How Physical Security Can Improve Campus Policy and Procedure Compliance

Digitizing your SOPs makes it easier to follow protocol when rare events and emergencies happen. Your security solution can be configured to automatically alert certain people, trigger alarms or sprinklers, or broadcast important announcements.

This results in security personnel being able to invest their attention where it’s most needed for a more comprehensive and robust approach to campus security

Take a Proactive Approach

From evolving cybersecurity risks to concerns about harassment and bullying, it’s challenging to monitor all corners of educational facilities. False alarms compound the situation when doors or access points are accidentally left open.

To enhance safety and take a more proactive approach to risk detection, consider combining video analytics and a collaborative decision management system. Investing in a decision management system can help your team focus on the most urgent events by filtering through false alarms and alerting the team to suspicious activity. It can even provide step-by-step guidance on the procedures staff need to follow.

Automations programmed within your security system can also support your policies and procedures by streamlining operations. For example, a roles-based schoolwide emergency alert system linked to your active directory sends a text message to all teachers or other groups of staff members if there’s an intruder on campus.

Using analytics, you may track crowds and capacity limits around campus to automatically dispatch additional security resources or restrict access to avoid overcrowding.

These solutions help you identify risk opportunities in advance while focusing on the most important tasks at hand. Thus, they’re able to respond appropriately and in a timely manner, before the incident escalates.

Where to Begin: Consider Your Current Challenges

When considering new security technology, a good place to start is a threat assessment. Identify what risks you need to mitigate and the problems or friction points you experience. Don’t worry about selecting solutions yet. Instead, focus on identifying the problems you want to solve or the goals you hope to achieve.

First, think about your pain points and the policies you have in place. These will guide the setup of your security solution and determine your hardware or software requirements.

For example, if you have a policy that all doors remain locked, a requirement for your new access control solution might be that it can lock outside access by default. Everyone inside exits freely without the need for a key.

Or perhaps your school has had problems with students vaping in certain areas. You have a policy in place that says this is not allowed. However, you’re having difficulty enforcing it. One solution to improve compliance could be to install vape sensors in these areas. When vaping is detected, your unified security solution alerts the person responsible for enforcement.

Other incidents might require the involvement of more stakeholders. For example, if there’s a fight in a hallway and the incident is referred to prosecution, video of the incident becomes evidence. You may have a policy in place to protect the privacy of students and staff. However, do you know how you’ll blur the faces of innocent bystanders who happened to be caught on video?

In such an incident, you’ll want technology that blurs all faces by default. It allows only authorized users to unmask the identities of any persons of interest. Your policies determine who can remove privacy filters and under what circumstances. The system would ensure the policy is followed and provide an audit trail to show who accessed the information.

Regardless of the exact pain points you face, choose a modern security solution that can be designed to automate certain steps based on your policies and procedures. This way, your team can focus on meaningful activities rather than busy work. Ask your integrator or technology partner to propose solutions that help you reduce friction and streamline your operations.

Don’t Forget the Human Side of Security

Technology is only part of the equation. Faculty, staff, and students need to be trained and contribute their input when developing policies and procedures. Likewise, you’ll want to consider collaboration with external partners and agencies.

Student and staff training is critical to ensure they are aware of the role they play in ensuring campus security. They need to know what to do if they see or hear something of concern. Likewise, remind them to keep locked doors closed and not accidentally prop them open. If anyone asks to be let in, students or staff should follow procedures to direct the guest to a main office entry point rather than open the door for them.

The way you implement your security solutions should reflect not only your policies but your culture as well. Inform students and their families that the campus is under surveillance but reassure them that there are privacy protections in place. Likewise, if perimeter security solutions are in place at the sports field to detect trespassers after hours, make sure students know they shouldn’t hang out there at night.

The relationships your campus has with local emergency services also impact how you design your procedures and the technology solutions you choose. Some schools that have close relationships with law enforcement choose to integrate mobile access control credentials. The school can permit police officers with department-issued phones to access school buildings in an emergency without waiting for a key.

Other campuses have agreed to be part of community camera registry programs. Such programs permit police to access the school’s video surveillance footage under certain emergency conditions.

Choose Security Software for Now and the Future

As you’re considering enhancing or replacing your physical security solution, make sure to choose one that not only meets your needs today but is also flexible enough to respond to the challenges of the future.

You want a platform that will grow with you. A unified, open-architecture system is ideal. It can incorporate a wide variety of non-proprietary technologies. Thus, you may be able to use some existing hardware that you don’t want to replace as well as new devices that become available.

Unification Simplifies Operations, Helps with Policy Compliance

When you have a small team responsible for monitoring a large campus, your team has a lot of responsibilities to juggle and procedures to follow. A unified security solution simplifies operations. It empowers your security team to manage and interpret data from video surveillance, access control, intrusion detection, and other systems all in one place.

Likewise, with such a system, your team can quickly pinpoint potential threats or concerns and view related data such as video feeds or access control logs. They don’t need to switch back and forth between systems to find the information or guidelines they need to follow. Everything they need to enhance campus safety and security can all be found on the same interface, providing a reliable solution to streamline response and improve efficiency.