COLLEGE TOWN, FL (WTXL) — Florida A&M University's police department hosted a Safety Summit Wednesday, bringing together law enforcement, faith leaders, and community organizations to build relationships and strengthen emergency response ahead of the fall semester.
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Florida A&M University's police department hosted a Safety Summit Wednesday, bringing together law enforcement agencies, faith leaders, school officials, and community organizations to strengthen relationships before problems arise.
The event comes just weeks before students begin returning to campus for the fall semester, when the campus and surrounding neighborhoods become one connected community.
"FAMU is a part of the community. FAMU has people coming in from the outside. FAMU has its own community, so the whole FAMULY, we have to make sure we're protected," FAMU Police Department Sergeant Craig Swain said.
Organizers say conversations centered around communication, sharing resources, and making sure agencies know how to respond together during emergencies.
Swain said the goal is to ensure that when help is needed, the call comes between familiar faces — not strangers.
"We want to make sure everyone knows that this is a safe place to live, work, and play, but at the same time we wanna also make sure that we're bridging the gap for our relationships to ensure that we have the right relationships with our stakeholders who are basically in our neighborhood and in our communities, so that when there is anything that's needed from them it's not a stranger calling a stranger. It's, you know, friends calling friends," Swain said.
Warren Cave, Executive Director of the Clean Start Initiative and Pastors Assistant at Connections Church, said the summit was a necessity for the area surrounding campus.
"This event is wonderful because it's needed. FAMU has a lot of homelessness, addiction, and violence in this community, in this area. The church I work at is a block away from FAMU, so it's good to come and see them trying to get knowledge out of what's really going on, what's really happening, but also, how can we become part of the solution where we know the problem," Cave said.
Dr. Willie Williams, Assistant Professor of Allied Health Sciences at FAMU, said the location of the summit sent a message of its own.
"The most impactful thing was that this took place at an institution of higher learning, which is what we need nowadays. We need the community base level programs to start collaborating with higher learning so that we can all learn how to do a joint approach, a more evidence-based approach as far as addressing community violence, and with us doing that we start to answer the question of if our presence is making a difference, then we definitely make an impact," Williams said.
Officials say the relationships built at Wednesday's meeting are just as important as the plans on paper. As thousands of students prepare to return to Tallahassee over the next several weeks, leaders say the conversations are about making sure everyone shares the responsibility of keeping the community safe.
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