Security manager for The University of the West Indies (The UWI) Mona, retired Assistant Commissioner of Police Marlon Nesbeth, is reporting “a period of long safe days” at the campus which, he says, his team intends to “keep like that” amidst further tightening of the protective measures there.

Addressing a parents and family orientation session at the university this week, Nesbeth said over the past year the security team “has not had any serious challenge for incidents or crime” on the campus.

“It has been going very well and we intend to keep it like that because we have a good stakeholder approach and we have a good security apparatus,” Nesbeth said while disclosing that the campus police, which is the arm of the three-tiered security operation that he oversees, is being restructured and will see an increase in personnel “by more than 100 per cent”.

The 650-acre campus is protected by the Jamaica Constabulary Force’s Mona police, the campus police, and KingAlarm guards, aided by a 24-hour surveillance system.

An aerial view of a section of The University of the West Indies Mona campus.

Nesbeth assured individuals that student safety is not left up to chance, adding that his team also oversees the contracted private security, “making sure they do what we expect of them to make sure that staff and students and persons who visit are, in fact, safe and secured”.

“So they have a central monitoring station. It’s just set up like a guard room, but it’s more elaborate in that it has a CCTV (closed-circuit television) surveillance system that is properly constructed with cameras across campus to include licence plate recognition cameras, and this surveillance system is monitored 24/7. So we have eyes on campus, even where individual security providers are not placed, also assisting as we seek to look at suspicious characters or activities and attend to them with our patrols,” Nesbeth said.

He told the audience that the ongoing technology project, which has achieved a lot in the previous semester, should see further improvement to the surveillance system at the campus by the end of the current term.

“It’s being enhanced and we are spending a lot of money on that to make sure that the campus is properly suited around technological processes,” Nesbeth said in disclosing plans to increase the number of surveillance cameras, including license plate recognition (LPR) and pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras.

An LPR camera is a specialised surveillance device designed to automatically capture, read, and log vehicle licence plate numbers. Using high-speed shutters, infrared lighting, and optical character recognition (OCR) software, it converts physical licence plates into searchable digital text data.

A PTZ camera is a motorised security or video production device that can be moved remotely to look left and right (pan), up and down (tilt), and magnify close-up details.

Nesbeth, however, impressed on students their role in maintaining their own safety, emphasising the need to wear or produce their identification cards when requested to help distinguish legitimate campus users from ill-intentioned individuals.

“Sometimes those with ill-intentions…will come on campus, and it creates problems. So we from the security department…will seek to interfere with these persons. We cannot make a distinction of who are students or who are possible perpetrators. I can tell you, students dress just like how you wouldn’t expect them to dress or dress just like how these other persons dress. So we don’t know the distinction. We have to then use these forms of identification to know when to be easier on the individual we’re interfacing with or to go harder based on the circumstances, because we do mitigate issues of suspicion with this as our tool of doing it,” he told the audience.

He said a protocol with a construct similar to a neighbourhood watch is being built out with the guild of students for the campus. He, however, emphasised that while students will be encouraged to “look out for any signs” of possible security threats, the idea is not that they are to “attend to any matter” but instead share it with campus security personnel.