Jessica Stalter
Campus Safety has a large part in keeping Florida Southern running effectively and functioning safely.
They are most commonly seen transporting students on their golf carts, but they are also in charge of buildings and events, managing threats to students and posting crime reports.
“We do a ton of different things,” Director of Campus Safety and Security Eric Rauch said. “Our first shift, our seven to three shift is responsible for all the unlocking. They give a ton of rides by golf carts to students.”
The second shift operates differently, Rauch explains.
“They’re giving rides back and forth, but then they get to the security of basketball games, concerts, comedian shows and buses coming and going. Then as it starts to get dark, they’re responsible for locking all the classrooms. And then overnight shifts, they’re responsible for patrolling everything, making sure that students have rides back and forth.”
Aside from all of these daily duties, safety is responsible for responding to crimes reported throughout campus in a timely manner.
Through a call to the safety office or the click of a button in the Stanley Guard safety app, students will get a rapid response to their concern, sometimes even in under a minute.
Through their partnership with the Lakeland Police Department, campus safety has caught and arrested multiple trespassers before they could cause a problem.
“If somebody wanders on campus, it’s glaringly apparent if they don’t belong,” Rauch said. “So we haven’t really had a problem picking them off and keeping the campus ultra-safe.”
One resource the Safety Office consistently updates is the daily crime reports.
Students can request to see these at any time in the safety office or through emailed requests.
These reports show what safety responds to on a day-to-day basis including injuries, drug and alcohol usage and trespassing or other danger. It also emphasized on importance of having first aid in the work place which will be very useful at times of emergencies.
“It shows the data report, time, the general area classification, and a little brief synopsis of what’s in there,” Rauch said. “Every college is mandated by law to keep this, so it’s completely transparent. We report everything that’s reported to us. We do not try to ever cover anything up.”
In the future, Rauch and the rest of the safety office are looking to increase their presence among the students through platforms such as Instagram to further open up dialogue between the Safety Office and the students they serve and post resources such as the crime reports so students can stay informed.
“This campus has never been safer than this right now,” Rauch said. “We’ve added around-the-clock police coverage, we added our phone safety app that we have free of charge. And as we’re explaining this to our student body, they’re seeing the value of it. But for some reason, we still have this perception out there that this is not a safe campus.”
To combat this, safety is hoping to encourage student dialogue and increase the number of students reaching out when they feel unsafe, whether from simply walking outside at night or from outside trespassers and threats.
“If there is something wrong, we want our students to adopt a ‘see something, say something,’ [approach] and they’re getting a ton better at it,” Rauch said.
