‘GOTCHA’ will grab students attention

Public Safety is teaming up with University Housing to help raise awareness concerning security in residence halls.

According to Deputy Director of Public Safety, Richard Goodson, ‘GOTCHA’ is a program designed to raise awareness to students about the consequences of letting strangers enter residence halls.

“The ‘GOTCHA’ program is basically a method for us to make residents more aware of when strangers are in their hall and hopefully to keep them more safe and protected from strangers entering the residence halls and doing things they certainly don’t need to be doing,” Goodson said.

The program works by having an undercover or plain clothed police officer try to gain entry into a residence hall by following someone through the door or by asking someone to let him in. If successful, the officer hands the person a GOTCHA card that states, “If I had been a criminal, you would now be a statistic.” The card goes on to tell the student to report any suspicious activity and to call public safety as soon as possible.

Goodson said the GOTCHA program will also include having an undercover officer roam the halls in an effort to see how long it takes for someone to notice something suspicious.

A third component of the program will include an attempt to raise awareness of property security by having the undercover officer leave another Public Safety card on doors of rooms with unlocked doors that says “If this had been an actual theft, you would have been a statistic.” This card goes on to remind students to lock their doors and protect their property.

The implementation of this program comes after recent rapes in new residence halls at Kennesaw State University as well as Georgia State University, where strangers were allowed access into secure residence halls.

“I think it tests the weaknesses in the system, and it’s not that the alarm systems aren’t working properly because most of the time they are,” Goodson said. “Most of the time the problem is that students prop doors open or let somebody in trying to be nice, trying to do the right thing, but a lot of times when you do that you end up becoming a victim.”

Sophomore Political Science major, Precious Jones, said she has often seen unknown people being let into the residence halls.

“We need to be more careful about who we let into the dorms,” Jones said. “Just because they look like they might be a student doesn’t mean that they are.”

Goodson said the program has already been approved by Residence Life as well as the Residence Hall Advisors and Residence Hall Directors. It is just the first of a series of crime prevention programs that he hopes to see implemented.

Goodson said once printing materials for the project are ready, the program should be able to begin.

Associate Director of Operations for University Housing John Stone said he thinks students sometimes tend to be complacent in letting people in and not confronting strangers.

“Hopefully, [GOTCHA] will educate students on their responsibility for security for the residence halls,” Stone said.

Goodson said this project is important to help raise awareness that crimes like the ones at Kennesaw State and Georgia State University do happen.

“We’ve got to continue to be vigilant to make sure that we don’t let strangers in,” he said.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Mar 21 2003. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry