Revised Standards Released for Campus Police and Public Safety

The Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS) is pleased to announce the release of a revised set of standards for Campus Police and Public Safety.

CAS, a consortium composed of over 40 collaborating professional associations representing over 115,000 professionals in higher education, has developed standards for 47 functional areas and 3 cross-functional teams, and rooted them in the scholarship and work conducted within their respective fields. These revised standards delineate expectations for practitioners and educators in related functional areas, and are an update to the standards published in the 2019 CAS Professional Standards for Higher Education (10th ed). The revised standards reflect a name change to the functional area formerly known by CAS as “Campus Police and Security Programs."

The CAS revision committee was chaired by Alicia Czachowski, Director of Public Health Initiatives and Assessment at Tulane University, and a CAS Representative from the American College Health Association (ACHA). Czachowski commented on the timeliness and relevance of the revised standards for today's campus police and public safety programs, noting that “these standards explicitly call[s] out a number of topic areas which were not included in previous editions, including the need for specific type of training regarding implicit bias, bias incidents, diversity, equity and inclusion, and crisis intervention; the importance of inclusion in specific campus committees like BIT and threat assessment teams; [and] the need to include student learning outcomes and learning opportunities for students in their work.”

CAS partnered closely with experts from the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators (IACLEA) in the revision of these standards. Regina Lawson, Chief of Police at Wake Forest University and a CAS Representative from IACLEA, provided expert guidance to the group in aligning research and practice recommendations from IACLEA with the CAS standards' focus on quality programs and services and promoting student learning, development, and success. Lawson was joined a team of experts including Terence Calloway (Florida A&M University), James Nawoichyk (St. Thomas Aquinas College), Cleveland Smith (Anne Arundel Community College), and Scott VanScoy (California State University, Northridge).

Czachowski and Lawson were joined by a multidisciplinary team of other CAS representatives including Nicole Cameron (NCSD, Baltimore City Community College), Shari Glaser (AHEPPP, Western Michigan University), Devan McCartney (NWSA, University of Houston), and Katherine Snyder (HECMA, University of Illinois).

CAS is proud to release this revised set of standards for an important and evolving functional area in higher education.

The new standards for Campus Police and Public Safety are now available at: https://store.cas.edu/campus-police-and-public-safety-standards/
An accompanying Self-Assessment Guide (SAG) is available at https://store.cas.edu/campus-police-and-public-safety-self-assessment-guide/

Please direct all questions and inquiries about the revised standards to the CAS Executive Director ([email protected]).