UCPD is asking members of the Cal community to phone in and comment about the department’s goal of complying with the international standards of campus safety promoted by IACLEA.
If you’ve never heard of IACLEA before, don’t worry—we’re here to help you out.
What is IACLEA?
The International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators, or IACLEA, is a professional organization dedicated to excellence in campus public safety. Born in the late 1950s, it now has over 9,000 members representing over 1,000 higher education institutions around the world.
IACLEA offers world-class training to those in charge of keeping college campuses safe. UCPD has had a longstanding goal of becoming IACLEA certified, and on July 23 a team of IACLEA assessors will visit UC Berkeley to examine all aspects of the UC Police Department’s efforts to keep students safe. As UC Berkeley put it in a recent email, IACLEA accreditation is “…a highly prized recognition of campus public safety professional excellence.”
Why is UCPD asking for comments?
UCPD Chief Pittman is asking all members of the UC Berkeley community (that includes parents!) to phone in and share their thoughts about UCPD’s ability to comply with IACLEA standards.
You can find a complete document of the standards here, but we’ll make it simple:
UCPD needs to do more to keep students safe.
What should I say when I call in?
Several IACLEA standards match what we want to make students safer, including:
Video surveillance systems (Section 12.2.2). Right now UCPD has over 100 video cameras at undisclosed locations around campus, but none of them are proactively screened to prevent crime from happening. They are only used after the fact to assist investigation. We want Cal to follow the lead of other great universities like USC and create a video monitoring facility with trained staff to watch feeds in realtime and report potentially dangerous situations to UCPD before crime occurs.
Crime Prevention Input (Sec. 12.1.3). Campus buildings, including residence halls, should be designed and renovated to prevent criminal activity from happening. This means buildings must have working door locks, keycard-enabled gates, well-lit entrances and exits, and video cameras. A quick glance through the recent crime at Cal shows that campus buildings are easily entered by dangerous individuals. As members of the Cal community, we should express our deep concerns over this and voice our support for securing campus buildings— not only the ones that will be built in the future, but those which are already in use by students.
Crime Prevention Groups (Sec. 12.1.2). IACLEA calls upon universities to build strong relationships with groups that have a strong stake in making campus safe. Their list includes student government, Greek life, and others. But it needs to include Cal parents. After all, we’re the ones paying to send our kids to Berkeley; it’s only right that we get a seat at the table. We should support this section of the standards and specifically tell UCPD that it needs to start meeting proactively with Cal parents— ideally, SafeBears!
Emergency Phones (Sec. 11.2.6). While Cal has “blue light” safety stations located around campus, several buildings are without emergency contact systems. In early 2023, a homeless man entered the Life Sciences Building and shouted that everyone there was “going to die”. This prompted frantic activity from students in the classes there who believed an active shooter was about to open fire. When they tried to contact UCPD, many discovered their phones were unable to get a signal. This is completely unacceptable. Blue light stations are good, but every location on campus must have the ability to reach UCPD in the event of an emergency.
How & When Should I Call in?
UCPD is asking us to call on Monday, July 24 between 10 AM and 12 PM Pacific Daylight Time. Here’s the phone number:
+1 510 643 9597
Can I email instead?
Absolutely! Just remember that our calls tend to carry more weight than sending emails. But if you really want to use email, here’s the address:
jmurphy@iaclea.org
Just use some of the bullet points above & put them in your own voice before the July 24 deadline.