NIU police add canine and bomb scanner to force

by Joe King

Ensuring the safety of campus has always been the paramount concern for NIU's Department of Public Safety. So, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, they joined law enforcement officials across the nation in looking for ways to better protect those they serve. "Sept. 11 changed the face of security in the country. It generated the idea that we need to be better prepared to face all sorts of issues," says NIU Chief of Police Donald Grady.

NIU Police Officer Brad Fleming shows off the department's new dog, Kazan.

"After reviewing our capabilities, we determined that we needed to improve our ability to handle circumstances like bomb threats and suspicious packages."

To address those needs, the department recently purchased a state-of-the art bomb scanner and soon will add a bomb-sniffing dog to the force.

"It is not that we believe NIU is suddenly vulnerable to such problems, or that we anticipate that we will have situations involving explosives," Grady said. "But considering the state of the world today, we want to do everything we can to prepare for such situations, or to prevent them from ever occurring."

As at any college or university, bomb threats are an unfortunate fact of life at NIU; and occasionally suspicious packages that could hold explosives are encountered, Grady said. In the past, his department has had to rely upon assistance from bomb squads in Rockford and Kane County to handle those situations. However, it often took those units hours to respond, a problem that worsened in recent months as those squads have been in greater demand since Sept. 11.

The new x-ray scanner, which was purchased in February, will allow the university to deal with some of those situations on its own. It can peer into just about any package, bag or container to see what is inside without anyone having to physically touch or jostle the package. Furthermore, thanks to wireless technology, an officer can conduct a scan from several hundred feet away, viewing an image transmitted to the screen of a laptop computer.

"This is the finest scanner available on the market today," Grady said.

The scanner already has been pressed into service twice to check suspicious packages mailed to the university, he said. Neither proved to be dangerous.

The university's ability to deal with such situations will be further enhanced in late April when Kazan, a German shepherd trained to detect explosives, joins the force. The dog will be a tremendous help in assessing the validity of any bomb threat quickly, Grady said.

"For us to evacuate a building and have to wait five or six hours before we can take action or determine that there is no credible threat is simply unacceptable," Grady said. With the dog on the force, such threats can be evaluated in an hour or less, hopefully eliminating some of the incentive for pranksters to call in such threats in the first place, he said.

When not responding to such calls, the dog and his handler (Officer Brad Fleming, who has spent the last several weeks in Texas, training with Kazan) will spend their time traveling across campus, conducting routine sweeps of designated areas. They also will be a regular part of details that conduct security sweeps of campus venues prior to major events.

The campus police also will be willing to share the services of Kazan with municipalities in the surrounding area, should the need ever arise, Grady said.