By Andre Gonzalez

“Bad boys, bad boys, what you gonna do? What you gonna do when they come for you?”

MSU campus police can use Inner Circle’s one hit as inspiration now that they have two new Ford F-150 squad pickup trucks to help in the fight against crime.

The trucks were being sported all over campus in the beginning of March, causing raised eyebrows and having many students speculate as to where the funding came from to pay for them.

“Actually it was HEAF (Higher Education Assistance Funds) money, which is constitutionally given to the institution by the state every year,” said Keith Lamb, vice president of student affairs. “It’s not student money, not student fee money, not tuition increase money, or parking fee money.”

The money given by the state is also separate from the university’s appropriations.

HEAF is used on university capital projects, and cannot be used for anything else, according to Lamb.

The fund goes toward numerous items on campus and new police trucks happened to be on the menu for the 2011-2012 school year.

The vehicles are not fully purchased by the university. Instead, they are being leased for three years at about $4,300 per year per unit. At the end of three years, the school will have pitched in $25,800.

The school will then have the option to pay the remaining balance or trade the trucks in for other models.

“We’re upgrading our police equipment, and safety is one of our top priorities,” Lamb said. “We need to equip our police adequately so that they can provide good services and part of that are vehicles to respond to situations.”

The fresh Ford V-6 four-doors will replace the 2005 Dodge Dakota models the police department has utilized for seven years. During that time, the vehicles had their share of wear and tear.

“Most of our operations are at 15-20 miles per hour or sitting in idle, and that’s very hard on a vehicle,” MSU police chief Dan Williams said. “I even encourage them to drive on the highway just to run them at a higher speed.”

With low operation and a lot of idle time, the motors see the damage and there is only so much preventive maintenance can do.

“Every so often you have to switch out vehicles,” Lamb added. “They were just fairly inadequate to meet the needs of today’s campus security.”

One of the newer trucks boasts a cage system, a fenced barricade that separates the front and back seats.

The cage is almost standard in any law enforcement vehicle, but MSU didn’t have it in their older models, which allowed for an easy escape.

“It at least gives our officers the ability to hopefully transport people in a safer environment,” Williams said.

Over the past summer, MSU police arrested a student who was intoxicated and had several run-ins with MSU law before. The student was handcuffed with arms behind his back, and placed in the front seat of the squad unit.

As the student was driven to the county jail for booking, he was able to slip out of handcuffs and unclick his seat belt in an attempted to escape the vehicle, which was traveling 45 mph.

“Fortunately, we had two officers, one driving and one in the back and they were able to restrain the student and handle the situation,” Williams said.

Williams said the student was so intoxicated that he didn’t know what he was doing.

“With the new units we wanted to put a cage in at least one of them,” Williams said. “In the past if we’ve had a situation where someone was fighting. We had to call the city or county to transport them because they had cage systems.”

More modern conveniences include LED light bars, a newer police communications system and four doors.

Some students question why the school continues to purchase pickup trucks rather than sedans, like a Ford Crown Victoria, the traditional police car.

“We like the pickups so much because we always have to haul barricades around campus to block things off,” Williams said. “There have been times where we’ve had to haul trailers to the football stadium for various events. It just works for us better to have a pickup versus a car.”

Lamb has plans to further update the police department.

“We’re actually getting grants right now to upgrade equipment,” Lamb said. “One of my priorities is to make sure our campus is safe and our police have the adequate equipment to protect us all.”

Hiring a new police officer is also a possibility.

“We could probably use another officer or two, quite frankly, but we’ve come leaps and bounds in the last three years of the number of officers employed,” Lamb said. “So we have fairly good coverage. What you’ll probably see is just more modern equipment.”

An interagency operability communication system is also in the future for the police force.

The current communications system used by campus police does not dovetale with city and county equipment, which is something Lamb wants to change.

“Obviously if there’s an emergency on campus we need to communicate with local and county authorities adequately,” Lamb said. “So we’re working on upgrading that equipment as well.”