The head of Iowa State University’s public safety department says it’s time to find a new facility. Campus Police Chief Michael Newton says they’re doing the best they can with what they have now.
“We’re in the Armory,” Newton says. “The Armory is a very old building. It’s not situated right for law enforcement.”
The Armory was built in the early 1920s. It had a gymnasium and horses were kept in stalls in the building, too. It’s been expanded and renovated often over the years and, at one time, was where Cyclone basketball and wrestling teams practiced and hosted games and matches.
“We’ve gotten the funding to some improvements and things that we need to do, but in the long term we need to find something that is more suited for law enforcement,” Newton says. “We actually are housed with students, so I’m bringing prisoners into a building where students are having class…just not the ideal space for us and so we are strategizing. We talk about it all the time and are looking for opportunities and we have moved some of our folks out of the building into another facility that, hopefully, long term we can do some more of.”
In the first 10 months of the year, Iowa State Campus Police made nearly 2700 traffic stops and responded to more than 15,000 emergency calls on the Ames campus. ISU is the largest university in Iowa in terms of number of students.