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SECURE
Help police to keep campus safe

Students and professors who want to run PowerPoint presentations in class will have to wait a while.

Eight projectors and a laptop were stolen over the summer by a man posing as a campus worker. In response, the university removed projectors from classrooms across campus. Each will be re-installed in the next two to three weeks with a new alarm system, said TCU Police Det. Kelly Ham.

Although all the items were recovered, the thefts raise a serious question: How can TCU protect itself from unauthorized people entering our buildings?

The suspect entered Sid W. Richardson Building during the day and returned that night to Reed Hall and the Bass Building. Doors to academic buildings are generally locked before midnight.

Ham said the university likes to keep its buildings accessible to students. Checking everybody who walked in the doors would impede that. There’s a trade-off between increasing security and maintaining ease of access.

But the university is improving security. More buildings now have card slots and four have camera surveillance systems, with TCU Police planning to add more systems as their budget allows.

Ham said he would have liked to see camera systems on all buildings five years ago. With the costs of digital cameras going down, he hopes this will happen soon.

In the meantime, TCU Police’s biggest help is us. Whenever you see anyone suspicious, call them. Ham said they’d rather check a building 100 times than be wrong once.