The Benefits of Video Analytics for Campus Security

Recent statistics noted there were 41,801 criminal offenses reported over 10,000 campuses in the US, an increase from the following year. 

This emphasizes how campuses continue to face several security challenges, from sexual violence and drug-use to vehicle crime and vandalism. 

And with such a vast number of risks, campuses face even greater struggles to manage all those risks whilst staying within institutional budgets.

In this blog, we delve into detail around the growing need for campus security, development of video analytics, and the benefits of utilizing such technology within educational institutions across the US.

The Growing Need for Campus Security 

Over recent years, campus security has become a top priority for most universities, colleges and schools. 

Designed to be safe havens for students, many campuses are now fighting a new stigma, faced with complex security challenges like gun violence. This perception has plagued campuses recently, leaving many questioning the safety of educational institutions.

Due to this, rising concerns over crime, violence, and safety have left institutions facing pressures to strengthen their proactive security measures in order to protect their staff, students, and visitors.

There are several key factors that are driving this growing need for campus security:

• Increase in Reported Crimes and Incidents - As mentioned, there were over 40,000 campus crimes in 2023, an increase from the following year. Common crimes include theft, motor vehicle theft, sexual assault.

• Changing Risk Environment - Beyond the traditional crimes, campuses are often faced with managing mental health risks, drug misuse, protests, and cyberthreats. Other broader societal issues like hate crime have also spilt heavily into some campuses creating heightened anxiety among students, parents, and staff.

• Sexual Violence and Misconduct - Since 2020, VAWA offenses have increased across campuses, with nearly 20,000 crimes reported in 2023. These numbers are often believed to be underestimated, as many VAWA cases still go unreported due to social stigma or lack of trust in the judicial system. 

• Changing Perceptions of Student Safety - 65% of current and prospective college students said school shootings make them concerned for their safety on campus. This displays a growing shift in perception on student safety. Even routine activities like walking alone or entering unfamiliar locations are now considered vulnerable situations by parents and students.

• Institutional Pressures - Educational institutions must provide campus crime reports under the Clery Act, risking reputational damage if found to hide statistics or display poor figures. Due to changing perceptions, campus security is now playing a critical role in where prospective students choose to study.

Most campuses face at least one, if not all the above challenges, driving the need for urgent action on their security to manage these. 

However, traditional security measures like record-only surveillance systems and security guards are no longer enough alone. Hence the move towards smarter, technology-driven surveillance.

Institutions must look for surveillance solutions offering video analytics, remote monitoring, and data-driven insights to create a safe, resilient environment that students, parents, and staff trust.

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What is Video Analytics?

Video analytics is the use of advanced software to automatically analyze video footage and extract meaningful information without requiring constant human monitoring.

It transforms traditional systems into intelligent surveillance tools that detect, track, and interpret activity as it’s happening. 

At the core, video analytics leverages artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and computer vision to teach systems how to recognize specific patterns with objects and behaviour like loitering. 

This removes the need for security personnel to watch hours of footage, video analytics scans live or recorded feeds, highlights any threats or suspicious behavior, and generates alerts when predefined rules are triggered.

The key capabilities of video analytics are as follows:

• Threat Detection and Classification - Identifies people and vehicles, and filters out false alarms like moving vegetation. This ensures accurate threat detection.

• Automated Alerts and Notifications - Sends real-time alerts to keyholders or security teams when suspicious activity is detected. This helps to reduce response time during active crime.

• Motion and Behavior Analysis - Detects unusual movement patterns, such as loitering, running, or group formation. This helps to identify threats early, so that quicker action can be taken to prevent it.

• Integrates with Security Systems - Video analytics can work alongside access control, environmental monitoring, intrusion detection, and other smart systems to enhance your overall surveillance. This helps to take a holistic approach to campus safety.

• Provides Connectivity to Video feeds - Allows stakeholders and security teams to quickly access live and recorded footage based on specific needs. This helps save time compared to manually reviewing footage.

Why It Matters for Campus Security

Thousands of students and staff enter campus on a daily basis, going to classrooms, heading to their dorms, and socializing in public spaces.

Video analytics offers a proactive monitoring solution that transforms your security system from being reactive (responding to an incident after it occurs) to preventative (detecting threats early).

This transition makes campuses safer, but also helps institutions ensure the efficient usage of their security without the need of investing in costly surveillance tactics. 

Cost-effective options include Surveillance Cameras and Trailers, which tend to be backed by a managed service that often involves video analytics within this.

What are the Benefits of Video Analytics with Campus Security?

Video analytics has the capability to reduce the amount of time security personnel spend monitoring cameras, whilst providing immediate responses to emerging security threats.

LotGuard’s surveillance camera experts below outline the key benefits of utilizing video analytics coupled with mobile surveillance cameras:

Enhanced Threat Detection and Response

Traditional surveillance systems often provide record-only functionality, and this limits their ability. Video analytics turn these passive cameras into active security partners that prevent crime. 

Relying on security guards or those present on campus depends heavily on circumstance and there’s a high risk for human error. Whereas surveillance systems with video analytics, they can notice unusual activity at a distance, even capturing multiple threats at one time.

This technology’s main aim is to monitor, detect, and alert, meaning that events will be captured early, allowing campus teams to respond quickly before the incident can escalate. 

Video analytics offer a proactive approach that prevents incidents rather than just recording them for you to then be able to react upon afterwards, helping to significantly reduce response time.

Improved Emergency Management

Fires, medical emergencies, terrorist acts, and active threats often trigger emergency incidents, and in these moments, every second matters. 

Due to the high traffic at campuses and regular events held there, crowd surges, terrorism, and protests are common issues that can quickly escalate into emergencies on-site.

Surveillance systems with video analytics can automatically detect changes in movement and behavior like crowd surges, unauthorized access, restricted area breaches, and panicked behavior.

The active monitoring from video analytics provides real-time situational awareness that security teams can act upon instantly. 

This also helps improve the accuracy of threat identification, meaning that when action is taken, it minimizes the risk of wasted time caused by false alarms, ensuring that other threats don’t go amiss because of this.

In fact, it’ll help to provide an accurate location, establish their movements, and decide where security requires deployment.

Operational Efficiency and Cost Savings

Traditional methods like guards are often popular, but their risk for human error, lack of scalability, and time-reliant nature create room for security breaches, and the consequences of these can be catastrophic.

Especially for campuses, which tend to cover large locations, often requiring vast coverage day-to-night.

Unlike guards who rely on being present at the time of an incident, video analytics are utilized by cameras to cover large areas, requiring no physical presence and providing instant response to verified threats.

It also avoids the tedious task of security teams filtering through hours of footage following an incident, due to traditional systems having record-only functionality.

Over time, this leads to lower staffing costs, reduced liability for your campus, and better use of security budgets which are already stretched across many institutions.

Protects Students, Employees, and Assets

Safeguarding staff and students is not the only concern regarding campus security, there’s high amounts of valuable assets like personal property, academic equipment, and vehicles, that are all prone to theft. 

This includes parking lots which are often overlooked by educational institutions as crime hotspots, however, these are common places for crime like theft, violent crime, and vandalism to occur. 

So, whether it’s protecting dormitories, parking lots, or laboratories, video analytics helps to provide an extra layer of defense. 

This also provides peace of mind to students, parents, and employees that safety is a priority and under monitoring from up-to-date, accurate technology with a human edge. In turn, improving wellbeing, boosting academic success, and increasing productivity.

Find Out Why Campus Security Begins in Your Parking Lot

Provides Data-Driven Insights for Safety Planning

Video analytics helps generate rich, reliable data that provide additional benefits beyond real-time monitoring, allowing for better long-term safety planning for campus security teams. 

For example, through the use of mobile surveillance systems backed by video analytics, institutions can relocate the system and analyze various areas on campus. They review patterns such as foot traffic, crime hotspots, and common crimes, so that teams can identify locations where security can be improved.

This ensures that any decision made is backed by data-driven evidence rather than assumption, helping to target those locations most needed and provide the best chance of crime prevention on-site.

Proves Compliance for Regulation Standards

Due to the Clery Act, educational institutions must comply with safety and reporting regulations. 

Traditional surveillance methods like security guards rely on their memory and accurate data entry regarding any incidents, and this makes proving compliance difficult. Video analytics streamline this process, ensuring better transparency to support regulators.

These advanced cameras automatically document incidents, provide accurate logs of this, and ease compliance reporting, all within one system. 

This alleviates the administrative burden placed on security teams, allowing them to focus on future strategy, but also provides transparent proof to parents and the general public that as an institution you’re taking all relevant steps to protect staff and students.

Maintains Business Reputation

One campus incident can damage an institution’s reputation, impact enrollment, and erode the trust of staff, students, parents, and the local community. 

Losing business reputation is much easier than gaining it, and the impact of this can be longlasting, and in serious cases lead to extreme financial losses and legal action.

Demonstrating a visible commitment to enhancing security through advanced safety technology, it sends a clear message to everyone that student welfare is a top priority, and you’re taking all the relevant precautions to ensure this.

It also helps to reassure investors and stakeholders, strengthens community confidence, and boosts your brand in a competitive landscape. 

Building Smarter, Safer Campuses with Video Analytics

Often overlooked for campus safety, parking lots face crimes and safety incidents on a daily basis, placing both staff and students at risk. 

Whether it’s walking to their car at night or public space protesting, parking lots and the surrounding area are vulnerable to car crime, assaults, vandalism, and pedestrian accidents.

Static cameras and security guard patrols alone have their limitations, and with security challenges only developing, they simply cannot manage these across large, open spaces.

However, video analytics provide a smarter solution by actively monitoring your parking lot and any surrounding areas. These surveillance systems like ours detect loitering, unauthorized access, vehicle break-ins, or unusual movements, providing alerts if limits are triggered to a keyholder or security team.

Additional integrations like License Plate Recognition (LPR) can help to monitor vehicles, monitoring patterns and any suspicious vehicle activity that your campus may wish to be aware of.

Video analytics can also be used to make improvements to help improve traffic congestion and in the process, pedestrian safety.

By extending video analytics to your parking lot, you can help dramatically reduce risks, provide peace of mind, and demonstrate your commitment to campus safety, now and in the future.

LotGuard is more than just enhanced surveillance, it’s building a smarter, safer campus where students, staff, and visitors can focus on what matters most: education.

Our fully autonomous Mobile Surveillance Trailers provide 24/7 security, each solution can be customized with different camera options to suit your requirements.

The LotGuard feature set includes the following:

• License Plate Recognition (LPR) cameras

• Infrared cameras

• AI video analytics cameras

• Thermal cameras

• Horn speakers

• Sirens

• Blue light alarms

Discover how our video analytics solutions can transform your campus security strategy.

Contact our team today!