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Temple University’s safety chief is stepping down following a four-year tenure during which a campus police officer was murdered while on patrol and the school made major investments in law enforcement technology.
Vice president for public safety Jennifer Griffin oversaw “a period of significant change and improvement” and her department made “dozens of operational technological enhancements” and bolstered partnerships with other law enforcement agencies, school president John Fry said in an email to students.
Griffin will leave June 30, Fry wrote. She has not said where she will work next.
She was named to the position in July 2022, after serving as a Delaware state trooper and captain and teaching criminal justice at the University of Delaware.
Her appointment came during what one Temple administrator called “a very challenging period” of soaring pandemic-era gun violence. The previous November, 21-year-old student Samuel Collington had been shot and killed in an off-campus carjacking.
The university responded by creating Griffin’s position, increasing police patrols, investing in more security cameras and other technology, launching a shuttle service and adding more walking escorts for students and staff. It commissioned a public safety audit by former Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey’s firm, which made dozens of recommendations.
Seven months after Griffin’s hiring, in February 2023, Officer Christopher Fitzgerald chased three masked men in an area where there had been a series of robberies and carjackings. He caught up with 21-year-old Miles Pfeffer, who fatally shot the officer while they struggled.
Fitzgerald’s death was the first killing of an on-duty Temple police officer. Pfeffer was later convicted of first-degree murder and other charges.
Among other changes, Griffin had officers switch from solo to paired car patrols, while noting the risks of the change.
“One of the challenges with moving to a two-officer car is now you reduce the number of vehicles on campus and around the area. So, as opposed to having ten cars out there with officers or whatever the deployment number would be, you reduce that by half,” she said at the time.
The school moved to further bolster its public safety infrastructure, in part through a $1.7 million federal grant to install gunshot detection devices, license plate readers, and closed-circuit television cameras, and to recruit and retain officers and provide them with crisis intervention and other training.
Following the pandemic crime spike, aggravated assaults, robbery and auto theft in the university area fell by double-digit percentages in 2023, the Inquirer reported.
Yet Griffin faced criticism from Temple’s police union, which called for her resignation in June 2023. The union alleged she had failed to make significant safety improvements and criticized her for terminating three officers.
Like the city of Philadelphia and law enforcement agencies across the country, the university struggled to hire police. In December 2024 the union criticized Griffin again, saying the department was down to 41 patrol officers, having lost 55 officers and only hiring 13 during her tenure. “We are deeply concerned about the future viability of the department,” the union wrote in a social media post.
As of December 2025, Temple had 77 officers and planned to hire 37 more over five years. Griffin said additional staffing would allow for more proactive policing, and said her department had made “huge investments” in equipment and technology.
“Campus is very safe, but we also have issues like any urban environment and any university. Many people feel safer when there are more police around. We’ve done a lot of different things, so this is just another one of the strategies that we’re using,” she told 6ABC.
Crime around the university remains a concern. In March, for example, Temple and city police responded to a double shooting at a hookah lounge close to the university. In April a student was chased into the lobby of the Morgan Hall dormitory and attacked by about a dozen young people, one of several such incidents that occured that day.
Violent crime in the city’s 22nd police district, which includes Temple, was up 18% in the last 12 months, led by surges in armed assaults and robberies, according to Philadelphia police data. The number of homicides fell compared to the same period a year earlier, as did shooting incidents and property crimes like auto theft.
