Since the Institute’s own tragedy in the CII during the past spring semester, RPI has been researching a variety of different ways to protect its campus, ranging from new cameras to notification systems, in addition to performing drills and furthering RPI’s relationship with the Troy Police Department.

A trend that has been spreading through universities across the country is the installation of more cameras on campus. Although RPI already has a working camera system in place, a new kind of surveillance system would promise to be a great addition to school security and would serve to augment and upgrade RPI’s system.

The “smart TV” system was used initially at John’s Hopkins University, due to several crimes that had caused fatalities at off-campus housing. The university has put 101 smart cameras on its Baltimore campus in the two years since then.

These smart cameras recognize 16 “bad behaviors,” according to Director of Public Safety Jerry Matthews. “It can detect if there’s fighting going on between two people, if someone is lying down for more than a few minutes, if someone’s loitering where they shouldn’t be, or if there’s a car accident.” The cameras can then send a signal to look at the video feed of the camera that detected suspicious behavior to the campus security office, where the officer then can decide if there is something wrong.

The smart cameras can also be programmed to operate at specific times of the day, which Matthews hopes to use for off-campus housing as well. “We can program it so that during the day, they are pointed toward the academic side of campus, but then at 10 pm or on a weekend, when students are walking back to their homes off-campus, we can program it so that those areas can be watched as well, although it might only be able to go a block or two off campus.”

Although the cameras have not yet been purchased, it is hopeful that RPI will be seeing these in the future, according to Matthews. “I see it as an outstanding way to keep the campus safe from a technological standpoint.”

During the past spring semester, RPI also expanded card-only access to certain campus buildings, so that only students who have a class or need access to that building are allowed to enter during evening hours. This grew to encompass the Mueller Center and Armory, the ’87 Gym, Troy Building, Sage Labs, the Greene Building, Folsom Library, VCC, Empire Hall, Cogswell, MRC, the Biotech Center, and Academy Hall last year. The growth was primarily in response to several robberies and people from outside the RPI community using equipment from inside the buildings.

Several universities have also implemented notification phone systems as a way to alert students of emergencies on campus, including George Washington University, Monmouth University, and Butler University. One such system called Connect-ED can send out both voice and text messages to students on campus, and many colleges use these systems particularly in the occurrence of power outages, or to keep students informed of events occurring on campus.

RPI is researching such a system as well, but it seems less likely to be installed than the cameras, according to Matthews. “It would involve students volunteering their cell phone numbers to campus security, and some students might not necessarily want to give that information to us.”

RPI has an extensive network of other notifications besides using cell phones, which includes the main RPI website, public safety website, e-mails, loudspeakers in certain buildings, campus phones, and the blue light phones. “We don’t want to rely on any one technology as a method of informing people on campus,” said Vice President for Administration Claude Rounds. “We want to make sure as many people know about what’s going on as we can, and there needs to be many different features to our plan.”

The Institute has also been working very closely with the Troy Police Department to plan what would happen in an emergency on campus. The Troy Police Department and RPI have a very strong working relationship, evidenced by the response from last year during the unfolding of the events in the CII. “We were given opportunities to learn lessons from that, and we took those opportunities,” said Rounds.

RPI and the Police Department are in the process of planning a tabletop exercise next Tuesday to discuss the procedure for having an active shooter on campus. In addition to the tabletop exercise, there is also a planned mutual aid drill on August 6 to simulate an active shooter on campus, which will provide RPI and the Troy SWAT team a chance to put hypotheticals to practice.

“RPI is looking at all methods of protecting our campus,” said Rounds. “We don’t want there to be a rush of judgment; we want to plan, develop, and then implement.”