Colleges and universities carry a dual responsibility: meeting federal Clery Act requirements while protecting the safety and well-being of students, faculty, and staff. The Clery Act ensures institutions report campus crime statistics and issue timely alerts—but compliance alone isn’t enough. True campus safety requires visibility into how incidents are handled as well as insights to continually improve response.
Incident recording, QA, and intelligence solutions offer unique additional capabilities and advantages for higher education institutions. They serve as a centralized repository—a single point of truth—for all incident information, enabling campuses to capture complete incident information, reconstruct incidents quickly, and share insights with stakeholders. Beyond meeting compliance obligations, these systems support operational efficiency, faster incident review, and transparent reporting.
Many colleges already employ technologies such as campus alert systems, public safety software, and case management platforms to help track and report incidents under the Clery Act. However, integrating an incident recording and intelligence solution adds critical capabilities. It allows institutions to consolidate data from multiple sources, reconstruct incidents efficiently, and provide actionable insights—all from one centralized system.
MSU Shooting: A Case Study in Centralized Incident Intelligence
A vivid example of the value of incident intelligence dashboards comes from the Michigan State University (MSU) shooting.
Barb Davidson, Director of Ingham County 911, which serves MSU, explained: “We had a shooting at Michigan State, and we took about two and a half days’ worth of work and completed it in about five hours. We took 2,200 calls and about 400 texts across 16 talk groups. Part of being in public safety is being transparent about what we did. People wanted to know how many texts, how many calls, how many CAD incidents were logged, how long we were on calls, and what the response times were.”
Davidson emphasized that the incident recording and intelligence system allowed her team to rapidly reconstruct the entire event, providing stakeholders with comprehensive and accurate details—critical in the aftermath of high-profile campus emergencies.
Leveraging Quality Assurance for Continuous Improvement
Another key benefit of incident recording and intelligence solutions is the ability to quality assure calls. While not a specific Clery Act requirement, Quality Assurance (QA) allows institutions to review how incidents and calls are handled, ensuring high standards in real-time response and staff performance. QA programs help:
By integrating QA into the incident workflow, campuses gain an additional layer of operational oversight, reinforcing campus safety through proper emergency incident response and call handling.
Incident Intelligence Dashboards: Turning Data into Insight
Some incident information management solutions, such as NiCE Inform Elite, also feature incident intelligence dashboards that transform raw data into actionable insights. The solution’s incident intelligence dashboards, for example, provide real-time metrics and visualization capabilities, allowing campuses to:
The dashboards empower decision-makers to understand the full scope of incidents, allocate resources effectively, and communicate accurate information to stakeholders.
In the MSU example, having dashboards and centralized data meant Davidson’s team could reconstruct and report on thousands of calls and texts across multiple talk groups efficiently—a process that would have taken days without a centralized solution.
Incident intelligence dashboards also allow campus safety teams to identify recurring risks and improve emergency preparedness over time.
Conclusion
The Clery Act provides the baseline for campus safety reporting, but truly keeping a campus safe is a higher bar—one that requires campuses to capture complete incident information and use that information to take action. Incident information management solutions—combining call and radio recording, centralized repositories, rapid incident reconstruction, QA, and incident intelligence dashboards—offer universities insights on how to respond to emergencies effectively, while continuously improving campus safety at the same time.
Confirm that calls and incidents are managed efficiently
Provide targeted coaching and training opportunities for dispatchers
Aid in maintaining consistent adherence to protocols for responding to different types of incidents and threats
Compile call data for a large-scale incident
Monitor incident trends over time and make better staffing decisions
Track performance metrics for response times and call handling—overall, and for individual call takers—to improve coaching and training
Drill down into related communications to review how particular calls were handled
