Community Policing Awards: Winner - UNC-Chapel Hill, North Carolina

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Community Policing Case Studies with IACP/ITT Night Vision Community Policing Award

The Problem
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was the first public university in the United States. The university has approximately 15,400 undergraduate students and approximately 9,000 graduate/professional students. There are approximately 2,500 faculty members and approximately 13,082 staff members employed by the university. There also is a major medical facility in the middle of campus — the UNC Hospitals. On any given day, the total population of the campus, including vendors and visitors, is approximately 40,000, which can double depending upon special events such as games and concerts.

In 2001 the Department of Public Safety began recognizing a rise in the level of larceny cases. The most affected areas on the south campus were the residence halls, parking lots and medical buildings around the UNC Hospitals. The most seriously affected areas on the north campus were the libraries, gyms and residence halls. Larcenies accounted for 45 percent of the crimes reported to the Department of Public Safety in 2001.

The department identified the problem of campuswide larcenies by a number of different means. First, the command staff looked at and compared a number of statistical reports compiled by the records section. They found the number of reported larcenies for 2001 to be 667, which was an increase of 9 percent from 2000. In addition, by comparing data from the previous four years, it was determined that reported larcenies had increased campus-wide by about 30 percent. Next, the annual customer surveys were analyzed to determine what the community viewed to be the most pressing crime problems on campus. Based on these findings, it was overwhelmingly shown to be property crimes and, more specifically, larceny.

The department utilized its ongoing community policing efforts and knowledge to facilitate the initiative, knowing that the main objective had to be partnering with and educating the community about how to prevent larcenies from occurring, and when and how to report suspicious activity.

The Solution
To help solve this pressing issue, the Department of Public Safety launched a campus-wide "Larceny Reduction Campaign" in July of 2002, with the goal of reducing larcenies by 15 percent. This plan consisted of 10 overall strategies, including having officers conduct greater numbers of foot patrols in problem locations, deploying greater numbers of officers to these locations, and communicating with the entire university community through various types of programs, meetings, e-mails and videos.

First, the department wanted to get the information out to students, employees and visitors. Officers partnered with: the Dean of Students Office, which coordinates all liaisons with student organizations and associations; the UNC Housing Department, which governs all on-campus residential housing; the UNC Facilities Services Division, which oversees service, maintenance and cleaning operations throughout all university-owned property and buildings; and various faculty/staff organizations and groups.

Each and every one of the aforementioned organizations was immensely integral and helpful in providing officers with information on problem areas and locations, conducting programs and meetings, and by making repairs and improvements to certain types of structures and areas, both inside and outside, to make them more safe and secure.

The department’s command staff created two mandatory strategies for supervisors and officers on patrol to use in order to facilitate the plan:

• A list of overall police strategies was created and implemented for the police division. Officers began conducting a minimum of two hours of foot patrol in their assigned areas per each shift worked, whether day or night. Platoon supervisors then were allowed to deploy officers as they deemed necessary to address ongoing larceny occurrences in particular areas or at specific locations as identified in the Monthly Larceny Reports sent out by the records division.
• Chief of Police Derek K. Poarch issued a campuswide letter to all deans, directors, and department heads, discussing the problem of larceny on campus and providing larceny prevention tips. These tips included property records and accountability information, and stated that building managers would be contacted by officers to schedule crime prevention programs relating to larceny education. Each officer then began conducting these programs at the frequency of at least one per semester in each assigned residence hall and one per academic year in each assigned office/administrative building.

Other tactics in the battle to reduce larceny included:

• A video with accompanying printed material, utilizing both officers and students as actors and actresses. The video was commissioned and is under development by the University’s A.T.N. Department. By utilizing A.T.N. to make the video and by using officers and student volunteers to be in the video, there is minimal cost to the Department of Public Safety.
• Housekeeping Liaison – One of the platoon supervisors was assigned as a liaison with the university’s housekeeping division. This lieutenant began conducting quarterly meetings with housekeeping staff members in order to follow-up on larcenies in various areas and discuss larceny prevention strategies and the reporting of suspicious persons and conditions.

Several tactics within the police division itself were implemented as well. They include:

• Monthly Training – Monthly training with assigned detectives from the C.I.D. Unit was started. This training, held at pre-shift briefings, consisted of the reviewing of larceny cases — this ensured reporting uniformity, and brainstorming to develop and implement strategies for larceny.
• Field Reports – "Field Contact Procedure Reports," utilizing the existing RMS reporting system, were implemented to pursue and track officers' voluntary contacts with suspicious individuals.
• Photography System – A system was created and implemented, using existing investigative equipment, to photograph individuals and to make the images readily accessible to all officers in the field.
• Area-Specific Strategies – Area-specific strategies, individualized for each specific area depending upon its particular geographic makeup and population size, were created and implemented for each of the four respective police patrol platoons, and included: 1) Conducting informational seminars related to crime prevention and larceny reduction in areas heavily frequented by students, 2) Designing and disseminating fliers as well as posting signs in areas having high occurrences of larcenies, such as the gyms, libraries and parking lots, reminding users to secure their property properly at all times, 3) Utilizing plain-clothes officers, as staffing allows, to observe activities in these areas, and 4) Conducting nightly documented vehicular patrols in all off-campus parking areas.

Finally, in addition to the overall and area-specific strategies for the initiative itself, the Department of Public Safety published its official "2001/2002 Annual Report," which made larceny information available to the campus. The information was disseminated at the beginning of the fall semester, typically the time when the department sees larceny numbers rise significantly. In addition, the information was integrated into the various programs, seminars and informational displays officers conduct throughout the year.

Evaluation
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of Public Safety annually completes extensive data analysis to document and analyze the multiple variables associated with larceny and its causes, as well as assessing citizen satisfaction with community policing and overall department performance through the use of customer satisfaction surveys, which are sent to citizens and are designed to solicit total satisfaction levels with policing services.

The agency, as well as the community, has learned a number of things since the initiation of the Larceny Reduction Campaign campus-wide. When the Larceny Reduction Campaign began, there were a number of people, both inside of the agency as well as working and/or living in the community, who felt the law enforcement agency could not make a real, noticeable difference in the number of larcenies occurring within the jurisdiction because of it being a "campus" environment with a very transient population. The department has been able to make a significant reduction in the number of campus larcenies by: having uniformed police officers highly visible in problem locations; having "street-level" officers coordinating and working with personnel from various campus groups, organizations and departments to include conducting several types of educational programs and seminars; and finally, encouraging these officers to take appropriate enforcement actions whenever applicable and necessary.

In order for a campaign to be successful, the entire police organization, both sworn and civilian staff, must work with the community as well as with each other in a number of different ways. Furthermore, everyone, both living and/or working within the entire community, has to be involved in identifying the problem as well as identifying solutions to the problem, and the citizens also must have a stake in their own personal well-being. Then, and only then, is the police agency actually able to work with the community as a whole to successfully solve the problem.

The Larceny Reduction Campaign’s complete initiative provided the department with a long-term solution by allowing it to do the following three basic, yet significantly important, things:

• Enable the community to reduce larcenies significantly.
• Identify new and permanent ways to reduce larceny.
• Continue to monitor problem areas regularly, adjusting strategies and manpower as necessary.

In conclusion, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of Public Safety’s stated goal was to reduce larceny by 15 percent campus-wide, which the department easily met and exceeded with a campus-wide reduction of 29 percent.

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