Creating 21st-Century Campus Police

A public service professor at Suffolk University’s Sawyer Business School, Brenda Bond is a national expert on policing and has worked with organizations across the country to assess and improve their organizational performance. Over the past few years, she has started to use her research and practical experience in that area to work with college and university campus security agencies, which operate with their own special dynamic: part police entity, part community service organization, occasional parent figure. She sat down to explain the challenges campus police are facing today.

Q: You’ve done a lot of work for municipal police agencies across the country. What can you bring from the municipal side to your work to campus organizations?

Brenda Bond: One asset is that I'm an academic and a researcher with deep practical experience, too. I understand the higher education environment, but I also have deep experience in police-community relations. As part of a team of experts, I work closely with others who have deep policing experience, but limited exposure to higher ed culture. For example, when I work with the former police commissioners of Washington, DC, or Philadelphia, and they look to me for how to engage with a dean of faculty. I feel like I can bridge the two worlds.

Q: What’s different for college police now compared to 10 years ago?

BB: For many years, college campuses had been kind of protected from the bigger, broader conversations of police reform. Campus police agencies were in a bit of a bubble. But around the time of George Floyd’s murder there was increased dissatisfaction with policing in municipalities, and that has made its way more prominently onto university campuses. Campus constituencies are increasingly calling for campus police transparency and accountability, just like the movements in municipalities. Over the past four to five years, there has been significant disruption and tension and attention to campus safety, and what that means, and how it's carried out.

Q: How are campus police organizations different from municipal ones?

BB: In municipalities, the police are always at the forefront of government service. They are very present and active members of the community. But on campuses, it's really been intentional to have the police and security be under the radar. And now university leaders are wondering, “What should we do about this?” And it’s an urgent matter: University presidents have lost their jobs because of how they and their campus police responded to protests.

Q: How do you help a college and their police organization evolve?

BB: I work with a team of national experts, and we take a deep-dive look at how they operate. It starts with a 360-degree review of their policies and their procedures. Their data. Their hiring practices. Their training. Their supervision. Their oversight. Their transparency. Are they meeting the standards and best practices of the profession? One big thing to define is what, exactly, do they do? How are they spending their time? Most campus safety personnel are in the business of service provision. It's not like they're out chasing criminals. They’re mostly about service. When I work with campus agencies, I'm really focused on what kind of relationships does the campus safety unit have with other units in the university, especially counseling, health and wellbeing, and residence staff? How are they supporting the goals of campus community members, while also ensuring safety?

Q: Arming campus police forces is another hot button issue.

BB: This is an extremely difficult issue on campuses. If you live in a community, you assume your police department is armed. Campuses are different. They are inherently places of ideas, voice, and engagement. You have a lot of faculty, staff, and students who are outraged at injustices carried out in communities across the nation. Along with these injustices comes trauma. They do not want police on campus to be armed. Police understand these realities, but they are also concerned about the increased incidence of campus violence and the prevalence of weapons in our society. The question that arises is how to best prepare for and respond to a violent campus incident, but at the same time respect and recognize community concerns. And so that's a pressing issue for university leadership and public safety leadership on campus.

Q: What else do universities need to do to evolve?

BB: All the other student services need to be a part of the dynamic. Counseling centers. Health and wellness. The residential staff. Those groups also have to figure out how to work with public safety. Because they are another resource here. And it's not us versus them. They’ve got to be on the same team.

Q: Moving forward, what’s the role that campus police should play? Unlike the old days, it’s a lot more than showing up when a fire alarm goes off in a residence hall!

BB: I was leading a focus group on a campus near Boston and someone said, “When there is a major safety incident, either here or elsewhere, I want to look to my campus police department to help me understand it.” You know, the campus police should be a resource to help us make sense of what's going on in the world. To help the community understand and feel safe. Just as we turned to the trained health experts on campus during the pandemic, we should think about campus public safety as experts to ensure that campus community members are safe while they are here to learn and grow.

Brenda Bond is the author of Organizational Change in an Urban Police Department, which analyzes the community and organizational forces that stimulated change in the Lowell Police Department.