Our focus is not just on the students. Our focus is on the University of Tennessee community.
UT Alert is our actual text messaging alert system that we have.
So, what we have now are around 22,000 people that have registered through the service, through the University of Tennessee,
and for actual emergencies-- and when we talk about emergencies, it's like a natural disaster, a fire, maybe someone on campus that has a weapon,
or there's an imminent threat of someone being harmed on campus-- for incidents like that, we put out the text message alerts to those people registered for the service.
We coordinate all of our community programs through our Community Relations Unit, or the "CRU."
We offer a wide variety of programs: our women's self defense program is probably one of our best received programs (Rape Aggression Defense),
that's available to the staff or faculty at no charge.
We also have general personal safety programs. We do engraving of personal property through our Operation ID program.
We also have a program that deals specifically with workplace violence, or potential for workplace violence, and de-escalation,
and putting good policies and procedures in place for best practices to be able to address anything that has to do with personal safety in the workplace.
Even if we don't have a program scheduled through our Community Relations Unit, any department or any person on campus can always call
-- we'll be happy to set something up specifically for your department, or we'll let you know as soon as we have something set up
if we don't have it already scheduled through our department or Employee Organizational Development.
If we don't have something set up, we'll be glad to set up a program specifically for you or your department to be able to go over the information.
We want to be able to address the concerns of the entire community. If we have faculty members or staff members that are working late,
and they're concerned about walking out to their vehicle, or needing a ride from one campus location to another one,
we're more than happy to provide that service. We'll either send our officers out, or we'll have one of our community service officers come over,
and walk them out to their vehicle. Again, we don't charge for any of the services we perform.
We don't charge for any of the programs that we do through Community Relations.
Our goal is to make campus safe. Anything that we can do to help contribute to a safer campus is great for us.