Georgetown University Boosts Security With Personal Interaction

Maintaining security on an urban college campus is particularly difficult, with the public passing through the grounds throughout the day. Increasingly, educational institutions in cities are turning to technology to boost safety. Yet the human element remains the cornerstone of any effective security program, said Jay Gruber, chief of police for Georgetown University in northwest Washington, D.C.

“I think we’ll be leveraging technology more,” Gruber said. “I think we’ll be putting in more robust video monitoring systems. That will include video analytics, facial recognition, things of that nature.” However, any university police force must balance “the openness of a college campus with the security of a college campus. Colleges are meant to be places where nonstudents come to go to seminars, to use libraries, to go to events” without feeling that Big Brother is watching.

“We’re very sensitive to privacy concerns. We don’t have cameras looking down residence halls. We don’t have cameras in academic offices,” Gruber said. Technology “has to be used properly.”

One of the latest innovations that Georgetown University has embraced to boost security is a mobile technology called LiveSafe. It combines a smartphone app for students and a cloud-based Command Dashboard for safety officials. Gruber scheduled student focus groups on campus to help develop the app, which is now being used on campuses in 19 states.

Introduced at Georgetown in the fall of 2014, the app was downloaded by almost 20 percent of the student body within three months. It allows students to communicate with campus police—and with each other—in real time. Students can send text, audio, video, and photos. They can report suspicious acts or people and can provide peer-to-peer virtual escorting as students walk around the 104-acre campus.

“We’ve received dozens and dozens of tips this semester, and one actually led to an arrest,” Gruber said.

Involving students is essential to campus security, said Alison Kiss, executive director of the Clery Center for Security on Campus in Wayne, Pa. “You need an all-hands-on-deck approach, including students,” she said. Security programs like those at Georgetown “are being looked to by corporate America” as models for safety initiatives, she said.

Unlike some urban universities, Georgetown has a fairly contiguous campus—one not bisected by a lot of cross streets. Still, “you have to be vigilant on your perimeter and have to rely on your community to alert you to something that doesn’t seem right,” Gruber said.

Several programs developed before Gruber came to Georgetown support security efforts. One of the most effective is the Community Liaison Program. “It partners a police officer with a particular community. We have CLOs (community liaison officers) for each of our residential communities and CLOs that cover different buildings on campus.”

Noting that “the basic foundation of any police department is their community policing,” Gruber said “having the CLOs is a very good way to do community policing.”

Georgetown welcomes many high-profile visitors who need top-level security. “Our special events program has been very important for us,” said Gruber. Good relationships with the 32 law enforcement agencies in the city support these visits.

A longtime program employing student guards also remains successful. The guards, who are not armed, examine student and guest security cards to ensure that the cards are valid before allowing residence hall entry. “We have that human element,” Gruber said. The program “is pretty popular. In fact, we’re the largest student employer on campus.”

In addition, the Georgetown police force uses a website form to solicit feedback and learn about student concerns. It offers women’s self-defense classes, crime prevention presentations, safe rides, and laptop and bicycle registration to deter theft.

The campus police force sends out electronic notifications after a serious crime is reported. There are emergency notifications, too, but to date they have been used only for alerts about extreme weather.

In addition to all the technology, “it really comes down to the cop on the beat,” Gruber said. “You can have a lot of technologies in place, you can have a lot of systems, but really it’s that community interaction that means the most.”

Steve Bates is a freelance writer based in the Washington, D.C., area.