The annual Utah Campus Safety Summit is a statewide opportunity to bring together a variety of campus communities and create a unified approach to improving safety and security on all of Utah’s campuses.

“This summit demonstrates our commitment to creating safer campus communities through collaboration and shared expertise,” said Keith Squires, chief safety officer, University of Utah. “By bringing together diverse perspectives from education and law enforcement, we’re building a more resilient safety network across Utah.”

Key focus areas of this year’s summit, held March 19 and 20, included insights surrounding school violence research and prevention, cybercrime protection strategies, hate crime response, and law enforcement and administrator coordination.

Throughout the conference, various presenters, including keynote speakers Dr. Jillian Peterson, executive director of The Violence Prevention Project; Dr. Chris Linder, director of the McCluskey Center for Violence Prevention; and Glen

Kraemer, founder and managing partner of Hirschfeld Kraemer, highlighted the fact that those who commit violent acts in the workplace or on campuses have often shown signs of a significant change in behavior and told people around them of what they might do.

Kraemer counseled leaders to go beyond the “see something, say something” model and adopt a “see, hear, care, share” approach.

Peterson used research data from mass shooters and K-12 and higher education homicides over the past 30 years to develop holistic violence prevention that addresses the root causes of violence. She offered tangible skills and data-driven solutions, including crisis intervention, de-escalation, suicide prevention, domestic violence prevention, crisis response teams and trauma-informed institutions.

Linder discussed some reasons why people engage in harmful behaviors and what strategies can be employed to intervene and prevent more escalated behavior later.

The attendance of multiple law enforcement agencies at the federal, state and local levels as well as representatives from nearly all Utah higher education institutions and technical colleges at the two-day summit allows the community and the University of Utah Department of Public Safety to build a framework for ongoing collaboration between Utah’s educational institutions and law enforcement agencies, strengthening campus safety protocols across the state to implement best practices and innovative safety solutions across educational communities.

“The engagement and solutions that emerged from this summit will help shape the future of campus safety in Utah,” said Squires. “We’re seeing unprecedented levels of cooperation between institutions.”