Safety Tips for Lancaster's Community Organizations

Tips for School Administrators (courtesy of the National Crime Prevention Council):

• Enforce zero-tolerance policies toward the presence of weapons, alcohol, and illegal drugs.
• Establish and enforce drug- and gun-free zones.
• Establish policies that declare that anything that is illegal off campus is illegal on campus.
• Engage students in maintaining a good learning environment by establishing a teen court.
• Develop protocols between law enforcement and the school about ways to share information on at-risk youth.
• Develop resource lists that provide referral services for students who are depressed or otherwise under stress.
• Involve teens in designing and running programs such as mediation, mentoring, peer assistance, School Crime Watch, and graffiti removal programs.
• Insist that all students put outerwear in their lockers during school hours.
• Establish a policy of positive identification such as ID badges for administrators, staff, students, and visitors.
• Deny students permission to leave school for lunch and other non-school-related activities during school hours.

Tips for Faith-Based Organizations:

• Like all community organizations, implement best-practice CPTED, including:
  • Install lighting at all doors, including motion-sensitive lights all around your facility.
  • Eliminate blind-spots and hiding places – including tall fences, dense landscaping, and dumpsters.
  • Plant low thorny bushes in front of windows – which not only give you a clear line of site, but also provide a painful place for criminals to hide.
  • Replace old locks with state-of-the-art deadbolts.
  • Ensure that office staff has a clear line of sight of who is entering the building, or install video safety cameras.
• Leaders should consider all locks, key control, access control, safes, physical layout of facility and grounds, vulnerable windows, and they should train escorts/ushers.
• Buy a safe a safe which cannot be easily removed from the facility and kept in a location which few people know about.
• Ushers/escorts, custodians and/or security workers should always approach people if they have a question about them or why they are in a certain location.
• Discuss what to do if an unruly, disruptive person enters the worship service.
• Consider using alarms, closed circuit television, motion sensors and communication systems.

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