By MARTY LEVINE

The head of Pitt’s Office of Public Safety & Emergency Management says that his favorite hidden gem on campus is its most precarious perch of all: The roof of the Cathedral of Learning, 42 stories in the air.

“It really puts everything into a lot of perspective,” Vice Chancellor Ted Fritz told the latest Staff Council Coffee and Conversation, a monthly public interview event, on Nov. 11.

He recalled his years prior to his current post, when he was a lawyer in the University counsel’s office and wrote the permission slip that had to be signed by film crews and others wanting access to the topmost campus view. “It said you could have falls from great heights, lightning strikes and be attacked by a falcon,” he said, since the birds famously nest on a ledge a few floors below. “That was pretty funny, but it was actually true.”

His job today, which oversees not just emergencies but Pitt’s police department and its environmental health and safety personnel, was created after a March 2012 shooting at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic. Fritz had already been advising student affairs, international programs and Pitt’s police on legal matters, so he was asked to form and lead the new unit.

“It was a great opportunity,” he recalled. “At the police department, there’s terrific people — I knew that their hearts are all in the right place. I knew that the University was trying to do a good thing in putting more emphasis on safety and emergency management kinds of issues.

“It’s certainly a challenge, I can tell you,” Fritz added. “It’s a lot easier to be the lawyer after the fact, saying you should have done this and you should have done that and why didn’t you do this, than it is in this position, where you’re having to think a lot more proactively.”

All the people in his department, he said, “they’re just amazing people who are constantly looking to make things better, who are not afraid of change or not afraid of going in a different direction from what they’ve done in the past. … You’ve got to really pay attention to the hiring part of it, and why do you want to be in this business. If the answers are coming from the heart, then you can figure out how to train people and get them to the right place.”

Asked to name his role models or mentors, Fritz cited his family. “We should really honor our families and how we get to where we are in certain places in life. My grandparents were a huge part of that. My father was a huge part of that.”

His grandfather was a captain in the state police and his father was a professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, from which Fritz received his bachelor’s degree in criminology, in the town where he grew up. “Somehow between those two things I ended up here. … My other grandfather worked on the railroad during World War II and he worked in the coal mines. I came from a county which respects hard working people.”

He is also pleased to see the families of Pitt Police stand behind them through the years, he said. Standing behind them is his job as well: “There were a couple of protests that got violent last year and in one of them some of our officers were injured. You have to get behind them by understanding what they’re doing and then supporting them through that crisis. While they understand that by virtue of their position they’re going to get into some tough calls, you still have to be understanding about where they’re at and make sure that you have their back whenever things do go the wrong way.

“It’s never just one person, it’s many people that are dealing with” crises when they occur, he continued. “I’ve been at Pitt for 27 years. I’ve noticed that people put their other work down and everybody sort of chips in. What I take from the different crises that we face through the years is that it affects a lot more departments than you think it does. There’s a focal point sometimes, but there’s all kinds of things going on in the background as well, and I’m always amazed about how wide the impact of a certain crisis could be.”

He also is impressed with the teamwork among local agencies and Pitt departments: “We’re really in touch with the Western Pennsylvania law enforcement. There’s almost complete cooperation and that doesn’t exist everywhere in the country. The sharing of information and the sharing of resources is unmatched.”

Fritz expects the biggest future challenges for his department to be “the information technology challenges, on the side of keeping up with the changes in it, so that investigators and officers know what’s available to them and how to access resources to conduct investigations. Every crime now has something to do with IT, so if it’s not committed by using the technology, it’s being investigated using technology. Our folks need to make sure that in the future they have those IT skills to be able to do that.”

The fact that his interview was taking place on Veterans’ Day was fortuitous, he said. “Our Office of Public Safety and Emergency Management has a lot of veterans. The University has a lot of faculty, staff and student veterans. Today is a glorious day to honor them. We just looked out the window and saw the flags all over Soldiers and Sailors’ lawn, and you know it makes you feel good that they’re a ton of people out there that are willing to sacrifice for the entire country.

“There’s unfortunately fewer and fewer people every year that are answering that call, but I do think that it’s incumbent upon the University to honor our veterans. When we look at what departments we all come from, you should ask yourself, how is your department doing that today and how can they perhaps do that in the future? (Pitt is) a successful model of diversity in this country and how you can integrate different people coming from all sorts of backgrounds. It’s a wonderful experience and companies, colleges, universities, everybody can benefit by having veterans on their team.”

Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.

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