A Wednesday afternoon in the Campus Safety office is a chorus of busy bootsteps and ringing phones. In the dispatch room, daytime dispatcher Flo Wyche monitors the phone and fields calls from across campus. Mounted on the wall is a flat screen that displays 12 high-traffic areas outside of dorms and academic buildings. Students and faculty scurry across sidewalks in typical Wednesday afternoon fashion. This room is the home of campus safety’s operations on Tejon, three doors down from Wooglin’s Deli. The flat screen television is the most obvious implementation of on-campus surveillance that is carried out by Campus Safety. An interlocking system of card-swipe access logs and security cameras provides Campus Safety and Residential Life with the ability to keep an eye on the estimated 2,600 daily users of the CC campus.
Surveillance systems on campus function in a variety of ways for Campus Safety and Residential Life. Associate Director of Campus Safety Nicolas Calkins makes a clear distinction between the systems that Campus Safety has implemented and the preconceived notions that students may have around the word “surveillance.”
“People get a little nervous with the word ‘surveillance,’ but a security camera is a passive tool all the way up until you have a reason to make it be an active tool,” said Calkins. He continued, “Surveillance on its own doesn’t necessitate the stigma that people put on it. It’s not always a big brother thing. Most of the time, I would say in 99 percent of the instances that we’re using the cameras, it’s after the fact to try and establish some leads to develop suspects, to get evidence that we can pass along to the police department for ongoing criminal cases.”
As a rule, security cameras are placed in exit and entry points around buildings on campus. This year especially, Calkins said that the campus surveillance systems have helped thwart bike thefts.
“At the dispatch booth, they can note things that are just sort of abnormal. Somebody at 2 o’clock in the morning around the bike racks is not going to be normal. Four or five times within the last couple weeks we’ve had a dispatcher see someone at a bike rack and sent officers over there and we’ve chased them off or apprehended somebody with our CSPD colleagues,” said Calkins. The campus cameras are important for Campus Safety Director Maggie Santos and the entire campus security team’s mission to maintain a safe campus, but these systems also factor into Residential Life’s mission as well.
Zak Kroger, long-time RLC and current Residential Life and Programs Coordinator, has utilized campus cameras for a variety of reasons over the course of his career at CC. While cameras are used in lobbies along with exit and entry points, both Kroger and Calkins made the point that surveillance systems in hallways and living areas are both intrusive and unnecessary. The chances there would ever be camera surveillance in residential hallways are slim to none. “It would have to be a one-off and a very extreme situation for us to do that,” said Calkins. “Probably instead of having a camera in there we would look for a method that would be less intrusive and more overt to be able to get the same results.”
For the most part, the Residential Life Office is using key card swipe data to track down missing students. “Anytime you swipe in or try to swipe in anywhere it records it. Whether the card swiper thing turns red or green, it’ll tell us you tried to swipe into that door,” said Kroger. However, this data is used sparingly. “We don’t really use it that much, it’s pretty tedious to look that info up,” said Kroger. An extenuating circumstance of a missing student would bring this data into play for the Dean’s Office and Residential Life. “One of the first things we’ll do is check where they have swiped and check cameras and see where they have been. If they haven’t swiped anywhere in three days that’s a pretty good indication that they could be missing,” said Kroger. The data collected by Residential Life brings up a conversation for Kroger around how students are treated at large in the Colorado College environment.
Kroger said, “There is a pro and con to it; I suppose. We say we are ‘high touch,’ and we are. You’re not in class, ‘where are you?’ We’re knocking on your door. You go to the hospital? We’re there, which I think is a really good thing.” Kroger continued, “I know there are concerns that it sets students up for getting out of the college environment and not knowing how to function without that support, if you don’t have someone constantly checking in on you.”
On the whole, surveillance systems on campus have served in a mostly passive and, at times, even comical way for Residential Life and Campus Safety. “A couple of years ago we were doing little Halloween games in the lobby and we were doing bobbing for apples and I had this big tub of water on the cart and I rolled it outside. As I rolled it into the atrium with the double doors, just boom, water everywhere. 30 gallons of water, well actually, it probably wasn’t that big, ten gallons of water. I went and got the camera footage for that and went and saved it because it was hilarious.”
For the 35 Campus Safety employees and additional 30 to 40 student employees of Campus Safety, the campus’s surveillance systems simply provide an additional tool to achieve the overarching mission of “community policing.” By interacting with students face to face Calkins and Santos believe that the campus will become more connected and communicative, leading to less bike theft and increased student safety.
Nick Calkins and Maggie Santos share an office in the Campus Safety Headquarters. While Calkins did most of the talking in describing the campus surveillance system, Santos stepped in and summed up the mission succinctly. “The cameras are there for us to protect students, staff, and faculty. It’s not there to monitor them.”