The standing committee for campus safety will hold its first meeting Wednesday to discuss how to implement the safety recommendations from the UNC Campus Safety Task Force.
The committee, created to examine and solve safety concerns on campus, will discuss the recommendations set forth while also adding its own input based on the University’s individual needs, according to Paul Florence, committee member and sophomore in political science.
“Increased awareness on campus is a huge part of what we’re trying to do because students and faculty being vigilant is a big part of campus safety,” Florence said. “Reporting suspicious activity is incredibly important. However, we need to know what to look for first.”
One of the proposed recommendations up for discussion is to train faculty, staff and students on how to recognize indicators of potential violence and suicide and the protocol on how to report them, according to Florence.
“The police report issued by the department has shown that nearly all types of crimes have decreased on campus, which is good because it shows that our police have been doing a great job over the last few years,” Florence said.
Bobby Mills, student body president, said since the Virginia Tech shooting, a lot more students have been coming forward about suspicious people.
“We are trying to find some kind of mechanism to where different facets of campus can share information with each other,” Mills said. “We need to create a forum where it is clear to everyone who they should report information to.”
Another recommendation up for discussion is for the campus to have a multidisciplinary threat assessment team, which would assess both general campus threats as well as individual student or employee threats, according to Florence.
Casey Coats, a senior in landscape architecture, said other than Campus Police, she is not informed about where to report suspicious activity.
“Although students can report to Campus Police, after the Virginia Tech shooting, there has been an increased awareness in campuses nationwide on heightened security measures,” Coats said. “It would be nice to know there was a central location and trained persons to react to any potential threats.”
Lindsay Jenkins, a senior in landscape architecture, said she has not felt any less safe since the Virginia Tech shootings, but she is not opposed to further measures to increase campus safety.
“In creating a system where students and faculty are informed as to where to report suspicious campus activity, we can prevent tragedies such as that at Virginia Tech from occurring here at N.C. State,” she said.
The meeting Wednesday will discuss the new recommendations while also discussing the individual security needs of the University, according to Florence.