Campus safety goes high tech

In wake of UNCW murders, UNC campuses seek personal safety devices

Matt Powell, left, and James Blalock test new security devices at the Center for Wireless and Mobile Computing at Greenville's East Carolina University. The center is testing technology to help protect students in the UNC system.

By MARTHA WAGGONER, Associated Press

GREENVILLE -- Inside a small brick house on the edge of the East Carolina University campus, Dr. Barry DuVall and his staff are driven by tragedy.

Last year, two University of North Carolina-Wilmington students were murdered. Now, DuVall and the staff at the Center for Wireless and Mobile Computing spend their days building portable safety alert systems on trash cans, mounting wired poles in the yard and testing cell phones with panic buttons.

Their mission: Find a way to make personal alert devices work on North Carolina's college campuses.

They grapple with questions like, key fobs or cell phones? Wired or wireless? More security inside buildings or outside? Some of the technology they work with has been on the market for a decade. Some is still in the lab.

But DuVall wants some sort of device in the hands of students and staff at the 16-campus UNC system and he wants it there now.

"I think there's a tendency to put off worrying about things like personal safety and sort of assume it will go away or we won't have to take it too seriously," he said recently.

He is to present his findings Tuesday to ECU's vice chancellor of student life and associate vice chancellor of academic outreach. If that goes well, he hopes UNC system officials will endorse a proposal to create a network of alert devices. The devices will function not only on UNC campuses, but also off-campus and at the state's private colleges and universities.

Christen Marie Naujoks, 22, and Jessica Lee Faulkner, 19, were UNCW students who died a month apart last spring.

Faulkner was killed in her dorm May 5. Fellow student Curtis Dixon was charged with kidnapping, raping and murdering her. Dixon was in custody when he committed suicide last month.

Naujoks was shot to death June 4, allegedly by former boyfriend, John Brian Peck. Peck, a former UNCW student, killed himself three days later as he fled from police.

Mainmain Yu, 22, an ECU graduate student from the Hunan province of China, said she worries about crime on and off campus and would appreciate having a personal alert device.

"I am a female, so I feel that it is not safe enough to walk alone at night," Yu said. "And my American friends warn me lots of times that after dark, Greenville is not safe enough."

Blue light safety

The center's research got a public viewing in November, when it sponsored a conference on alert devices that attracted eight vendors and more than 100 representatives from law enforcement and UNC schools.

Among those who attended was Jim Ramier, a sales representative for Linear Corp., a Carlsbad, Calif., wireless company.

Linear makes a transmitter that works with the "blue light" safety devices found on many campuses, including ECU's. By pushing a button on one of the blue light stations, people can let authorities know they're in trouble and where they are.

Of course, for a blue light device to work, an endangered person must be able to reach it. Linear's transmitter, which can be carried on a key ring, allows the lights to be activated from up to 100 feet away. It works outdoors and indoors, if the student is close enough to the blue light.

As many as 65,000 individually coded transmitters can work off one system.

"If you're in the building and within 100 feet of the blue light and press the button, it's going to activate it and tell them student Betsy Jones is within 100 feet of this particular blue light," Ramier said.

Bosch Security makes another key fob-style transmitter that's been used at Nazareth College in Rochester, N.Y., for more than a decade. A student once used her transmitter to alert authorities that she was in a car with her former boyfriend, who was trying to drive her off campus. Antennae and global positioning technology can be used to track people through their transmitters.

"Everybody knows security is a beep away," said Lee Struble, campus safety director at Nazareth, which also uses the devices to track expensive equipment. "There is a general sense of increased safety, similar to a neighborhood watch program."

He said Nazareth averages five to six alarms a year, including medical emergencies, fights and disputes between boyfriends and girlfriends.

Security doesn't come cheap. Jeff Scott, who works in application sales for Bosch, estimated Nazareth's system, used by 1,800 people in 20 buildings across 100 acres, cost about $500,000. At 23,000-student ECU, Ramier estimated a Linear system that works with the existing blue lights would run about $200,000.

And neither system works off-campus.

Beyond campus

Wider range is the appeal of Benefon essentially a cell phone with a panic button. It can work worldwide, but is less reliable indoors, where it can be hard to pick up a satellite signal, said Jonathan Ventulett, vice president of operations for Airo Wireless in Atlanta, which sells the Finnish-made device in the United States.

With a retail price of $400 each, Ventulett said most Benefon sales are to the military and the government. East Carolina is the first campus to express any interest in the device, he said.

At Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, a pilot program is scheduled to begin late next month that will use the school's wireless computing network to monitor the location of about 100 alert devices.

Jay Dominick, chief information officer and vice president for information systems at Wake Forest, said devices will work indoors and will first be distributed to students and staff who use the music and art building, where people often work alone.

"This sort of technology is going to explode over the next few years being able to tell where you are and where things are around you and being able to do something with that information," Dominick said.

Scott said Bosch developed its alert device with the college market in mind, but has marketed to other institutions, such as long-term care facilities.

The college market "doesn't lend itself to new technology," he says. "They're very slow to change the process."

DuVall dreams of putting a device in the hands of students and faculty that will make them feel safe on and off campus.

"Looking beyond the confines of the university would be desirable," DuVall says. "Projects that integrate the campus with the community are so important. So we need to look beyond a restricted environment. People are always on the move, so we need to have a lot of different options.""