The Challenge
The campus is open by design. Thousands of students live, study, eat, and gather there at all hours, and the environment includes residence halls, dining facilities, and athletic and event venues, each with distinct risks. Multiple buildings and many stakeholders meant safety practices had grown unevenly across the campus, with no single prioritized view.
Why They Came to Kingswood
The university needed an outside expert to look across the entire campus-safety picture, program, physical, and technology, and prioritize, rather than inspect one building in isolation. Just as important, leadership wanted the assessment to reflect the people who actually live the environment, including students, campus safety staff, and administrators.
Inside the Assessment
Kingswood conducted stakeholder interviews, gathered crime data, and walked through key buildings inside and out, evaluating how security technology integrates with daily campus life. Findings were organized across the three pillars and risk-ranked, with explicit attention to identifying and prioritizing the campus’s most critical assets so recommendations could feed a multi-year strategy.
What the Assessment Revealed
Themes emerged across both program and environment:
- Program: clearer risk ownership, a threat assessment / behavioral-threat process, emergency operations and business-continuity planning, training, incident reporting, and mass-notification readiness
- Environment: residence-hall access control, exterior lighting and parking areas, security at athletic and large public events, surveillance, and visitor management
The throughline: an open campus can’t be hardened like a single building. It is protected through layers and behavior-aware measures rather than a hard perimeter.
From Findings to Decisions: Clarity and Smarter Budgeting
Risk ranking plus asset prioritization let the university build a genuine multi-year plan and direct limited dollars to the highest-risk buildings and programs first, phasing technology and capital work across budget cycles instead of competing for a single large outlay.
What They Learned
You can’t and shouldn’t lock down an open campus; you layer it. Bringing student voice into the assessment improved both accuracy and buy-in, and a multi-year roadmap let safety planning track real budget cycles.
Key takeaways: (1) On an open campus, security is about layers and behavior, not walls. (2) A risk-ranked, multi-year roadmap lets safety investments follow real budget cycles instead of competing for one big spend.
