This summer, UCM’s Department of Public Safety completed a two year project to install security cameras on the Warrensburg campus. This project involved two phases.

  The first phase created policies for the surveillance systems and updated existing cameras, which was a total of 76 cameras. The second phase added more coverage across the whole campus, particularly for university buildings, which was a total of 300 cameras. 

  “We didn’t have a lot of cameras on campus,” Bill Brinkley, interim director of Public Safety, said. “As time went on, students came to campus, and we would take a report, and they would say, ‘Don’t you have cameras?’ So, the expectation was that there are cameras here. Well, there weren’t in years past. We’ve worked towards it for a long time, and now we finally have them.”

  The cameras have already proven helpful in multiple cases. They recently aided the department in tracking down an individual who robbed multiple vehicles in the parking lots.

  “Most every case now we can go back and look and see if we have footage,” Brinkley said.

  Public Safety can now use footage to respond to incident reports.

  Most students did not know about the recent increase in security cameras, or at least how big it was, as it happened over the summer.

  “I already thought there was that many cameras,” Nathalie Colindres, freshman digital media production major, said. “I thought that was the baseline, like that’s what would be in a college. So, I didn’t realize that there was so little before and now there’s so many.”

  Some students are more unsettled by the number of cameras around campus.

  “I don’t know, I mean that does put me at suspicion,” junior psychology major Deniro Peterson said. “It’s sort of like I’m being watched.”