As one of the first universities in the United States to make its graduate programs available online, Nova Southeastern University pioneered the use of technology and telecommunications to enhance traditional education delivery through distance learning. But this world-class university isn’t simply known for its ingenuity in education; it’s getting high marks for its innovations in safety, security, and customer service too.

The Public Safety Department of Nova Southeastern University (NSU) is such a model of progressive campus crime prevention that other colleges and universities often come to NSU for safety and security advice. Employing an expertly-trained workforce supported by state-of-the-art technology, the NSU Public Safety Department is consistently rated at the top of student and employee surveys for confidence and effectiveness. Furthermore, published statistics that track violent crime and property crime reveal that the threat of such crime at NSU is minimal compared to other institutions.

Achieving such high marks in safety and security is no small feat when you consider NSU’s expansive properties and sizable student population. NSU is the largest independent institution of higher learning in Florida and the Southeast, and the sixth largest in the United States, with student enrollment topping 26,000. The University maintains a 300-acre campus in Davie-Ft. Lauderdale and two satellite locations: a campus at North Miami Beach, and the East Campus in Ft. Lauderdale, as well as student education centers in Jamaica, Las Vegas, and throughout Florida including Miami, Tampa, Jacksonville, Orlando, Cape Coral, Naples and Palm Beach Gardens.

Ensuring safety and security at NSU is a big job that gets bigger every year. Over the past decade, the University has experienced substantial growth, both organically and through mergers with other institutions. New colleges and programs have been added to the curriculum. New facilities have sprung up to meet the needs of a student population that is growing by leaps and bounds. Joint use facilities, such as on-campus outpatient healthcare clinics and a new library and technology center designed to serve both NSU staff and students, and Broward County residents, bridge NSU to the outside community and are another source of expansion. With these transformations, the NSU Public Safety Department’s oversight, led by NSU’s Vice President of Facilities Management John J. Santulli II and Executive Director of Protective Services Bronson S. Bias, has expanded, too.

“The growth of NSU has simply been phenomenal,” said James Lambe, Communications System Manager for the Public Safety Department at NSU. “The organization and structure increases an average of ten percent each year. With our community healthcare clinics on our main campus, NSU is also an integral part of the surrounding community. Our mission is to work with all of the members of the NSU community to ensure a safe environment for everyone.”

NOVALERT and the SOC: Communication is key
Central to this mission is NSU’s public safety workforce. The NSU Public Safety Department is a 24/7 operation staffed by more than one hundred highly-skilled public safety professionals. The majority are uniformed officers who function as “protective caregivers,” patrolling the campuses in marked vehicles or on foot, and responding to requests for assistance. NSU officers are CPR/AED certified and trained in crime prevention, effective security practices, and all aspects of caregiving and life safety.

Approximately fifty-percent of the Public Safety Department’s workforce graduated from or are currently enrolled at NSU, and Lambe says this connection with the campus community fosters a sense of loyalty, professionalism, understanding, and communication. It is noteworthy that NSU employs two full time sworn Town of Davie Police Officers to patrol the school’s main campus. These officers work in direct coordination with NSU Public Safety and handle all calls for service.

Effective communication between the NSU community and the Public Safety Department is paramount to the Department’s mission to keep NSU staff and students safe and secure. That’s where NSU’s NOVALERT communications program and the Security Operations Center (SOC) come in. Through NOVALERT, students and employees on the NSU main campus can access a Public Safety Console Communication Systems Operator (CSO) at the SOC, 24 hours a day, simply by dialing a designated hotline number. Other non-emergency numbers are also set up for more routine requests. “We’re here 365 days a year, through holidays and hurricanes,” said Lambe.

Students can also instantly connect with the SOC through 110 “blue light” telephones – (so named for their distinguishing blue lights). Similar to call boxes, these push button phones are strategically located throughout the campuses. When a call for help comes in, Communication Systems Operators use two-way radio to get in touch with uniformed officers in the field who can quickly respond.

Calls that come in to the SOC range from basic requests for information to true emergencies. “We’re basically the front lines of customer service, so we get everything – questions about classes, lost and found, directions. We never know what we’re going to get,” said Lambe. The center also receives a fair number of calls for vehicle assistance. “We get plenty of those calls every day, especially at the end of the day when people go back to their cars. They may have locked their keys in the car or they may find that they’ve left their lights on and need a jumpstart, or they may need air in a tire. We handle all of those requests,” he added.

Then there are the serious emergencies that require police, fire or EMS response. For those situations, students and faculty are instructed to dial 9-1-1 first, and then dial the NOVALERT hotline. Dialing 9-1-1 from any internal NSU telephone automatically triggers an alert notification that displays inside the NSU Public Safety Security Operations Center (SOC). The on-duty Communication Systems Operator sees the extension from which the 9-1-1 call was placed and can then dial that extension to connect with the caller and verify details of the emergency, including the location. The SOC Communication Systems Operator uses this information to coordinate an effective response involving NSU uniformed officers and local police, fire or emergency medical services. NSU patrol vehicles meet up with the first responders at a designated campus entrance and escort them to the exact campus location, ensuring a rapid response.

From routine calls to requests for 9-1-1 assists, the quantity of calls that come in to the SOC is staggering. “We receive three to four thousand phone calls on our main hotline number and dispatch between two to three thousand radio calls on a typical week,” said Lambe. On occasion, the Department will need to go back and review calls to see how incidents were handled.

Up until about two years ago, the Department relied solely on Communication Systems Operator logs – essentially notes written by the Communication Systems Operators as they’re taking calls – and printouts from the Department’s CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch) system, to research calls. Today, the thousands of calls that come in to the SOC – from cell phones, campus phones, blue light phones, elevator emergency phones, bus stop phones, and even from the access control gate phones – are captured on a NiceCall Focus™ II recording solution that the Department purchased through NICE Systems’ partner Replay Systems. The recording system also captures all of the public safety radio communications on the main campus.

The Department’s previous paper-based approach to reviewing incidents had its limitations. “Researching calls or complaints in the past was extremely difficult,” said Lambe. “Once, we received a complaint from an employee who had purported to her supervisor, as an excuse for not showing up to work, that a Public Safety Communication Systems Operator had advised her that her building was closed and that she should go home.”

Relying solely on the CAD log entries to research the complaint could have proven problematic. “The Communication Systems Operator’s log entry more than likely won’t say ‘I was rude to a customer’ or ‘I told a customer to go home,’” said Lambe. “You have one person’s word against another person’s word as to how the experience transpired.” In this particular instance, Lambe said that researching the call history from that date in the NiceCall Focus™ enabled them to disprove the complaint because there was no record of the call to substantiate the claim.

Lambe says that being able to review captured interactions is the closest thing to actually being there when the event transpired. “There are always times where we wish we could have been there to see or hear what happened,” he said. Recordings, in a sense, enable Lambe’s investigators to do just that. “They eliminate the he said/she said elements of call research and replace it with objective, factual content, and that’s invaluable,” Lambe said. ”Now I can pull the recording of the call and listen to it myself. That’s worth a thousand words.”

The recordings don’t replace previous methods of capturing information about calls, though. SOC Communication Systems Operators still use CAD entries and logs to keep track of calls. But, the recordings do supplement those sources of information, accentuating the need for accuracy and accountability. “It gives the Communication Systems Operators an impetus to be more detail-oriented,” said Lambe. “They know the policies. They know they’re supposed to log certain information, and they know the call is being recorded.”

Having all three pieces of information – CAD printouts, Communication Systems Operator logs and recordings – also enables the Department to conduct more thorough research and investigations. “We can listen to the actual call and then cross-reference the information captured in NICE – like the time and date of the call, its duration, the number dialed, and so on – with our CAD records,” noted Lambe.

The ability to go back and review recorded interactions has proven beneficial on more than one occasion. “There have been times where our radio recordings and our captured inbound and outbound calls have been important in helping us research and resolve issues relating to an investigation or to our operations,” said Lambe. “The ability to query our captured calls can also help defend the actions of our field officers and our Communication Systems Operators, when handling of an incident is questioned.”

The NSU Public Safety Department’s approach to quality assurance (QA) and training is a proactive one, and the recording solution is also central to those efforts. “We want to be sure that our Communication Systems Operators and patrol officers are being professional and using proper etiquette at all times,” said Lambe. “So I regularly use the recordings to review the manner in which calls were handled.”

The recordings have also been helpful as a training tool for Communication Systems Operator trainees. No matter what the call is, the Communication Systems Operator’s handling and demeanor with the caller has to be consistent and professional. “The recordings allow Communication Systems Operators to hear a variety of typical and atypical calls,” said Lambe. “And, if there’s a situation that I think could have been handled better, they can listen to the call and learn from it. The NICE recording technology helps us ensure that every call for service from the NSU community is professionally handled.”

Beyond communications: the SOC, a full-fledged control center
The SOC is much more than a communications center. It’s a full fledged control center; and the Communication Systems Operators at the SOC perform a variety of functions to keep the NSU community safe and secure. “All third party alarm monitoring calls for campus burglar and fire alarms are fielded through our SOC,” said Lambe.

SOC personnel also directly monitor and control alarm points and door openings for the Main Fort Lauderdale-Davie Campus as well as NSU student service centers in Orlando, Kendall-Miami and Palm Beach Gardens, using the University’s sophisticated C*CURE integrated access control system.

“It’s basically an ID card access control system,” said Lambe. “Through C*CURE, we can remotely monitor and control access to NSU buildings, both on campus and off campus. We can set up schedules to lock and unlock doors; we can remotely alarm or disarm doors; we can set up security clearances for certain ID cards. It eliminates having to have an officer on-site with a key.” If a door is breached or opened after hours, that triggers an alarm at the operations center. It’s the responsibility of the SOC Communication Systems Operators to monitor these alarms and dispatch responding NSU Public Safety officers and Town of Davie Police Officers to the scene.

The C*CURE access control system works hand-in-hand with the University’s NiceVision® video surveillance solution that digitally captures surveillance footage from CCTV cameras trained on various access points across University properties. NICE teamed up with Siemens Building Technologies, Inc., to deliver the integrated solution that marries access control with camera coverage.

When there’s a security infraction, the remote cameras monitored by the SOC Communication Systems Operator give insight into what’s happening at the scene. For instance, Lambe says, pre-set triggers can be set in the system such that if someone swipes a card at a door but doesn’t have the proper clearance, the video surveillance image of that person will automatically be displayed in the SOC as an alarm is sounding.

“When an alarm goes off, the video surveillance footage displays on a specific wall-mounted view monitor. Simultaneously, instructions pop up on the Communication Systems Operator’s screen. It’s all automated to assist the Communication Systems Operator,” explained Lambe. SOC personnel use the video to immediately discern what’s going on and, if necessary, communicate with uniformed NSU officers via two-way radio to dispatch them to the scene.

In all, Nova Southeastern University employs more than 400 CCTV cameras at various campus locations – in the new library, in parking areas, in elevators; and at various gates and other access points. All of these video surveillance images are digitally captured and stored in NICE’s NiceVision® digital video recording system, and monitored at the SOC.

CCTV camera coverage is even tied to more than 80 blue light phones in the two main campus parking garages. “If somebody activates an emergency phone, the surveillance camera for that specific phone pops up on a dedicated monitor at the SOC, so the Communication Systems Operator handling that call not only hears the person, but sees the person as well,” said Lambe. “When an emergency phone is activated, a nearby camera automatically calls up a preset shot and zooms in on the phone,” he added.

The NSU Public Safety department’s video surveillance system delivers real-time insight, but it also provides hindsight into past events, and sometimes that hindsight pays off. “We’ve solved crimes through our video surveillance,” said Lambe. “We’ve been able to detect and identify individuals involved in crimes of opportunity, namely thefts of computer equipment and personal property. In partnership with Public Safety’s sworn Town of Davie Police Officers, those suspects were later apprehended and arrested.”

While NSU employs separate NICE solutions to capture voice and video, it’s not uncommon for the NSU Public Safety Department to use both pieces of information to connect the dots in an investigation. Lambe explains: “We routinely query our radio and telephone calls in conjunction with our video for investigations. Cross-referencing voice recordings and surveillance video can reveal consistencies or inconsistencies between what was said on the phone and events as they were captured on video, which can help get to the heart of what really happened.”


For more information on NICE's solutions for capturing voice and video please visit www.nice.com.

For more information on Replay Systems please visit www.replaysys.com/.

For more information on Siemens Building Technologies please visit www.sbt.siemens.com.