Collegiate Times

For the past year, Virginia Tech has been implementing a new policy on the use and storage of video surveillance. Before the policy came into effect, there were many cameras around campus, owned and operated by various departments, but there were no rules governing their use.

“The reason (the policy) was developed was there were already surveillance cameras on campus,” said Wendell Flinchum, Virginia Tech police chief. “But there wasn’t a university policy that addressed their use, such as how long storage would be, what they’d be used for and those types of issues.”

The policy places the cameras under a single set of rules.

“It’s just to make sure that everybody uses cameras in a proper way. There are certain areas where it’s not appropriate to use cameras and we just want to make sure that those type of things weren’t occurring,” said Mike Mulhare, director of emergency management.

Flinchum said cameras are fairly routine on college campuses.

“When we developed this we looked at policies for other universities and how they managed cameras and made sure we did things in a similar fashion,” Flinchum said.

Flinchum and Mulhare said the policy wasn’t a response to a specific issue or problem.

“We observed that departments and other subdivisions of the university were installing and utilizing cameras, however there was no university policy governing the use of those cameras, we saw that as a void,” Mulhare said. “We wanted to make sure that the cameras were used appropriately and that expectations of privacy were met.”

A version of this article appeared in the Mar 15 issue of the Collegiate Times.