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Given their young age, students are at a heightened risk of violent victimisation. Yet few studies have considered students’ perceptions of safety and the impact of these, on a British university campus. The purpose of this research was to close this gap.

From late 2019–2020, using an online university wide survey, data was gathered over a three-month period from 550 students studying at a university in the north of England on “city” campuses about their perceptions of safety and security on-campus.

Students, particularly women students, felt unsafe on the university campuses because of poor lighting, limited CCTV, security patrols and the presences of others. They felt unsafe in and around teaching buildings, moving around the campuses and in transport locations.

The response rate of the survey was 6%. Consequently, the findings are not representative of the wider student population on the campuses.

Campus Security should consider enhancing surveillance on the campuses.

Students, particularly women, limited the time they spent on-campus studying because they felt unsafe. Their choices about when and how to engage in their university education were therefore restricted.

This study addresses the gap in research on students’ perceptions of safety and the impact of these, on a British university campus. In doing so, it forefronts the responsibility of higher education institutions to enhance students’ safety, including their perceptions of safety, on-campus.

Safety and security (S&S) are critical concerns in South Africa, especially in Cape Town, one of the country’s most crime-ridden cities. The University of Cape Town (UCT), situated on a large, open campus, has experienced increased malefaction. Facilities management (FM) services at universities bear the primary responsibility for providing S&S to their communities. To comprehensively understand and address the community’s demands regarding S&S, the current study was conducted to investigate the challenges specific to open universities. This study aims to determine whether implementing community-based FM (CbFM) principles and using technological innovations could offer a more effective and sustainable solution.

The study adopted interpretivist overarching case study methodology, which is ontologically based. A mixed-method approach was used to incorporate the strengths and limitations of the weaknesses of both methods. The data collection took the form of an online survey of the university community and semi-structured interviews with university executive management to obtain data from the single case study of UCT. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the quantitative data, and thematic analysis was used to identify emergent themes from the qualitative data.

The study presents an overall view of the provision of S&S at UCT, the unique challenges faced by management and the main S&S issues affecting the community. Moreover, the study reveals that UCT has implemented community participation processes in the past with limited success. This is because the strategies implemented constitute a narrow perspective of community participation. Therefore, a much smarter and more inclusive perspective using technological innovation is required for successful community participation to occur and to be successfully used in providing S&S toward achieving future-proofing facilities.

This research has demonstrated the influence of CbFM and innovative technologies on the S&S of the open campus. Hence, future-proof facilities can be achieved when FM actively engages university communities in managing campuses through technological innovation.

Purpose – A decade after the heinous act of moral turpitude at Virginia Tech, this chapter examines considerations of deterrence and mitigation for campus violence, and discusses the arming of campus police.

Design/methodology/approach – This chapter incorporates campus violence from a phenomenological perspective.

Findings – This chapter highlights the notion that no universal panacea exists toward abating violence among higher education settings. However, various preventive and control strategies may be employed to support the long-term campus safety initiatives of higher education institutions.

Originality/value – This chapter provides a commentary regarding preventive strategies, control strategies, and policy considerations for higher education institutions. It emphasizes the notion that all higher educations are unique, and must craft their own individual policies that satisfy the requirements of their specific situations.

Residential college campuses remain dangerous – especially for women students who face a persistent threat of sexual violence, despite passage of the 1990 Campus Security Act and its multiple amendments. Campuses have developed new programming, yet recent research confirms one in five women will experience some form of sexual assault before graduating. Research on campus crime legislation does not describe in detail the context in which it developed. The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the effects of early rhetorical frames on the ineffective policy.

The authors discuss the rhetorical construction of “campus crime,” and related “criminals” and “victims,” through content analysis and a close interpretive reading of related newspaper articles.

The 1986 violent rape and murder of Jeanne Clery at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania became iconic in media descriptions of campus crime. Media drew attention to the racial and classed dimensions of the attack on Clery, but elided the misogyny central to all sexual assaults. This reinforced a stereotype that “insiders” on campuses, primarily white and middle class, were most vulnerable to “outsider” attacks by persons of color. Colleges and universities adopted rhetoric of “endangerment” and “unreason” and focused on what potential victims could do to protect themselves, ignoring the role of students in perpetrating crime.

This analysis does not link rhetoric in newspapers to legislative discussion. Further analysis is necessary to confirm the impact of particular claims and to understand why some claims may have superseded others.

This analysis focuses critical attention on how campus crime policy is shaped by cultural frames.

Crime and fear of crime in and around the university campus can affect enrolments and retention rates as well as compromising the safety, security and well-being of students and staff. The purpose of this paper is to explore user perceptions of personal safety using the “Prospect and Refuge Model” and crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED).

The study used a fear of crime survey of 88 students at a university in Western Australia. The respondents were asked to identify on a map, three locations perceived to be “safe” and three locations perceived to be “unsafe”. The six most commonly identified sites were then visually audited to measure the levels of “prospect” and “refuge” and CPTED features at each location.

The findings indicate the top three “fear spots” were associated with low levels of “prospect” and high levels of “refuge” – and generally, with poor opportunities for natural surveillance and CPTED qualities. The top three “safe spots” had consistently higher levels of “prospect” and lower levels of “refuge” in the site audits and responses to the surveys. Increased opportunities for surveillance were therefore associated with increased levels of personal safety.

The survey is relatively small (88) and a larger study is certainly required to underpin these findings. The methodology is transferable to other universities and facilities seeking to manage crime and fear of crime. The research develops more finely nuanced measures for the concepts of prospect and refuge.

Interestingly, surveillance opportunities and perceptions of personal safety were perceived to be mediated by distance from buildings and by the construction of new buildings and infrastructure being carried out across the campus. This has implications for the construction of new universities and for those which are expanding. Recommendations are provided for new and existing universities and for those undergoing redevelopment.

Improving students’ perception of personal safety can enhance their performance and retention at university.

No studies have investigated the campus design and layout and students’ perceptions of personal safety in Australia in this way. The approach is more “bottom-up” by first exploring users’ perceptions of “unsafe” locations, then assessing these sites in terms of the presence or absence of measures for CPTED and prospect-refuge.

Descriptive analyses of campus police agencies reveal that agencies’ tactical and operational features are similar to those found in municipal agencies. The problem is that none of these studies have examined, using multivariate models, the structural characteristics of these organizations. Using LEMAS data collected in 1995, this study answered two main questions: what are the organizational characteristics of campus police agencies; and what factors, both internal and external, explain variation in the structural dimensions of the agencies. The results indicated that campus police agencies possess the same structural characteristics of municipal police agencies identified by 40 years of police organizational research, and internal agency characteristics were most important in explaining variation in the organizations’ structural dimensions. The degree to which campus agencies have adopted organizational structures that are similar to those of municipal police is discussed and framed within an institutional perspective.

Recent highly publicized acts of violence and shootings on school campuses have prompted numerous crime prevention responses. The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of protective measures such as law enforcement, security policies, and school/neighborhood characteristics on school violence within the context of the racial composition of the school and grade level.

The data used in this study were part of the School Survey on Crime and Safety collected in 2006. The dependent measures of school violence include reports of serious violence, physical attacks/fights, gun or knife possession, and threats and attacks with a weapon. The sample was divided by racial composition of the school (predominately white, and predominately minority schools) and by grade level (high schools, and all other grades). A negative binomial regression was conducted due the count-based dependent variables.

Findings revealed that minority schools often face higher levels of reported violence and had a heavier law enforcement presence, which often had mixed or counterproductive results for reducing school violence. School characteristics, such as reports of bullying, location, gang activity, and security measures yielded numerous statistically significant results.

Officials proposing school violence prevention efforts should strongly consider the importance of school and community characteristics, most notably grade level, and the unique context of a predominately white or minority school as there were different statistically significant results. Furthermore, officials should be cautious about relying on simple efforts such as more security personnel to address school violence. Violence and crime on school grounds should not be viewed as being isolated from violence and other forms of crime in the community. Policy recommendations and suggestions for future research are provided.

This study differs from much of the previous literature, which typically examines student and administrator attitudes about victimization and crime prevention. The current study examines detailed information on the effects of school violence prevention efforts and moves beyond most other works as it considers school safety approaches within the context of racial composition of the school and by different grade levels.

The University of Michigan has installed one of the largest private communications switches in the world. The switch and supporting network are designed to meet the voice, data service, security, and video transmission requirements of the university into the next century. The processes of defining needs, selecting a vendor, and implementing the system are discussed.

Campus crime and related issues have received considerable attention from the various legislative bodies, the media and social science researchers over the last two decades. Much of the attention has been focused on campus police with regard to their ability to protect the campus community. Civil liability lawsuits against campus police departments and their host institutions are not uncommon today. As campus policing has evolved from a watchman/security orientation to more of a full‐service model, it is incumbent that policies used to guide officers in high liability areas be comprehensive. Having comprehensive policies in the high liability areas may also aid in the defense of civil liability lawsuits. One such high liability area is vehicle pursuits. While the general policing literature has focused considerable attention on this topic, campus police guidelines have not been collected or systematically reviewed. The present study examines the content of the vehicle pursuit policies from 67 of the largest 100 campus police departments, serving communities with high student enrollments and often a substantial number of roadways throughout their boundaries. It is certainly foreseeable that from time to time campus police will become engaged in vehicle pursuits. While pursuits by campus police may be relatively infrequent events, policies governing officer decision making are none the less critical. A profile of these policies is developed for review by practitioners and researchers alike. It is believed to be the first such examination of this important policy area within the context of campus policing.

An increase in the number of disruptive and violent events on college and university campuses instigated this review of the methods used to interrupt the trend, with the goal of identifying a preliminary model for systematic management of such threats. The intent is to instigate research, review and discussion in order to decrease the number and severity of threatening incidents on college campuses.

Thorough review of plans from primary and secondary education, plans in use in higher education, literature on risk and threat assessment, literature on “whistle blowers”, and of violent events on college campuses was used to construct a model.

It was found that, in terms of managing and reducing threats to people who study, live and work in post‐secondary educational institutions, insufficient attention has been given to the unique needs of this setting and therefore efforts to mitigate threats have been insufficient. The investigation resulted in the development of a model of assessment and management of threats on university and college campuses.

College campus threat assessment research is very much in its infancy and will certainly develop over time. This paper is the first step in an effort to develop and ultimately test the plausibility of a model. Future research should be pursued to determinewhether the model holds up under a majority of situations on college campuses. Those involved in threat mitigation in university settings should be queried to determine their agreement with the proposed framework and for assistance in refining it.

This paper presents suggestions for the systematic management of threats and mitigation in university settings.