Safety at the palm of your hand

Timothy Chapman

Campus Shield is a mobile application students can download in order to have quicker access to University Police for features such as an emergency button, anonymous reports, campus resources and other services.

Community Engagement Officer Marco Huerta said the app is available on Android and iOS. It is completely free and to sign up, students just need to register with their name, UTRGV email and phone number.

He said one of the most-used features on both campuses is the safe-walk option, which is commonly used by students when they feel uncomfortable or unsafe walking across campus by themselves.

“[Students] can press safe walk and call us,” Huerta said. “We’ll send a police officer or a public safety officer to get them to their location more safely, wherever they need to go, whether it’s their vehicle, their dorm or just to get to another building that they may need assistance with.”

In the event there are not enough officers available at any given moment, Huerta advises students to wait in a safe, well-lit area until an officer arrives to assist them.

According to Huerta, the app not only works on university grounds. He said a staff member’s child once accidentally pressed the emergency button on the app and within minutes, local police were at her doorstep.

“If you are in an emergency situation and you need to get a hold of police, let’s say you’re somewhere else, not on campus, you can still do the emergency number and it’s got to go to whatever city you’re in,” Huerta said. “They’ll go directly to the 911 dispatch.”

Assistant Chief of Police Van Slusser said the University Police tracks the number of users on the app each month. Slusser said the number is low compared to the total number of students.

“I think we’re somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000 users right now,” Slusser said. “Two or 3,000 and that’s an extremely small percentage of the student population when you consider that we’re in the neighborhood of 32,000 total students.”

Slusser said the app features may be helpful to students.

“There’s ways that [students] can report crimes anonymously or text us information, send us pictures,” he said. “They can monitor locations of buses as they go around the campus and they’re waiting on them.”

For information about the Campus Shield app, visit utrgv.edu/campusshield.

This is Timothy Chapman for Vaquero Radio.