UC Davis students and employees seeking the protection of a safety escort can now look to their smartphones to achieve that peace of mind.
Officials from the UCD Police Department and Safety Services on Wednesday unveiled the Aggie Guardian, a free mobile application for iPhones and Androids that acts as a “virtual escort” while its users travel between campus locations.
“This is such a cool piece of technology,” UCD Police Chief Matt Carmichael said during a demonstration of the app, which became available to anyone with a UCD email address as of May 1. “This really builds upon our emphasis on protection.”
It works like this:
Upon downloading the app onto their smartphone, the user enters their personal information as well as contact details for their designated “guardians,” which Carmichael said can include campus police as well as friends, roommates and family members.
The user then sets a “timer” with their anticipated travel time between locations — for example, a 15-minute walk from Shields Library to a student dormitory — and deactivates the timer upon their arrival. Guardians can check their status along the way.
Should the timer expire without being deactivated, the app issues an alert to the designated guardian along with a map of the user’s location, including the address and latitude/longitude coordinates.
The service operates at the UCD Medical Center in Sacramento as well.
“We basically treat this as we would a welfare check, which is we would typically send an immediate response to check on someone” once the alarm sounds, said Mark Spangler, director of support services for UCD police.
Other features of Aggie Guardian include crime-tip reporting via text to campus police and an icon for making swift 911 calls that connect to the closest law-enforcement agency, regardless of the user’s location.
It’s been used at other college campuses across the nation and received positive reviews, according to UCD spokesman Andy Fell.
“This comes as part of the package tool that we use to alert the campus to fast-moving events and emergencies,” Fell said, referring to the WarnMe and Aggie Alert systems that send messages to the campus community, their families and neighbors.
UCD gained access to the Guardian app when it recently changed vendors for its emergency notification system to Rave Mobile Safety.
The campus also recently expanded its Safe Rides program to six vans, giving more than 3,000 rides a month to passengers seeking safe transport on and off campus.
Safe Rides operates seven nights a week, offering on-campus rides from 5 to 10 p.m. and, after Unitrans shuts down for the night, transport from campus to any location in Davis from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.
Riders can summon Safe Rides with the TapRide app, also free, which notifies the closest driver that a ride is needed, then summons the passenger so they don’t have to wait outside a building for the van to arrive.
“This provides our students with that extra layer of protection,” Carmichael, himself the father of two college students, said of the new technology. “We’re investing in safety.”
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene