RUSafe: An Interactive Platform to Enhance Crime Alert Systems on University Campuses

A large University site is usually made up of numerous campuses, possibly in the midst of a busy city-center with a large population of students, faculty, staff, and citizens. Even in an academic environment, because of its size and diversity of the crowd that blends, criminal acts are likely to occur, posing everyone’s safety at risk. In most campuses the emergency system that informs the community of dangerous acts that have just occurred, consists of dense or tedious communication items that users may miss or overlook. Our work presents RUSafe: a versatile and multi-fledged software tool to improve the existing Crime Alert methods on campuses and promote the security of the community. Moreover, we successfully implemented our software application on Rutgers State University of New Jersey. Rutgers consists of five campuses that span three large, populated city centers. We used as backbone the existing Rutgers Crime Alert system and expanded on it, adding such features that help capturing the attention of the user right away, and enable the handling of real-time data and alerts fast in cases of emergency. We envision that the RUSafe platform can be adopted at other university campuses to promote safety in the community.