Dylon Harrison
Staff Writer
With ISU’s campus being as open as it is, the school’s community relies heavily on Public Safety to eliminate any potential dangers or threats.
There are a variety of ways Public Safety approaches this job in order to keep the entire campus as safe as possible. These range from constant patrols, to use of an easily accessible app.
“Our campus is very open,” said Lewis Eakins, Public Safety director. “We want to be a campus-town as opposed to a campus in a town, so we invite the public here.”
There can be as many as four Public Safety officers patrolling campus at any given time, as well as over 900 cameras and almost 300 card access readers in use on various buildings. Each Public Safety officer employed by the school has gone through full police training.
“There are two ways of protecting this type of environment,” Eakins said. “We can either close off campus and monitor people who are coming on, or we can open up the campus and monitor those critical areas that we want to keep safe.”
Recently, there was an incident in the Pond Student Union Building (PSUB) in which a man, unaffiliated with the school had to be removed and escorted off campus by Public Safety. This man turned out to have an outstanding warrant with the Pocatello Police, and was quickly turned over to their custody. There were no injuries or damages caused by this incident.
“With all of the years I have been working in law enforcement, I have never worked with a greater department than the Pocatello Police,” Eakins said.
Public Safety occasionally has to remove people with no relationship to the school that are found either sleeping or panhandling in the PSUB.
There are multiple services offered to ISU students and faculty by Public Safety.
One of these is a 24-hour, safety escort service. This service is provided to anyone on campus who feels that traveling from one area to the next might be unsafe for them. The service is designed only for safety purposes, however, and should not be used for transportation under normal circumstances.
Another service offered is the use of the Rave Guardian app. This is a “blue light’ app that allows people to do things such as set a time limit for travelling to places that will set off an alarm and send their location to Public Safety if the timer is not stopped before reaching the limit.
This app also has a panic button which sends the user’s GPS location to Public Safety and any other emergency contact they desire, as well as a variety of other features.
Public Safety also encourages any member of the ISU community to “see something, say something.” This means that if any suspicious activity is observed, it should be reported immediately.
“We have a relatively safe campus,” Eakins said, in comparison to other campuses he has worked at in the past.
If needed, Public Safety can be reached at (208) 282-2911.
