Three years ago, I campaigned to stop the Department of Public Safety from becoming an armed police force. Here’s why I was wrong.

Someone just called 911. The caller said there is a man in PLC with a gun.

The University of Oregon Police Department immediately dispatches a team of officers to respond. Captain Pete Deshpande and Lieutenant Andy Bechdolt are in the EMU meeting with students when they get the call. They swiftly leave the meeting and hop into their police cruiser, lights flashing and sirens blaring. It takes them less than two minutes to get from the EMU parking lot to PLC.

They’re wearing black uniforms with badges on their chest labeled “Police.” Both are highly trained with decades of experience as law enforcement officers. Both graduated from the Police Academy with thorough training and have made it through a rigorous hiring process to be a part of the UO Police Department.

They are trained to “run toward a threat, not away from it,” in the words of UOPD Chief Carolyn McDermed. These officers are the heroes that we want responding to calls like this.

Bechdolt has more than 23 years of law enforcement experience with multiple agencies across the state of Oregon. He had never heard of a police department in the United States that doesn’t allow its officers to carry a firearm while on duty until he applied with the UOPD. When he took this job with the knowledge that he wouldn’t be allowed to carry a gun, his colleagues in law enforcement were more than skeptical.

“They all thought I was crazy,” Bechdolt said.

Yet there he was, responding to a call about a potential armed gunman — without a gun of his own.

And this is why I owe Lt. Bechdolt an apology.

As a freshman in the middle of his first student government campaign, it was easier for me to embrace misguided conventional wisdom than it was to think critically and put myself in Bechdolt’s shoes. “Keep guns and tasers off campus!” is a much neater fit on quarter-sheet campaign flyers than “Police officers put themselves in harm’s way to protect students, so we have an obligation to equip these officers with the tools they need to protect themselves in every situation we expect them to respond to!”

Luckily, the tip about the gunman in PLC turned out to be a series of miscommunications. In fact there was no gunman. But Bechdolt and Deshpande didn’t know that as they sped over to PLC.

Bechdolt was scared. In his head, he’s attempting to formulate a plan for when he arrives. Should I go in? Should I wait for an armed EPD officer to get here? Bechdolt has never been trained to respond to a situation like this without a firearm in his holster, but every second matters and he knows it. This must be why his colleagues thought he was crazy for taking this job.

When I asked what he thinks he would have done if the unspeakable had happened and he heard shots fired in PLC, his answer proves that McDermed knows her officers well.

“I would have gone into the building.”

He would have run toward the threat.

At this moment in my interview with Bechdolt, I sink into my chair, feeling guilty and embarrassed, wondering if somehow I am personally responsible for the fact that for more than a year, Bechdolt, Captain Deshpande and the other police officers at UOPD went to work every single day to protect me without the means to protect themselves.

In two consecutive elections, students voted overwhelmingly (over 77 percent of voters in both cases) on ballot measures indicating that they didn’t believe that the Department of Public Safety (the non-police entity that preceded the UOPD) should become an armed police department. I was part of the 77 percent. We were wrong.

The University of Oregon now has its own police department specifically designed to best serve the campus community. Cracking down on recreational marijuana use and 20-year-olds drinking alcohol isn’t a focus for UOPD. But having a faster response time to emergency situations is a focus. And doing something about the epidemic of sexual violence on campus is a focus too.

And now when Bechdolt reports for work every day, he has a gun in his utility belt. And that’s the way it should be.