part of the squad’s effort to become more approachable by hosting events and patrolling with K-9 Labs.
“Just because we’re around doesn’t mean something bad is going on,” Reese said during an interview at the University Police headquarters behind the college bookstore. “We do a lot of foot patrols. We try to be interactive with our campus community.”
One popular new initiative that Reese helped launch is a Water Pong Tournament, held in Whiteface Hall and co-organized with on-campus community advocates. The first tournament this past spring included more than 16 teams of combined officers, students and staff.
Reese said he would like to see more events happening on campus, in part because of his own experience at SUNY Albany, where he went to on-campus concerts every semester. “Just something for students to go be engaged with on campus,” said Reese, who studied sociology and criminal justice as an undergraduate before attending the Zone 9 Plattsburgh Police Training Academy.
Day-to-day, UP officers start their shift with a briefing of upcoming tasks and goals. They take calls, help on cases, do shift training, and patrol campus alongside the department’s recently added K-9 police dogs Izzy and Reva, English Labradors (and siblings) who joined the force in 2024 and quickly made the officers appear more approachable.
“I’ll just be walking around, and people ask me, ‘Hey, where’s Izzy?’” Reese said. “Nobody knows what our names are, but everyone knows the two dogs.”
“Izzy is the cutest little pup that brightens my day,” said 21-year-old senior Lillian Gilroy. “I love getting to see her and her officer around campus.”
There’s also a serious side to the UP’s work, cases that might call for a person to be restrained and even detained. When things do get serious, the UP has a new tool for it: the BolaWrap, a device that shoots a Kevlar cord that wraps tightly around a person. The tool was even tested on Reese, but it has yet to be deployed outside of training.
Reese’s colleague, Lieutenant Conrad LaVarnway, said 90% of a UP officer’s job is to be a positive figure on campus. Most calls are for building inspections, street patrols, and emergency mental-health crises.
“We do a lot of mental health calls and welfare checks,” said LaVarnway, who also joined the department in 2021 and moonlights as a crisis intervention instructor at the Zone 9 Academy. “We do those welfare checks for students, whether they are having a day, or maybe their family is concerned about them and want us to check up on them. Crisis intervention stuff is a lot of what we do here.”
Mental health resources are also available by way of the Student Health & Counseling Center and Behavioral Health Resources North (BHSN) networks that are available to all students and local residents.
“You try to… speak to them, get on their level, understand why they’re feeling the way they are,” Reese said of the health checks. “And then see what we can do to either help them in that situation or let them know what resources are available, both on campus and locally.”
UP must also respond to the fire alarms that are regularly triggered by students’ blow dryers, hair curlers, and hair straighteners, or from kitchen activity or smoking indoors. LaVarnway said Whiteface Hall, a nine-floor freshman dorm, had about 70 alarms during the 2023-2024 academic year.
Sometimes the alarms are real, of course. The day before graduation in May, LaVarnway rescued a student from the third floor of a burning house near campus. Then there was the time in March 2024 when state police were in pursuit of a vehicle on Interstate 87 that drove onto college grounds. The driver ditched their car by Kehoe Hall, then ran through multiple academic buildings, as well as a residence hall, before being apprehended by university police.
Collin MacDonald, a 19-year-old business major at SUNY Plattsburgh, said the officers “provide a sense of safety and security.”
Vella Cook, a 20-year-old junior psychology major, said that “knowing there’s people around that are here to protect me and my peers gives me a huge relief and makes it easier to roam campus freely.”
Most of the time the UP officers go unnoticed. But they’re always on call, available via the 12 blue light phone kiosks spread around campus as well as the yellow box phones in all of the dorm buildings. They also have a 24/7 phone number, (518) 564-2022.
“Everyone should save our phone number,” said Reese. “You never know when you’ll need it.”
