 Good morning. My name is Todd Palaza and I'm the Director of Public Safety at Fairfield University. I've been at the university now for 40 years and we'd like to tell you a little bit this morning about our department. Hi my name is John Richie. I'm the Assistant Director of Public Safety here at Fairfield University. I've been with the university for 24 years now. Our function really is to provide a safe and secure environment and maintain an academic setting which really is a balancing act. We are not a corporate setting. We have an open campus so it does provide challenges and opportunities for us all the time. We're authorized to prevent any of the laws in Connecticut or federal laws as well as enforcing the regulations of the university. Our jurisdiction is on campus pretty much exclusively. We also patrol the town bookstore which is located in town. We do not patrol the beach area which is a student residence which is exclusively a rental area of the campus. Some safety tips. We always encourage people to lock doors and you've probably heard me say this during orientation when you were here back in June but we're asking people to lock their doors at all times. We do want to create a community atmosphere but when your students are not in their rooms we ask them to lock their doors. Also propping doors open to the residence halls. It's just self-defeating with our security systems because our residence halls are locked 24 hours a day. We encourage your students to be aware of their surroundings at all times to walk in well-traveled lit areas and to walk with friends and to really have that 360 degree awareness about them. We also encourage them to report any type of suspicious activity to us. Basically it's to trust their instincts. If something doesn't seem right to them we want them to report it to us. So we really want to encourage our students to call us whenever they have a concern on campus. You know students move around campus they're pretty good eyes and ears that we have on campus so should they see a tense situation we want them to feel comfortable enough to give us a call before a situation gets too far out of control. They hear unusual noises glass breaking or screaming things like that we would really appreciate students giving us a call it'll give us the opportunity to respond in a timely manner to investigate what's going on. If you see any unusual people walking around campus the students who live in the residence halls get a pretty good feel of who belongs there and who doesn't you know when they see somebody in the residence hall that they don't they've never seen before we really want them to give us a call so we can go over and make sure that the person who's in the building actually belongs in that building. So basically when things just don't seem right we really want people to give us a call. So how to contact public safety first we ask everyone to program their cell phones with our number and that's 203-254-4090. We also want people to use our emergency poles blue light poles okay the other safety feature that we introduced last year and our goal is to get 100% participation this year is emergency it's a personal safety app on their smartphones and they could report anything to us that way as well. We also have a confidential reporting system on our DPS website we're located in Loyola Hall on the ground floor in room two. Okay so the emergency app you know everyone traditionally knows to pick up the phone and give us a call but today's a younger generation texting and using their technology to reach out to their friends and family is more common place rather than actually speaking live on the phone. So we bought into a system called emergency. Now emergency is an app that you put on your smartphone and it allows people to report incidents to our office the Department of Public Safety using their phone and what emergency does is when you activate the emergency system it actually starts to stream audio and video from the caller's phone that allows our dispatchers in our office to actually watch and see and hear what's really going on live. So if you're in a very tensile situation we actually get to see what's going on and a geo catches your location meaning we can pinpoint you on a map and know exactly where you are so you don't have to tell us where you are we'll know where you are and if you're in a stressful situation if you're running if you're moving into a building we would know that it would actually track you and we would know where you're going. We also have a campus alert system we call it the stag alert system. We use it during acute situations when there really is a true emergency. Also there are weather conditions that might affect classes or transportation to campus and we might utilize stag alert in that area as well for class cancellations things of that nature or any other important announcements and basically what we would do is tell our students what the emergency is and give them some type of instructions on what to do that stag alert system broadcast in multiple ways through email texting and voice messaging. We also have timely warnings so if any emergency or concern that arises on or off campus that's affecting our students we would put out a timely warning that's done both electronically through the students email accounts as well as posters and flyers. Any ongoing threat to the community or crime prevention tips we would let them know. All right CCTV cameras you know our patrol officers can only be in so many places at so many times so one of the additional benefits we have of keeping an eye on the campus or CCTV systems currently we have over 350 cameras on campus and that doesn't even come close to covering campus so we're always looking to add more but we do want all of our students to be aware that we do use a CCTV system on campus we do have cameras watching the residence halls outside the residence halls in other areas that the students tend to frequent and so those cameras allow us quite often to pick up on suspicious behavior and it certainly allows us to investigate complaints after the fact and helps us solve incidents on campus. Parking on campus is very limited and that's why we don't allow first-year students or sophomores to have a car on campus not only do we just not have enough room but through a variety of studies it's been proven that students are far more successful without a vehicle their first two years of a college experience. We also have a shuttle service that goes on campus and off as well taking taking our students to many points off campus of interest where they can pick up necessary items or entertainment venues. We also have a zip car on campus a person would sign up online for that and it's virtually renting a car if you will. We do have emergency procedures and we just went through conducting a violent intruder training for entire first-year students this gave them different response options one being shelter in place two being locked down and the third would be an evacuation. We talked about violent intruders active shooter situations on how they can prepare to protect themselves and have that mindset of survivability. All right so we encourage all of our students to have a plan what that means is they should be aware of the surroundings they should know where their room is located in their building they should have alternate exit points in the event of a problem. You should also have alternate ways of getting home if there's a problem so if we ever have a need to to evacuate campus and how would you get home some students live locally it's pretty easy to get home but some students live at distances and maybe they can start to find other people who live in their hometown or region that they could commute with to and from campus. It would save a lot of trouble for parents having to come get them if we ever had to send somebody home but we really encourage everyone to have a primary secondary and back routes of for getting out of a building or even getting home off campus okay. We look forward to serving your students and you as well. I come with a unique perspective my son Justin graduated this past May so I've gotten a full appreciation of what it's like to be a parent as well as seeing it through a student's eyes so we really encourage your students to become involved become active on campus and if you ever have any concerns or questions feel free to give us a call. Again our phone is 203-254-4090. Thank you. All right that about sums up everything that we have to bring to you today. How do we have any questions? We do have questions. We're looking at Liz over here in the corner who's pretty much running everything. Given the proximity to the shoreline how are students protected in a natural disaster? Yes we do have an emergency evacuation plans we have emergency evacuation sites and we would have shuttle buses take if we had to ever evacuate campus in a short period of time with a little notification we would be able to do that as well. Great question about the staff how many officers are on staff what's the male to female ratio are they and are they certified EMTs? Yes well we are all EMTs our staff are required at the emergency medical technicians we have approximately 20 officers on staff and a couple part-time officers on staff our male to female ratio of our staff I believe two females on patrol and the rest are all males so yes it's a male dominated career path EMTs we're all trained and certified by the state of Connecticut I mean all the requirements set forth. Our officers and our office is open 24 hours a day we have roving patrols on campus we patrol the campus through a variety of ways vehicle foot and bicycle patrol we also patrol the residence halls as well. Great do you offer self-defense courses? We do several self-defense classes throughout the year one of the programs that we endorse is called RAD rape aggression defense we have some certified officers that are instructors and not only do they teach here but they go to other universities and teach but your students will see flyers throughout the semester about this self-defense program we also have crime prevention programs that we bring to the res halls throughout the year. Great two more how are parents notified during an emergency? If an emergency occurs one of the things that we talk to our students about is to contact their parents right away and let them know that they're safe we utilize the stag alert system however parents are not notified on that system we encourage our students to go to our website and all information that you would need would be on our website. Great and then the last one is how late does the campus lock down? Well the university has entrance points we have seven entrance points and all of those are gated at 11 o'clock at each night we secure those gates and so you can only access the campus through the main entrance which is staffed with a public safety officer that occurs at 11 o'clock to six in the morning. Great those were all of the questions. All right well thank you very much and again if there's anything we could ever do to support your students let us know.