Executive Summary

The Reimagining Campus Safety Action Committee, charged by President Bruce Harreld, recently completed its work. This report includes information on the committee charge, process, key findings, recommendations, and work plan for implementation.

Download the Full Committee report

Key Findings

  • Key Finding 1: Our current safety systems are not effective for many UI students, particularly the most vulnerable students. Our students, across all classifications (undergraduate, graduate, and professional) experience our structures of safety and policing differently than other classifications of university community members. Students are more likely to report feeling unsafe around campus and around UI police.
  • Key Finding 2: Additional investment in mental health and basic needs support is essential to student success. All constituent groups, across all feedback options, support increasing financial resources for mental health, well-being, and basic needs, as well as increasing funding for departments, such as the Cultural Centers that support BIPOC, disabled, and LGBTQIA+ individuals.
  • Key Finding 3: Additional community accountability and transparency processes are needed for UIDPS. We found that nationally or locally recommended practices were nearly always already in place within UIDPS, often for years. However, our local community did not know about them or perceive them as effective. This disconnect speaks to a need for additional transparency and ongoing communication between UIDPS and campus stakeholders and supports creating a feedback and accountability structure, anchored at the UI leadership level.

Recommendations

  • Recommendation 1: Provide non-law enforcement response options for mental health, basic needs, crisis intervention, and follow-up.
  • Recommendation 2: Invest financial resources in holistic safety services, including mental health, case management, well-being, and basic needs.
  • Recommendation 3: Charge a Presidential Campus Safety & Accountability Board, that centers marginalized campus members and includes members of shared governance and representatives of the broad UI community, with soliciting ongoing feedback, identifying metrics and measures of success, communicating concerns and recommendations, and facilitating a transparent sharing of information with the UI community.
  • Recommendation 4: Collaborate with local public safety and community officials to align UI and surrounding community safety protocols in support of a holistic response approach.
  • Recommendation 5: Create an implementation and assessment team charged with enacting recommendations and monitoring progress.