The UTRGV Police Department will now have officers on bicycle patrol on the Edinburg and Brownsville campuses to make them more approachable for students.
“It gives [students] better access to the officers and what we’ve noticed is that students are more open to come and talk to the officers,” Police Chief Raul Munguia said. “For the last couple of years, they’ve pretty much been on a patrol car and they’re hard to approach when they’re on a car versus on a bike.”
The International Police Mountain Bike Association training consisted of an intensive weeklong course where nine officers from the Edinburg campus and seven from the Brownsville campus learned to do slow-speed skills, slow maneuvers, balance and pedal retention for bike safety.
“Basically, it’s a course they go [to], they have to take their bikes and it’s a really intensive weeklong course and they get certified if they pass it, and not everybody passes it,” Munguia said.
UTRGV Police Officer Joe Hernandez, who received training in Ohio for an instructor certification, started the training sessions last semester. Hernandez and UTRGV Police Officer Roman Ramos went through a weeklong certification course in order to train and certify officers and security guards.
“I am looking forward to growing the program here for the university,” he said. “I am looking forward to growing all the bike-patrol units here with our police department, and to bring awareness to the other police departments in the Rio Grande Valley.”
Hernandez was the University of Texas System’s Police Officer of the Month in July 2017. He told The Rider training bike officers in the Valley is his passion.
Munguia said the department is training not only UTRGV officers, but also local agencies who want to get certified for bike patrolling.
“We wanted to get a couple of training sessions under our belt before we go full board here, and I’m happy to report that our training program is getting started and we have our trainer here,” he said. “We had one in December, so now I think we got our guys pretty warmed up for it.”
The next training sessions are planned for April and May, and each will consist of a maximum of seven officers.
“This class takes some planning and it’s not an easy course to pass,” Munguia said. “So, there’s a lot of preparation, and then we have to be able to schedule them to when the officer is available for that weeklong training, because we can’t break the training, either. They have to be there the entire five days. So, we’re going to be doing the training in Edinburg and then also in Brownsville. You can only train six or seven at a time, so it will take a while.”
He said students should start seeing some bike patrols on both campuses, including public-safety officers.
“We are moving forward. We are going to start the training this next quarter and we’ve already got a couple of officers that we’ve done,” Munguia said. “We have right about 30 officers that patrol, so we are going to try to get as many of them as possible.”
To contact the UTRGV Police Department, call 882-4911 or email police@utrgv.edu.
