Page 28 - Campus Security & Life Safety, March/April 2020

Big Data
“While most security programs remain highly manual and almost entirely human-based, security programs are becoming increasingly connected to automation.”
By Jason David
How to Leverage AI
Improving situational awareness on campus
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Academic reputation is a key driver for colleges and universities to attract the best students, but campus safety is becoming an increasingly important factor in the college-choice equation. Topping the list of safety concerns is the threat of gun violence at schools, which struck on a nearly weekly basis in the past year in the United States. Of the 45 school shootings that took place up to Nov. 19, 2019, 14 occurred on higher education campuses, according to a CNN report.
The active-shooter-on-campus threat is real, and it’s the primary threat that keeps campus safety leaders up at night thinking of new ways to detect, deter and react to such incidents. Other top campus crime concerns include burglaries, forcible sex offenses, vehicle theft, assault and robberies.
While the number of on-campus crimes between 2001 and 2016
decreased by 32 percent, proactive safety officials should be aware of new solutions that can help them anticipate crisis events and mitigate potential threats to students, staff and property.
The particular solution discussed in this article is the Situational Awareness Program that consists of incident and case management and situational awareness platforms that leverage big data and artifi- cial intelligence and pair them with human analysis. But before I show you what a Situational Awareness Program consists of and how it works, let me place this into the context of how big data and artifi- cial intelligence are affecting the security industry.
Big Data and Artificial Intelligence on Campus
Campus safety leaders should be aware of a growing evolutionary force in the security industry called Security 4.0. It’s similar to when the manufacturing industry first heard the term Industry 4.0 or the
28 campuslifesecurity.com | MARCH/APRIL 2020