PITTSBURGH (PTTP) – Even without personally knowing officers killed in the line of duty, Pitt Police Chief James Loftus said these losses resonate throughout the law enforcement community.
“My frame of reference is 40 years long — that’s how long I’ve been in this business,” Loftus said. “My family’s frame of reference is over 100 years, with my wife and my father in law enforcement. So I’ve grown up knowing people intimately have been touched by this type of violence.”
Three Pennsylvania police officers — Chief Justin McIntire of Brackenridge, officer Sean Sluganski of McKeesport and Temple police officer Chris Fitzgerald — were killed in the line of duty in the past few months. Loftus said he has seen anti-police sentiment rise and fall in his time in law enforcement.
“Over the length of my career, I believe there’s an ebb and flow,” Loftus said. “People much smarter than me are tracking that ebb and flow and they can see it’s related to events that are going on in our country. It’s not hard to imagine that anti-police sentiment is very high, where we see some of the horrible things that we’ve seen play out in social media and on body cameras.”
Gun violence on college campuses has also been at the forefront of peoples’ minds in the past week after a shooting claimed the lives of three Michigan State students — Arielle Anderson, Alexandria Verner and Brian Fraser. A gunman on campus also injured five students, one of whom remained in critical condition on Friday.
Loftus said the Pitt police department does lots of training to prepare for active killer scenarios, including training University employees, during breaks from classes.
“Summer is a time where we can do a lot of training, and a lot of that training we do during our downtime is relative to our response to potentially active killer scenarios,” Loftus said. “We’ve trained over 3000 people on campus over the last few years in active killer protocols.”
To protect themselves from on-campus violence, Loftus said students should make an effort to pay attention to their surroundings and report any suspicious behavior to police.
