In this new series from VOLT, 38-year police officer and first responder, Demetrius Anderson, will cut through the noise around campus safety, access control, technology, CPTED, and response plans for universities across the country.
"Safety is a program, not a purchase."
Picture a campus safety director walking the quad on a Tuesday afternoon in October, past six brand-new cameras his team fought the budget committee for all spring. Yet, he still can't answer the one question his board keeps asking:
are we actually safer than we were last year?
That question is the whole problem.
Most higher ed institutions fall into what we call the Reactive-Tool Trap: a vulnerability gets exposed, someone buys a camera or a piece of software to close the gap, and the purchase gets called a strategy. It isn't one. Every reactive system is really just a record of what a campus failed to prevent.
Key takeaways
- Campus safety is a program, not a purchase. Cameras, credentials, and software are components. Without a strategy connecting them, they're just expensive gadgets.
- The real cost of an incident dwarfs the cost of prevention. A single breach can force a university to notify tens of thousands of people and tie up IT for months; prevention is almost always the cheaper option.
- A real safety program rests on three pillars: a culture that knows what to report, a cross-functional coalition that owns safety together, and a roadmap tied to institutional goals.
- The Proactive Campus Safety Stack™ organizes this work into nine layers, from environmental design to measurement.
Cameras don't make a campus safe. Programs do.
When a security gap surfaces, like a break-in, a near-miss, a state audit finding, the fastest thing an administrator can do is buy something. A camera. A card reader. A monitoring contract. It feels like progress, and it is defensible in a budget meeting. But bought in isolation, each purchase adds another platform that doesn't talk to the others.
That organic, one-off expansion is how campuses end up drowning in cameras while starving for insight. Standalone systems create real administrative overhead: separate licensing, separate support contracts, separate logins for separate teams. None of it adds up to a safer campus, because none of it was designed to work together in the first place.
What an incident actually costs
The financial and operational fallout of a security failure is almost always larger than the cost of preventing it. A single breach, like a hacker compromising a server, can force a university to notify tens of thousands of affected students, staff, and alumni. That single event consumes months of IT time, invites regulatory scrutiny, and does lasting damage to a school's reputation, long after the technical fix is in place.
Disjointed systems compound this cost over years, not just in the moment of crisis. Every additional platform means another renewal negotiation, another specialist to hire or train, another support agreement to track. Prevention is almost always the cheapest option on the table, the incident that never happens is also the one that never shows up as a line item. If you want to see where your own numbers land, VOLT's cost-benefit calculator walks through the math for your specific camera count and budget.
Proactive investment pays that logic back directly. When the University of Illinois Chicago piloted AI-powered monitoring across 30 outdoor cameras, the school cut third-party security costs by roughly 50% (about $236,000 a year for every 24/7 position it no longer needed to staff). That's not a hypothetical efficiency gain. It's a budget line that funded other priorities instead, and it's one of several real customer stories worth reading if you're building the case internally.
What a real campus safety program looks like
A genuine campus safety program is welcoming by design, not a fortress. It runs on three things working together.
A culture of safety, not surveillance. The best sensor on any campus is a person who knows exactly what to report and trusts that reporting it will matter. That means treating Clery Act and Title IX compliance as more than annual paperwork. The data inside those reports can surface real patterns, if anyone's looking.
Cross-functional coalitions. No single office owns safety. It takes an active partnership between Public Safety, Student Affairs, Facilities & Operations, IT, and Executive Leadership, each with a real stake in the outcome, not just a seat at the table.
As Noah Skinner, Director of Safety & Emergency Management at UC Law San Francisco, puts it:
"Even with the best security staff, human limitations exist... [good technology] ensures that critical activity is detected and immediately brought to our attention."
The technology doesn't replace the coalition. It gives the coalition better information to act on.
An aligned, strategic roadmap.
Instead of buying point solutions as gaps appear, proactive campuses start by discovering their current state, defining clear functional requirements, and aligning the safety plan with institutional goals, including the goal of staying open and welcoming, not locked down. If you're weighing cost, procurement, or implementation timelines as part of that roadmap, VOLT's Higher Education FAQs covers the questions campus leaders ask most.
The Proactive Campus Safety Stack™: nine layers, one strategy
Shifting the moment of intervention earlier means moving up a stack, not just buying up a shopping list. Nine layers, building on each other:
- Layer 0 — Mindset Shift: moving the entire campus culture from reactive response to proactive prevention.
- Layer 1 — Designed Environment (CPTED): using lighting, sightlines, landscaping, and territoriality so the physical campus itself deters incidents.
- Layer 2 — Intelligent Visibility: layering smart video analytics — including a human-verified Virtual Security Operations Center — onto the cameras you already own, instead of a costly rip-and-replace project.
- Layer 3 — Controlled Access: layered, zoned credentialing that balances open, welcoming spaces with real security in critical areas.
- Layer 4 — Early Awareness: threat assessment and care teams that route concerns to help before they become incidents.
- Layer 5 — Compliance & Transparency: turning Clery and Title IX reporting into a proactive engine that surfaces patterns of risk.
- Layer 6 — Coordinated Response: moving emergency preparedness out of a binder and into live, cross-department tabletop drills.
- Layer 7 — Sustained Coalition: building a board-ready ROI case that secures long-term funding and shared executive ownership.
- Layer 8 — Measurement: defining leading and lagging indicators that prove prevention is actually working, so the program keeps improving.
The bottom line
A camera is not a strategy. A card reader is not a strategy. Even the best individual tool, bought in isolation, just becomes one more thing your team has to log into. Real campus safety is a program: a culture that reports, a coalition that owns the outcome together, and a roadmap that ties it all to what your institution is actually trying to be. Build the program, and the tools finally start earning their keep.
Request a demo and see how VOLT's school security solutions can turn your existing cameras into more than a record of what already happened — before your next Tuesday afternoon walk across the quad.
Common questions about building a campus safety program
What's the difference between campus security tools and a campus safety program?
Security tools — cameras, access control, monitoring software — are components. A campus safety program is the strategy that connects those components to a culture of reporting, a cross-functional coalition, and a roadmap tied to institutional goals. Tools without a program create silos; a program makes existing tools work together.
How much does a security incident actually cost a university, compared to preventing one?
Beyond the immediate response, a serious incident can force a school to notify tens of thousands of people, absorb months of IT overtime, and take a lasting reputational hit — costs that compound well past the initial event. Proactive investment tends to pay for itself: the University of Illinois Chicago cut third-party security costs by roughly 50%, or about $236,000 a year per eliminated 24/7 position, after piloting AI-powered monitoring on cameras it already owned.
Do we have to replace our existing cameras to build a proactive program?
No. The point of Layer 2 (Intelligent Visibility) in the Proactive Campus Safety Stack is to add smart analytics on top of the camera infrastructure you already have, rather than pursuing an expensive rip-and-replace project.
What is CPTED, and why does it matter for a college campus?
CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design) is the practice of using lighting, sightlines, landscaping, and clear territoriality to make a physical space naturally deter incidents. On a campus, that means building security into renovation and construction plans from the start, rather than retrofitting it after a problem occurs.
Who actually needs to be involved in a cross-functional campus safety coalition?
At minimum: Public Safety, Student Affairs, Facilities & Operations, IT, and Executive Leadership. No single office can own campus safety alone, and coalitions that leave one of these groups out tend to develop blind spots exactly where that group's expertise was needed.
About Demetrius Anderson
Demetrius Anderson spent 38 years as a police officer and first responder protecting some of the nation's most sensitive environments — from Biosafety Level 3 laboratories and Cesium-137 research facilities to formal liaison roles with the Illinois State Terrorism & Intelligence Center, Chicago's counter-terrorism center (CPIC), and the Department of Homeland Security. At the University of Illinois Chicago, he helped architect a first-of-its-kind real-time visual intelligence solution that analyzed live surveillance feeds, detected anomalies, and triggered automated responses — all on the university's existing camera infrastructure. That experience shaped the philosophy that defines his work today: prevention doesn't come from more cameras, it comes from making the cameras you already have smarter.