Designed to offer higher and further education institutions practical advice, the free ADT whitepaper provides tangible steps to protecting on-campus facilities, staff, students and visitors from a growing number of threats, especially criminal activity and anti-social behaviour.
Get hold of the whitepaper for free here.
With term-time populations often running into the tens of thousands, university campuses face similar issues to those of small towns, such as burglary, mugging and violence.
ADT outlines in this whitepaper not only the role of emerging technologies in fields such as CCTV and access control in combating crime, but also the importance of integrating these systems and making them ‘talk’ to one another to boost the efficiency of security and life safety systems.
Additionally, as parents trust in universities to ensure the well-being of their children, often living away from home for the first time, ADT has provided clear guidance on steps that should be taken to effectively protect against the risk of fire and carbon monoxide poisoning on-campus and in student accommodations.
ADT says it “recognises the challenges facing universities in building and maintaining a safe, pleasant, and productive learning environment”.
It has identified several key areas that are crucial in ensuring the safety of the ‘campus citizens,’ including:
1. Avoid the ‘short-term’ mentality approach to safety and security and ensure a long-term strategy is in place to protect all staff and patients across multiple sites
2. Make systems “talk”: Integrated systems can enhance levels of protection by creating a single platform that allows individual systems to communicate seamlessly
3. Consider centralised control and monitoring. This enables security operatives to control each component from a centralised workstation, streamlining the monitoring process and helping improve the efficiency and response time to potential incidents
4. Explore next generation CCTV for increased staff productivity and cost efficiency
“Students and universities have long been viewed as ‘soft targets’ by the criminal community, and because campus life often parallels a small town, protecting the people and property on-site from the issues which also plague society should be a major priority,” said Muriel Runnalls, public sector marketing manager at ADT.
“Innovations in technology, such as CCTV and access control, can help with these challenges.
“ADT hopes this whitepaper will lead universities to take a more holistic approach to security and life safety, and understand how the integration of these systems can boost intelligence, creating better levels of security to deter criminal activity and build a safer environment for study.”
