By Josh Siatkowski | Staff Writer
With an approximately 1,000-acre campus to manage, Baylor’s department of public safety uses tools to protect its 16,000 students every day. One of these tools is the “virtual wall” — a network of over 1,700 cameras that ensures constant surveillance of campus and its perimeter.
Sorting footage from nearly 2,000 cameras recording campus 24/7 seems like a daunting task. Mark Childers, Baylor’s associate vice president for safety and security, said the camera network — which he calls “a virtual wall around campus” — serves a twofold purpose. The first of these is the network’s role as evidence for crimes that have already happened.
He said he could not disclose which buildings have cameras or where they are in the buildings. With 1,700 cameras creating over 40,000 hours of footage every day, Childers said it’s not possible or practical to get the eyes of officers on all of the video.
“We just don’t have the manpower for it,” Childers said.
As Baylor’s security camera system continues to develop, Childers said he wants to make one thing very clear: Cameras are, and always will be, exclusively in public places.
“It’s very important that everybody understands that we do not have cameras in private spaces,” Childers said. “These are in public spaces.”
Childers said the cameras and the rest of Baylor’s security measures ultimately exist for the safety of the community. Because of the sheer amount of footage, most cameras on campus serve as what Childers calls a “forensic tool.”
Childers said footage pools onto a server with a roughly 30-day retention period. If the department of public safety is not alerted to any incidents around the area of a camera’s surveillance, the video will be deleted in about a month. However, when the department does get word of something, the footage can be brought up to help piece together an event.
“If there’s an event, then we’ll go in and take that moment in time, and we’ll put it in evidence and hold it,” Childers said.
Childers said the physical process of storing and retrieving the footage is the responsibility of the ITS department, which is closely connected with the department of public safety.
Jon Allen, chief information officer and chief information security officer, said he was unable to go into the details of how ITS handles these responsibilities. However, he said via email that “[Baylor ITS] has a strong partnership with Baylor DPS as we work together on technical security, including the university’s camera network, to enhance the overall safety of the Baylor campus.”
While this is one use of the camera network, Childers said there is a more “proactive” purpose. Some select cameras are under constant surveillance by BUPD officers and can be used to help stop crimes or incidents as they are happening.
“They rotate these constantly surveyed areas,” Childers said. “Sometimes it’s around the residence halls. Sometimes it’s on Fountain Mall — sometimes McLane Stadium during an event.”
The ability of these cameras to help with incidents as they are happening is set to improve in the future. Childers said the department of public safety has invested in AI software that will help the cameras flag specific events.
“We just ran a test last week that was very successful in evaluating weapons, … people fighting or people falling down,” Childers said.
Childers could not specify how the AI software works, but he said the department of public safety plans to use the new technology at football games in McLane Stadium next fall.
Baylor’s security camera network is now an integral component of its technical security — one of the five branches of the department of public safety. However, the network and the department of public safety itself wasn’t what it is today when Childers joined the team in 2014.
“Baylor hired me to come in and set up a brand new division back in 2014, which is today the department of public safety,” Childers said.
Before coming to Baylor, Childers worked for the U.S. government for 26 years. His first eight years were as a U.S. marshal, but he spent the last 18 years in the Secret Service. He worked for President George W. Bush in Washington and later as the supervisor of the Bush Ranch in Crawford.
Childers said his background in the Secret Service influenced the way he developed the security camera system at Baylor.
“When I started, … we had 600 cameras on campus. I realized there was a gap, and we needed to create this branch of physical and technical security, very similar to the Secret Service’s Technical Security division. So we stood that up, and we’ve gone from 600 cameras to approximately 1,700 today.”
“[The cameras are] just a tool in a very large tool chest … of different things that we deploy to keep the community safe.”
