Editorial: Measuring Safety
Editorial Board
Issue date: 2/2/07 Section: Ed-Op
It's encouraging to see the Department of Public Safety and USGA work together to audit campus safety. The fact that they made the data publicly available is promising. When the Department of Public Safety is effective and transparent, the entire campus benefits. The report of gun violence this week between University City students serves as vivid backdrop of how important this is.
Ben Gollotti, senior associate vice president of the Department of Public Safety, said he will continue to conduct these secret shopper surveys with the USGA. This is laudable, but a few tweaks are in order.
First, emergency call boxes need testing. Some students reported difficulty communicating with the dispatcher over the call boxes. Perhaps those are isolated incidents, or perhaps it is indicative of a widespread problem, but without testing, we'll never know for sure. It's also important to test the response time of Public Safety officers in an emergency situation, which may be quite different from response time to say a student who forgot a textbook in a locked building after hours.
Second, Public Safety ought to collect more data in future audits. The first audit was a good start, but now it should be expanded. It had a small sample size and, more troubling, it was mostly conducted by only a few students. Future audits should include surveys from more students.
Third, Public Safety really ought to rethink some of its performance metrics. Dispatcher response time down to the second is great, but the reported score of 6.2 on a scale of 10 for meeting student expectations is misleading and not useful. There was no 10-point scale on the surveys that students filled out; there was a three-point scale. The secret shoppers were instructed to circle 3 if their expectations were exceeded, 2 if they were met, and 1 if they were not met.
Clearly, more is called for than a three-point scale. In contrast, course evaluations use more metrics and finer-grained metrics. Surely, our safety is at least as important as our education.
Also, it will be more helpful for secret shoppers to evaluate Public Safety on more metrics. The survey that was used was too subjective. By using more objective metrics on surveys, future audits will not have as much variation between students.
These are all small changes that Public Safety can make in future audits, and they will greatly increase the usefulness of their results.
Ben Gollotti, senior associate vice president of the Department of Public Safety, said he will continue to conduct these secret shopper surveys with the USGA. This is laudable, but a few tweaks are in order.
First, emergency call boxes need testing. Some students reported difficulty communicating with the dispatcher over the call boxes. Perhaps those are isolated incidents, or perhaps it is indicative of a widespread problem, but without testing, we'll never know for sure. It's also important to test the response time of Public Safety officers in an emergency situation, which may be quite different from response time to say a student who forgot a textbook in a locked building after hours.
Second, Public Safety ought to collect more data in future audits. The first audit was a good start, but now it should be expanded. It had a small sample size and, more troubling, it was mostly conducted by only a few students. Future audits should include surveys from more students.
Third, Public Safety really ought to rethink some of its performance metrics. Dispatcher response time down to the second is great, but the reported score of 6.2 on a scale of 10 for meeting student expectations is misleading and not useful. There was no 10-point scale on the surveys that students filled out; there was a three-point scale. The secret shoppers were instructed to circle 3 if their expectations were exceeded, 2 if they were met, and 1 if they were not met.
Clearly, more is called for than a three-point scale. In contrast, course evaluations use more metrics and finer-grained metrics. Surely, our safety is at least as important as our education.
Also, it will be more helpful for secret shoppers to evaluate Public Safety on more metrics. The survey that was used was too subjective. By using more objective metrics on surveys, future audits will not have as much variation between students.
These are all small changes that Public Safety can make in future audits, and they will greatly increase the usefulness of their results.
Be the first to comment on this story