News > August 23, 2007

By Lizzie Rosen | News editor

Over the summer University Police underwent training to enhance its community policing efforts and create more of a presence for itself on campus.

“Now that we’ve had some time we are fully staffed,” Police Chief Regina Lawson said.

“Everyone is out of training. We’ve got more boots on the ground to increase our visibility in the residence halls and the academic and administrative buildings.”

University Police has also nearly finished doing a physical security assessment of each building on campus.

“We physically assess the entire building from locks, to windows, doors, floors, lighting to usage patterns. We have been working with the department chairs with locking and unlocking schedules to create a comprehensive assessment on the campus buildings,” Lawson said.

The assessment will be released once the remaining buildings have been analyzed.

Lawson encourages students to use common sense in regards to safety on campus emphasizing that theft is the number one crime stat seen as a result of unlocked doors and unsecured property.

“Take responsibility for your actions,” she said. “Take responsibility for your property, the lock on the dorm room is the best security device.”

University Police is taking special precaution this fall in advocating the importance of not letting unknown persons into residence halls.

Off-campus students will also be seeing more support from law enforcement and their surrounding residents via the University Area Neighborhood Association.

UANA is part of a neighborhood alliance in the Winston-Salem area that works to educate transient residents, students and other renters in the territory north and south of Polo Road and west of Cherry Street including areas like Rosedale Circle and Brookwood Road.

The Association was originally founded to deal with problem student housing. It works with campus and city police.

UANA consists of retirees, usually professionals, undergraduate and graduate students and some commercial properties like Campus Gas.

Although UANA has existed for around eight years, this year the organization is organizing a membership drive and will be going door-to-door to introduce themselves to renters.

“We want to genuinely welcome students; they usually do a good to great job,” UANA officer Tom Phillips said. “We want to make sure they know that we are there to help and support them and to remind them who to talk to for problems and protocols.”

When signing contracts for housing, off-campus residents affiliated with the university are required to sign a code of conduct that UANA wants to help enforce cooperatively with students.

This contract includes stipulations such as parking on lawns, which is prohibited by the code but the city of Winston-Salem has caused declining property value in the neighborhoods.

“We work aggressively with landlords to keep conduct appropriate in the neighborhood,” Phillips said.

“When you live off-campus you have to learn and understand what it means to be a good neighbor, to be quiet at night and not have excessive parties.”

Students can call 911 on a cell phone in case of emergency or 311 in case of a non-emergency to speak with police enforcement.