Importance of paying attention, how to stay safe on campus

On Feb. 14 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., 17 were killed in what was pronounced the second worst school shooting in U.S. history. The New York Times reports that over 400 individuals have been killed in over 200 school shootings since Sandy Hook in 2012.

In the wake of the shooting, a national conversation and movement has ignited, known as the “we call BS” movement led by the students from Douglas High School. This is proving to be a pivotal point in the gun control discussion because unlike previous debates following mass shootings that have fizzled out, this one has stayed strong.

Regardless of one’s stance on gun ownership and control legislation, there are tactics used by all parties to advance their agendas.

“Both parties use framing strategies,” said Sam Collitt, a political science graduate student. “Mental health is a frame used by Republican politicians, gun advocates or owners that is used to focus attention on that rather than gun control, in the sense that who can own or purchase. By shifting the debate to mental health it limits the amount of attention that gun control issues get.”

Collitt also noted that this is true in reverse for liberal views, which tend to lean toward stricter gun laws.

“Given the news cycle speed, if you’re able to divert attention from gun control, for as long as the public is paying attention to it you create less demand for gun control legislation, the status quo is easier to maintain,” Collitt said.

“It makes it easier to preserve status quo in Florida in talking about mental health,” Collitt said. “Whereas in California, it is easier to preserve the status quo in talking about gun control because it is more restrictive. It is much harder to change status quo than it is to preserve it.”

NBC reported that on Mar. 7, Florida’s House of Representatives passed the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act, which raises the age to purchase a firearm to 21, puts a three-day waiting period on obtaining a gun, prohibits bump stocks and implements mental health programs in schools to impede gun use by mentally unstable individuals.

Following Florida, The New York Times reported that California will expanding its gun control policy already in place, which prohibits the purchase of a handgun under the age of 21, and is widening to include longer guns.

California already has some of the strictest gun laws in the country. It is illegal to purchase or possess military grade assault weapons; the state bans firearms with “detachable high-capacity ammunition magazines” and magazines are limited to 10 rounds. There is also a “gun violence restraining order” which allows police or family to temporarily remove firearms from a potentially unstable individual.

In an interview in the Los Angeles Daily News,  Garen Wintemute, the director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis, said, “a gun violence restraining order could have made the difference [in Florida].” Wintemute was unavailable for an interview with The Aggie at this time.

These proposed gun control legislations directly impact the safety of U.S. citizens, especially for students on school campuses.

“Anytime a major incident like this happens, police and law enforcement always want to try and make sure we’re prepared and we’re doing the best we can,” said UC Davis police officer Ray Holguin.

The UC Davis campus is unique in that it has its own police department right on campus offering services such as 24/7 campus patrol, Aggie Safe Ride and WarnMe.

“WarnMe is our mass notification system, anybody who has a UC Davis email, faculty, staff or students, can sign up for it and we highly encourage it,” Holguin said. “This will send out a mass notification whether it be an active incident where a gun is involved, or just a chemical spill.”

In addition to this, the UC Davis Police Department is committed to proactive efforts in ensuring campus safety.

“One thing we really push, we have a simple saying here at the university, ‘if you see something say something,’” Holguin siad. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a crime or not, if something to you doesn’t look right or feel right, always give us a call so we can come and check it out and assess the situation. We highly recommend this, we want people to feel safe to call us no matter what.”

The UC Davis Police Department also conducts an Active Shooter Survival Workshop to educate faculty, students and staff on how to stay safe in the event of a firearm-related emergency.

“We really want to emphasize the mindset that if something like this does happen on campus what can we do, what should we do,” Holguin said. “We just had one on Mar. 1, right after the incident, and what we teach in that is homeland security has what they call ‘run hide or fight’ and that’s what we focus on.”

These hour-and-a-half classes are held on campus six times yearly and aim to prepare the UC Davis community in the event of an active incident.

“Now with more and more incidents happening, more and more faculty, staff and students are saying ‘we need this training,’” Holguin said. “We have seen an increase in demand for the training.”

In the wake of the Florida shooting, many campuses are initiating new protocols, but UC Davis is ahead of the game with its current procedures that have been in place and practice for years.

“We are reinforcing protocols already set in place. However, our management is always looking to work with the EOC, which is the emergency service center here on campus,” Holguin said. “We’re always working together and collaborating and making sure the information we are giving out is still the best and most up to date.”

In addition to campus safety resources, students have many options for getting involved and staying informed on this issue of gun violence.

“There are quite a lot of ways to get involved,” said Eric Medina, a third-year public service major and member of Davis College Democrats, J Street and Students for Justice in Palestine. “There is the Davis Political Review, they write on this issue without taking a stance. Then there are Davis College Democrats and Davis College Republicans who do [take stances on issues].”

Written by: Grace Simmons — features@theaggie.org

Students upset with parking inconvenience, TAPS input

Student parking spaces, or lack thereof, have been an issue of contention in recent years at UC Davis. Students who drive to campus from their off-campus housing and those who commute from neighboring cities such as Woodland have voiced their complaints of a lack of parking spaces, and some are concerned that this will be exacerbated by an expanding student body.

Clifford Contreras, the director of the Transportation and Parking Services on campus, shared some statistics on various facets of the issue, and offered explanations of some of the questions students have had regarding the rationale behind permits and their prices. He began by sharing the total inventory of C permit spaces available throughout regular business hours on campus: 7,502. If the L permit spaces are included as well, then the total comes to 8,529. However, these spaces are not exclusive to the C permit. In the first number presented, A/C/Visitor share the spaces, and in the additional 1,027, A/C/L/Visitor permits share the space.

“The reason we put A there is because As can park in any C spot,” Contreras said. “They typically park in every A spot that’s available [and] they usually don’t park in C spots, but because they can, we put that letter there. Every C permit [space] is also available to anybody that buys a daily permit. We can’t separate that out because we know how many dailies are sold, but we don’t know how long they’re there.”

The revenue gained from selling parking permits and parking citations is used to run TAPS, an entirely self-supported entity. As Contreras expressed, TAPS must generate an independent source of revenue in order to maintain operations and pay for the construction and maintenance of facilities, since it is not a university-funded program.

During the 2016-2017 school year, 29,300 parking citations were issued and 9,844 citations were appealed, with 65.6 percent of the appeals being granted. Citations that seem to fall under the arbitrary notion of a “simple parking violation” category have a decent chance of being forgiven.

However, citations are not appealed for rationales such as lack of space to park in a valid C permit area. According to the numbers, there are enough spaces for all C permits. 5,254  variations of C permits were sold during the Fall 2017 and there are 7,502 C permit parking spaces available, meaning there was no numerical requirement to cap the number of permits sold.

“We do quarterly utilization surveys, including the summer,” Contreras said. “We count every vehicle in every parking space, and we do it three times a day, three days within a week, at 10 a.m., 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. We keep track of what those utilization numbers are, and if they’re starting to get over 90 percent, we start thinking that we might have to do something as it relates to building additional facilities. Iin the 31 years that I’ve been here, we’ve never capped the number of permits that we sell because we’ve always had a sufficient number of spaces”

As Contreras suggested, although there are enough physical spaces in total throughout campus for C permits, student unrest typically surrounds the idea that people are no longer able to park where they used to, in part due to a greater campus population. The main hotspots for students are the Quad and Pavillion parking structures, which aren’t able to meet the high student demand. Contreras and other officers have noticed that students will stay double parked in their cars, for instance in the Quad structure, waiting for a space that they can occupy as people may clear spaces during class breaks.

“They stay in the car, and they’ll sit there listening to the radio or doing their homework and the car is turned on, unfortunately, so you got emissions going into the air,” Contreras said.

The main source of contention, according to Contreras, is that students prefer to park in the “hotspot” areas close to classes, such as the main parking structures, but those two areas simply cannot meet student demands. Students who want drive to campus must be prepared to park in less convenient locations that may be further away from their classes.

“What happens is this lodged complaint that there isn’t enough parking to accommodate [student] needs, which isn’t really true, because our statistics bare out that there is,” Contreras said. “It’s just not where they want it to be — it’s further away.”

Jyotsna Natarajan, a third-year genetics and genomics major, shared her experiences with driving to campus.

“I’ve been driving for a year and a half or so, and definitely I’ve realized you have to come before a certain time, and it depends on if you’re going to [the] Pavillion Structure or the Quad Structure,” Natarajan said. “I have a mental timetable. If I drive to campus, I won’t move my car after 9 a.m. or before 4 p.m., [otherwise] I won’t get parking once again.”

Mounika Bhaskara, a fourth-year neurobiology, physiology and behavior major, voiced similar frustrations with her campus parking experiences, especially since she commutes from her home near Folsom — a 45-minute commute without traffic.

“Campus parking sucks, to put it in one sentence,” Bhaskara said. “I have such a hard time finding parking every single day, because I commute from home now. It’s honestly a competition, because there are so many cars trying to take one spot. It’s so unfair because right next to it, you see the A parking, which is absolutely empty. Sometimes I’ve had to either risk parking in the A permit to go for my midterm, or luckily, if I have quarters, I put them in the meter. I’ve gotten tickets because sometimes you have to park in the A and just go.”

As a commuter, Bhaskara has no other option but to drive to campus. She cannot utilize services such as Unitrans that Davis resident students can. She expressed that this issue has significantly affected her stress levels, and she has found it to be a systemic reason for her self-acknowledged parking violations. She would like to see certain changes made, such as a change in the ratio of A to C permit spaces, along with a potential dynamic display of the number of spots available in a given lot, so that students can save time from circling around the lot looking for availability.

“[The parking issue] is important because it causes so much of an inconvenience,” Bhaskara said. “You get delayed for everything. If it’s midterms, what am I going to do? It’s not like I can just leave my car somewhere, and parking tickets are expensive, who wants to risk that? I think physically the space needs to be expanded, because we are a huge campus and you can’t expect somebody to park in one [area] and walk all the way across. We should open up some of the A parking to C parking. Particular places like the arboretum […]  there’s two huge A parking [lots] right across from each other and there’s one tiny C parking there, and it’s always full. We obviously have a lot more students than faculty.”

TAPS has launched some initiatives in order to address student concerns such as those voiced by Bhaskara and Natarajan. One such initiative that has been in place since this Fall 2017 is the stacked parking service available in Lots 25, 47 and the Quad Structure. This service has increased the number of parking available in each of the lots by approximately 20 percent.

Out of the 304 additional spaces cumulatively created by stacked parking in the three Lots, 236 spaces are currently being utilized by students, with the most underused spaces being in Lot 25 east of the ARC. The outside vendors that provide this service are insured, and they are professionals, meaning that risk for students handing their keys to them should be relatively low.

“It’s an expensive service that we outsource,” Contreras said. “We contract out to an outside vendor […] but right now, if we didn’t have it, there’d be almost three hundred people that wouldnt be able to find a place to park sort of in the immediate area, and we felt it’s important to be able to accommodate their access needs.”

However, counterbalancing the notion of increasing campus parking space is the UC campus-wide initiative stipulated in the UC Policy on sustainable practices. The initiative states that “By 2025, each location shall strive to reduce its percentage of employees and students commuting by SOV [single occupancy vehicles] by 10% relative to its 2015 SOV commute rates.”

With this, and the fact the UC Davis is the most sustainable campus in the world, there is an inherent contradiction to increasing parking space. But nonetheless, there is still immediate student necessity to address. To walk that tightrope, TAPS has been working with Alta Planning and Design, an outside consulting firm that is supposed to help their Transportation and Demand Management program.

“They’re helping us put together a suite of options that expand our existing TDM program that says we need to create an incentive that encourages and rewards people who choose an alternative to driving alone,” Contreras said. “Right now we provide subsidies to people for taking the train. But maybe that isn’t enough […] maybe we ought to reduce the cost of carpools to even lower rates so that more people choose to carpool.”

When TAPS started this program 30 years ago, it decided to base the permit prices on access, meaning those with the greatest access to the parking inventory would be paying the highest prices. In this case, the most expensive would be A permit, and next would be C.

However, this doesn’t take into account the convenience factor. A permit spaces are rarely full, whereas C permit spaces are rarely empty. C permits often have to find spaces farther from their most desired location, and they don’t have the flexibility of leaving campus and returning without running the risk of losing an option to park again.

“Now people are saying we ought to consider a different approach to pricing,” Contreras said. “That’s what we’re working with Alta on. One of the approaches they want us to consider is the convenience factor.”

Currently, TAPS is working on a three-year plan that is meant to address these issues and set into motion the potential changes, such as building new parking facilities and pricing to accommodate generating that revenue. This plan should be ready to share with the campus by the end of this fiscal year.

“I know it’s not just me, because everybody complains about parking all the time,” Bhaskara said. “I feel like that’s something that the campus needs to address before they try to make other changes.”

Written by: Sahiti Vemula — features@theaggie.org

UC Davis clubs offer opportunities for leadership, community

In order to get involved on campus, students often turn to clubs and organizations to find a sense of community, leadership and professional and personal development. With over 800 clubs on campus, students have ample opportunities to find communities that align with their cultural, professional and personal inclinations.

While joining an organization provides students with community and an outlet to pursue their interests, it also provides them with a platform to potentially gain leadership experience. By joining clubs and staying passionate and committed, students have the potential to go from participating in events and meetings as a general member to contributing more on the leadership staff.

Caroline Cho, a third-year human development major, is currently on the leadership team for Mustard Seed Ministry, a Christian organization on campus. She joined as a freshman and remained an active member of MSM throughout her experience at Davis.

“The reason why I initially became involved with [this organization] was because my dad was in Mustard Seed Ministry when he was an undergrad at UC Davis, so I already had that connection,” Cho said. “Some of my dad’s community is still here so I wanted to contribute to that.”

While Cho wanted to contribute to and be a part of her MSM’s community, she notes that her route in the organization followed a path that she didn’t initially anticipate.

“I didn’t expect to take on a role like this when I was a freshman,” Cho said. “It was weird going from a general member to a leader [in the organization]. I’m used to participating in [events], and now I’m in a more administrative role. It’s interesting to see myself in a position that I didn’t see myself in before.”

Students become passionate about their organizations for a variety of reasons; some students hope to give back, while others find like-minded community that may contribute to their personal interests. Karna Chelluri, a second-year managerial economics major, became involved with his club, the Finance Investment Club, after transferring to UC Davis from a business school.

“I wanted to keep some of the business aspect of the school I went to last year,” Chelluri said. “When I got to Davis, I wanted to look for business clubs and [my friend] told me to apply for FIC.”

The process for rising to leadership varies with each organization; some clubs require an extensive application and interview process, while other leaders are voted in by a general consensus of its organization members. When Chelluri joined FIC, he found that his previous professional and club experience gave him a leg up in joining their leadership team.

“There was an application process, and I applied to be treasurer along with everyone else,” Chelluri said, who was later offered the position of vice president instead. “I was VP at my old school’s investment group so I already had previous experience being on an executive board; I figured it would fit well.”

In contrast, Cho had a slightly different experience than students in other organizations entering into her leadership position in Mustard Seed Ministry.  

“How the coordinators are selected isn’t necessarily because someone is voted up, but who is willing to serve and it just snowballs from there,” Cho said. “I had just not been able to join ROTC and I was seeking a leadership position because ROTC played a huge portion in my life and now it was gone.”

Cho reflected on how an experience in a club changes drastically as a student goes from a new member to a veteran. Older students shape how new members of the organization are welcomed in and experience what the club has to offer. As such, young members eventually take over the leadership roles in the community, and in turn, welcome new members into the organization.

“Lowerclassmen gauge how much they’ll get out of it when they go to new orgs,” Cho said. “But when you’re an upperclassmen that’s been committed to an organization for a while, it’s less about what you’ll get out of it but more what you put into it.”

Entering into a leadership role, students are able to better understand the work that goes into planning small and large scale events. Alisha Nanda, a third-year computer science major, had prior experience with HackDavis before joining the leadership team, attending hackathons and participating in their events throughout previous school years.

“Before joining, I only got glimpses of what goes on behind the scenes and how much work goes into a hackathon, often taking things like wifi and power for granted,” Nanda said. “After joining the leadership team, I’ve come to appreciate all the small details that make our hackathon special and the hard work behind each and every aspect of the event.”

Nanda attributes her interest in joining the leadership team to her past experiences participating in hackathons.

“I was intrigued by the process of organizing a hackathon and curious to see how such an event comes together,” Nanda said, explaining her interest in joining the leadership team. “Especially since I had never experienced event planning before.”

Students on club executive teams tend to be passionate about their community and put in the time and effort necessary to improve their organization.

“There really is no fixed time commitment when you’re a leader for an organization,” Chelluri said. “For me, I’ll do anything I can to make my club better. If that means putting in extra hours, then I’ll do it.”

While finding the right club can positively contribute to a student’s college experience, student leaders emphasize the importance of maintaining community outside of any specific organization they may be a part of.

“[My organization] is an integral part of my life, but it’s important for me that I balance my friend group and have other friends outside my organization,” Cho said. “It’s so easy to get trapped inside your own organization’s bubble and not branch out at all.”

Written by: Alyssa Hada — features@theaggie.org