Page 34 - AUCSO Newsletter - Winter 2023

In order to have those meaningful encounters, campus safety has to cover a lot of ground. With 40,000
students and 15,000 to 20,000 staff and faculty, UMD is a small city on two and a half square miles. “To
cover that, I’ve got an authorized strength of 104 security staff, and we’re about 20 short right now,”
Mitchell says.

To maintain visibility, Mitchell says campus safety uses different strategies depending on the time of day.
“At night, we patrol with our lower lights on so that we’re visible. During the day, we do it on foot, on a
bicycle and on a motorcycle,” he says.

“We’re trying to cover a lot of ground, but we’re also trying to make a lot of contacts. When we’re on
bicycles and students are traversing campus, going to classes and so forth, we’re extremely visible. And
it’s easier to get around some of the nooks and crannies of our campus on bicycle and motorcycle than it
is with a vehicle,” Mitchell says.

In addition to personnel, the team leverages some 600 cameras in its security operations center to ensure
patrols are visible in the right places. Students help to monitor that feed, “because they know where to
look,” Mitchell says.

In addition to visibility, UMD utilizes strategies to support students and staff as well as provide
community engagement. “We have a comfort dog named Teddy the Terp; he wears a vest that says he’s a
comfort dog and says, ‘I like belly rubs.’ Students literally go crazy over him,” Mitchells says.
“I’ve got five anti-IED dogs — bomb dogs. That’s one thing. But Teddy is a star. He helps us demonstrate
that we’re not just out in a traditional police role,” he says. “Community engagement is important:
Students may come here with a heightened state of anxiety, and when they see us lighthearted, engaging
— not in enforcement mode — that’s really important. So we go out there, and we bring Teddy.”

Community Support
At Messiah University, Director of Safety Bryce Wickard says finding the right level of visibility helps to
drive the student buy-in he needs to mount an effective safety operation.

“We need the support and cooperation of the members of our community. We rely on them to be our
supplementary eyes and ears,” he says. “If the members of the community feel like they’re being over-
policed, they might pull away from that, be less likely to report unsafe behavior or criminal activity.”

Wickard says the focus of the campus safety team is promoting and fostering strong ties with students and
the community. “We are intentional in actually connecting. I would call it ‘relational visibility,’” he says.
“We have walkthroughs, for example, where we have assigned every officer a residential building on
campus, and they are expected on every shift that they work to walk through the floors of that building.
We want our officers to intentionally build relationships, to stop if they see someone in the hallway and
introduce themselves.”

That’s a shift from the way things used to be done. “Before we did this, anytime an officer went into a
residential dorm, you could see the reactions of the students: Somebody’s in trouble,” he says. “We want
to change that to where, when you see a safety officer, it doesn’t mean there’s something bad happening.”
In order to drive security in this way, Wickard says strong buy-in from the entire team is needed. “This
starts with who you hire for your officers. When I’m interviewing, I look for character as much as
credentials,” he says.

“You can train somebody to drive a car, but it’s much more difficult to train people to have a passion for
the wellbeing of the constituency,” Wickard says. “When we interview, we are asking people: What is your
interpretation of visibility when you’re out on campus? What message do you want to send? With our
strategy for visibility, we have to have people with the same vision.”

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