September is always a busy time of year for K-12 and college campuses. Throw a pandemic into the mix and nearly everyone tasked with keeping campuses safe will tell you both their personal and professional lives are busier than ever. Because of this, we’re providing a recap of the most popular stories from the month of September.
Over the summer months, the most-read Campus Safety stories have consistently and understandably revolved around the coronavirus pandemic and social injustices in our country. While these important topics still made it into the most popular stories for last month, a much wider range of topics seemed to be of interest to our readers, including Clery fines, access control and ransomware attacks.
The most reoccurring topic for September was police reform. A few weeks ago, Editor-in-Chief Robin Hattersley wrote a blog about police reform and it landed itself in September’s top 10 posts.
“Truth be told, law enforcement and Black and Brown Americans have experienced years of trauma that has not been appropriately addressed. They all need to be heard and understood, and they all need to hear and understand each other,” she said. “Most importantly, our nation really needs to address its race relations and police use-of-force issues.”
Hattersley ended the blog post by asking to hear from campuses with strong police programs that have effectively addressed law enforcement’s race relations and use-of-force issues. Officials at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond reached out with data that shows its police department was able to decrease its use-of-force incidents by 84% in the 2019-2020 academic year — the college’s lowest number in 10 years.
The fact that this article submitted to us ended up on the most-read articles of the month is exactly why we are asking our readers for more promising stories like this. Campus Safety patrons clearly want to hear what other campuses are doing to improve its police relations and keep students safe.
Check out the most-read stories in September by viewing this article’s slideshow.
