Diversity in Campus Safety

 

Effective recruitment, hiring, and retention processes are quintessential to establishing successful law enforcement agencies, including those on college and university campuses, staffed with qualified and service-oriented personnel to engage the community, develop collaborative problem-solving partnerships, demonstrate accountability, and build trust. The President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing identified increasing the diversity of the nation's law enforcement agencies as an important aspect in developing that trust. Recommendation 1.8 of the final report (PDF) states, "Law enforcement agencies should strive to create a workforce that contains a broad range of diversity including race, gender, language, life experience, and cultural background to improve understanding and effectiveness in dealing with all communities."

 

To build on the efforts of the Task Force, the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ's) Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) launched an interagency research initiative designed to identify the barriers that undermine diversity in law enforcement and propose promising practices for promoting equal opportunity in recruiting, hiring, promoting, and retaining police officers. As part of the initiative, DOJ's Civil Rights Division and the EEOC worked with law enforcement leaders, civil rights advocates, academic experts, municipal officials, and other stakeholders to access existing research and learn about successful models being used by agencies nationwide to address barriers to diversity. The resulting report, Advancing Diversity in Law Enforcement (PDF), serves to assist law enforcement agencies throughout the country as they strive to build workforces that better reflect the diversity of the communities they serve.

 

The report includes key topic areas such as:

Diversity has many forms ---- race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, language ability, background, experience ---- and serves as a critically important tool to build trust with communities. While the Advancing Diversity in Law Enforcement initiative revealed a number of unanswered questions, it also demonstrated that agencies undertaking efforts to broaden their talent pool and increase diversity see a range of benefits both within their workforces and in their relations with the communities they serve.

 

To learn more about recruitment, hiring, and retention in campus safety, read our March 2016 article, " Recruitment and Retention in Campus Policing," and attend the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators' webinar, Hiring and Retention in Campus Safety, scheduled for May 4, 2017 at 1:00PM ET.  

The U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office for Victims of Crime (OVC) has launched a first-of-its-kind online toolkit after four years of research, development, and pilot testing. The Vicarious Trauma Toolkit (VTT) was developed with the understanding that those who respond to victims of sexual abuse, assist survivors of acts of terrorism and mass violence, fight fires that may have taken people's lives, or respond to shootings and other crime scenes face vicarious trauma from these situations. In the VTT, the OVC uses the term "vicarious trauma" broadly to include other related terms such as  secondary traumatic stress,  compassion fatigue, or  critical incident stress. OVC Acting Director Marilyn M. Roberts confirms, "We are now more aware of the effects of trauma, experienced directly and vicariously, on the wide range of professionals who respond to and care for survivors. Research shows that such vicarious trauma, left unaddressed, leads to staff burnout, turnover, stress, and lesser quality of services to victims."

 

The VTT includes a compilation of nearly 500 resources assembled to assist victim services and first responder agencies and organizations in raising awareness about and addressing vicarious trauma. The resources primarily focus on an organizational response to work-related exposure to trauma, though some people may find some resources helpful from an individual perspective. The resources have been reviewed and vetted, and are organized by four disciplines: victim services, emergency medical services, fire services, and law enforcement, including campus law enforcement. It is important to note that the resources are relevant to all fields regardless of professional discipline and additional allied professionals such as mental health counselors, dispatchers, chaplains, forensic interviewers, sexual assault response teams (SART), sexual assault nurse examiners (SANE), school-based health professionals, and faith-based organizations will find them applicable. The VTT also introduces the VTT Model, a new paradigm for examining and conceptualizing the effects of vicarious trauma along a spectrum of reactions to the work-related trauma exposure that victim services providers and first responders experience. Additional inclusions are a glossary, bibliography, and references.

 

The VTT can be used most effectively by conducting a four-step process.

To begin exploring the VTT, you may enter through a specific discipline on the homepage or visit the Compendium of Resources .