Sean McMinn
smcminn@mustangdaily.net
The Cal Poly University Police Department has issued a safety advisory to the campus community after launching an investigation regarding a man who allegedly took photos of women working out at the Cal Poly Recreation Centerlast week.
University Chief of Police George Hughes said an Associated Students, Inc. (ASI) employee noticed a man taking photos on his iPhone in the Recreation Center’s second-floor exercise area last Tuesday evening. After staff confronted the man, he denied taking the photos and left, Hughes said.
According to police, the ASI employee who confronted the man saw an image of a woman working out on his phone before the man “quickly walked away.”
Employees at the Recreation Center did not contact police after the incident, and instead searched the building for the man themselves. The student workers were unable to find the individual, Hughes said.
Greg Avakian, assistant director of programs at ASI, said staff is instructed to confront people taking pictures at the Recreation Center, which the staff typically does multiple times a day. Tuesday’s particular incident, Avakian said, did not raise any red flags until police came to investigate based on a tip received Wednesday afternoon.
“We’ve got people in here always trying to take pictures of the facility and video, and we ask them to leave every time,” Avakian said.
The presence of Cal Poly facility workers inside the center further complicated the incident, Avakian said. Though he said he believes a worker would have simply shown identification instead of leaving when confronted by ASI staff, police are investigating the possibility of the suspect being a Cal Poly employee working inside the center.
The student employees at the Recreation Center would not have been expected to call the police unless the man was confrontational or was obviously recording with a full camera, Avakian said.
Hughes, however, said he would have preferred ASI employees had contacted police immediately after the incident. Whether or not the man allegedly taking photos committed a crime, Hughes said he wants to make sure that kind of activity does not occur in the Recreation Center.
“It’s unfortunate because we did not know about it until a day after the event,” Hughes said. “It makes it more difficult to investigate it a day after the event.”
A technical glitch in the Recreation Center’s security system, which rendered the footage from last Tuesday nearly irretrievable, added to the difficulty, ASI manager of information technology Anthony Colvard said. The cameras’ interface “froze” the day of the incident, keeping less footage in its history than it was supposed to.
A similar malfunction occurred earlier this year, but Colvard said it was resolved and should have been fixed. He said he reviews the system weekly to check for errors and saw no problems during testing the week prior to the incident.
Colvard said he is working with the security system’s software vendor to retrieve the footage, but for the time being, the video is inaccessible since it cannot be searched by date or time.
“You know how security cameras work,” Colvard said. “It’s kind of like a needle in a haystack finding someone sometimes.”
Of the 21 security cameras in the Recreation Center, none of them point at the weight room where the confrontation took place. Instead, the cameras are primarily aimed at entrances and exits to the building. Colvard said this is intentional as to not violate the privacy of gym users.
ASI President Katie Morrow, who was made aware of the situation Thursday, said these kinds of incidents are of great concern to the student-operated Recreation Center, and that she would take the situation “very seriously.”
Police described the suspect as a thin man in his mid-thirties, above six feet tall, with buzzed hair. The campus safety advisory states he was wearing a white T-shirt, brown work boots and brown work pants with paint or grease stains on them.
Anyone with information about the man or the incident is asked to call university police at (805) 756-2281.