Campus Safety Partnerships: Building Relationships Before a Crisis
The Worst Time to Meet Your Partners Is During a Campus Crisis
The National Governors Association's recent Briefing on Higher Education Campus Safety and Security highlighted the importance of partnerships. That makes sense. When something serious happens on a college campus, the response can quickly involve campus police or public safety, local law enforcement, fire and EMS, student affairs, counseling, emergency management, communications, facilities, senior leadership, and others depending on the situation. People who spend most of their working lives in very different parts of an institution may suddenly need to make decisions together, sometimes quickly and almost always with incomplete information.
Most campuses have plans for this. We have emergency operations plans, crisis communication plans, threat assessment protocols, continuity plans, notification systems, and procedures for situations we hope never happen. I would certainly rather have a good plan than discover during an emergency that nobody thought about one. Still, plans only get us so far because eventually people have to work the plan together, and relationships are harder to put into a binder. They are also much harder to build at 2:00 in the morning when something has gone terribly wrong.
Who Are You Going to Call?
I mean that more literally than it sounds. If something serious happened on your campus this afternoon, who would actually be on the phone with whom? Does your dean of students know the local police commander who might arrive? Does campus public safety have a working relationship with counseling services beyond exchanging information about individual cases? Does the communications team know who will be feeding them information, and do those people know communications is expecting it?
Then move outside the campus. Think about the local hospital, fire department, emergency management agency, prosecutor's office, neighboring schools and colleges, and other community partners who might suddenly become part of your response. Having a name and phone number on an emergency contact sheet is useful. Having already sat across a table from that person, worked through a problem together, and learned something about how they operate gives you considerably more.
There is something different about calling someone during a crisis when you have worked with them before. You know how they communicate and what their responsibilities and constraints likely are. Ideally, you have already disagreed about something when the stakes were lower and figured out how to work through it. I think that familiarity belongs in our understanding of campus safety infrastructure even though we rarely describe it that way.
Tabletop Exercises Can Tell Us a Lot About Relationships
This is one reason I like tabletop exercises when they are done well. Sometimes tabletops become elaborate tests of whether everyone remembers the emergency plan. Someone presents the scenario, participants explain what their department would do, the scenario moves forward, and eventually everyone reaches the end. That has value, but some of the most useful moments happen when the exercise exposes an assumption nobody realized they were making.
Student Affairs assumes campus police will contact the family, while campus police assume Student Affairs will. Communications expects verified information from someone who has no idea they are supposed to provide it. Counseling assumes they will be notified when students begin arriving at a reunification location. Halfway through the exercise, somebody realizes that the person with access to an important system would probably be standing at the emergency scene rather than sitting at a computer.
Those are good discoveries. Nobody failed the exercise. You found something on a Tuesday morning with coffee on the table that otherwise might have introduced confusion during an actual emergency.
Another benefit is harder to capture in an after-action report. Spend a few hours working through an uncomfortable scenario together and you begin learning how your colleagues think. You notice who asks good questions, who has access to information nobody else thought about, who gets focused on details, and who tends to look farther down the road. The next time those people are sitting together may be under very different circumstances, and that familiarity can matter.
BIT/CARE Teams Already Live in This World
For BIT, CARE, and threat assessment teams, these relationships matter because our work routinely crosses organizational boundaries long before anything reaches the level of a campus emergency. A concerning student may already be known to faculty, Residence life, counseling, disability services, campus police, student conduct, and people outside the institution. A parent may call one office, a professor may email another, and a roommate may talk with an RA. The team may be one of the few places where those pieces can come together.
Then a case changes. A student discussed primarily as a support concern makes a threatening statement. Someone being managed on campus is arrested off campus. A family member provides information nobody at the institution knew. A weapon becomes part of the concern. A situation that lived comfortably inside the normal BIT/CARE process yesterday may suddenly require people and systems that aren't usually at the team meeting.
This is where the relationships around the team become important. BIT/CARE and threat assessment teams should know their partners before they need them, including people who may never become regular team members. Local law enforcement, emergency management, hospitals and behavioral health providers, K-12 partners when appropriate, and other community resources can all become relevant surprisingly quickly.
I would not solve that by making the team enormous. I have seen enough oversized teams to know what happens when everyone who might someday be useful gets a permanent chair. The better question is whether the team knows who those people are, understands what they can contribute, and has enough of a relationship to bring them into the conversation when a case requires it.
Bring What You Learn Back to the Team
Partnerships matter on the other side of an incident, too. After-action reviews understandably focus on the emergency response itself: how quickly an alert went out, whether the command structure worked, whether responders could access the building, and whether information reached the people who needed it. For BIT/CARE and threat assessment teams, I would add some questions about what we learned before, during, and after the incident.
What did we know about the person or situation beforehand? What did we learn afterward that changes our understanding? Was information available somewhere that never reached the team? Did someone notice something but not know where to report it? Did the assessment process work the way we expected? Did the management plan hold up as circumstances changed?
Those questions require some care because a bad outcome does not automatically mean a threat assessment process failed. People sometimes cause harm without giving an institution information it reasonably could have identified beforehand. Teams can also have substantial information, make reasonable decisions based on what they know, and still experience a terrible outcome.
Other cases show that the aftermath can expose something we can improve. Information may have been sitting in separate systems. An outside partner may have known something the institution did not. People may have been uncertain about what they could share. A reporting process that looked perfectly clear to the people who designed it may have confused everyone else. That information needs to make its way back into the team's work rather than remaining solely in an emergency-response report.
Building Relationships While Nothing Is Wrong
Campuses have no shortage of expensive things they can buy in the name of safety, and some are worth every penny. Relationships are comparatively inexpensive, although they require something colleges can sometimes be surprisingly reluctant to spend: time. The NGA briefing is a useful reason to consider whether we are investing enough time before something happens.
Invite local law enforcement or emergency management colleagues to campus when there is no emergency. Include people from Student Affairs and counseling in exercises. Let communications participate in a BIT/CARE or threat assessment tabletop so they can see how information develops before an incident becomes a public story. Give the threat assessment team a case that eventually moves beyond its normal boundaries and see who everyone thinks should be called. Occasionally, just get people in the same room and let them get to know one another.
None of that is particularly sophisticated, and I think that is part of why it can get overlooked. We spend a great deal of time developing policies, protocols, reporting systems, assessment tools, and emergency plans because we need them. Eventually, though, those systems depend on people who have to communicate, share information, make decisions, disagree, adjust, and figure out what comes next together.
A campus can do quite a bit of that work before the emergency starts. The NGA briefing is a good reminder that the relationships surrounding our safety, BIT/CARE, and threat assessment processes deserve the same attention we give the processes themselves.