Page 33 - AUCSO Newsletter - Winter 2023

Community Engagement
At Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), Chief of Police John Venuti says visibility is interwoven
with a larger strategy of community engagement.
“There’s presence and visibility, and then there’s engagement. We really use both of those goals as tools
to increase the feeling of safety on VCU’s campuses,” he says.
Being present and being visible is one thing, but drawing the attention of community members specifically
is just as critical, he says. “When we engage with members of the community, it causes people to pause, to
look at us. Engagement is really designed to break down barriers, and it’s a really important part of our
strategy.”

For example, at night, when students may feel less safe, campus police make an effort to let students know
they are there. “Our offices will turn on their blue lights so that they are highly visible, especially at night,”
Venuti says. “You can see a police car half a block away if it has no lights on, but if it has lights on, you can
see it from much further away.”

The department also is making an effort to adapt its visible strategies to align with changing circumstances.
“Some of the feedback I got from a particular area at VCU was that there are not as many people working
in our buildings because of COVID,” he says. “We not only increased the presence and visibility in that
building, but we created a VCU-wide initiative. We’ve got over 220 buildings here at VCU on both
campuses, and coming back from the pandemic, staff may be feeling isolated. To make them feel safer,
we’re using a combination of building walks as well as engagement.”

He describes the VCU campus police’s strategy of engagement as a key way to strike that balance between
being visible, while not being overbearing. This strategy sometimes requires that campus police actually
be less visible on certain occasions, according to Venuti.

“Campus law enforcement in the past has responded to everything, just because we’re 24/7, we’re the
people that are always here,” he says. “Today, we only want to send the police when the police are
necessary.”

To that end, Venuti has modified how the campus security team completes status and welfare checks on
students. “Parents may call the police department, but we will coordinate with residential housing to make
that contact or conduct that check, unless there are imminent, ongoing life-threatening circumstances,” he
says.

Venuti is also in the midst of creating an additional alternative response unit — the VCU Safety
Ambassadors. The unit will aim to achieve that intended balance of support, community engagement and
safety and security.

“These will be non-sworn civilian employees and they will be in a vehicle that looks almost the exact
opposite of what a police vehicle looks like. They are going to have a training portfolio of some mental
health experience, some social work experience,” Venuti says. “We’re looking forward to working with
the VCU School of Social Work on internships for this program, and we’re going to use them in those
situations where we don’t need a police officer to respond.”

Active Listening
David Mitchell of the University of Maryland (UMD) says that the police and public safety team’s focus is
on the quality of encounters with students.

“We’re asking our officers to engage in conversations, to be present and actively listen to what students
have to say,” he says. “Given the tumultuous time that we’ve had in the past several years in particular,
my officers have asked me: How do we regain public trust? My response is always that we do that one
contact at a time, one traffic stop at a time, one community engagement at a time.”

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