Policies
Georgetown University Police Department is dedicated to protecting all students, staff, faculty, and community members. To foster a safe, transparent, and welcoming environment across our Hilltop and Capitol campuses, we maintain and adhere to a clear set of institutional policies and federal compliance standards.
Crime Statistics & Clery Compliance
The Jeanne Clery Campus Safety Act, commonly referred to as the Clery Act, requires higher education institutions to:
- Collect, report and disseminate crime data to the campus community and the U.S. Department of Education;
- Provide timely warnings of reported crimes that represent a threat to the safety of students or employees; and
- Make public their campus security policies.
To be in compliance with this legislation, the Georgetown University Police Department (GUPD) disseminates public safety alerts to faculty, staff and students, produces an annual crime report and maintains logs of reported criminal incidents.
Guidance on Use of Security Cameras
Georgetown University Police Department is committed to fostering a safe and secure campus environment for all students, faculty, staff and visitors. This includes the use of security cameras, which strengthen situational awareness and emergency response capabilities. GUPD ensures proper installation, operation and use of security cameras, including appropriate and legal compliance regarding issues of privacy, retention, release and use of recorded images.
Key information on GUPD use of security cameras:
- Officers will play a central role in any decisions on response – nothing happens without a person making a decision.
- Any video that is viewed is remotely encrypted in transit using TLS.
- All access is restricted via two factor authentication and strict role-based security controls that are not changing with the new system.
- All devices are NDAA compliant.
- Data is stored fully encrypted so if a physical device is stolen the data is still protected.
- Data is encrypted in-transit for both direct connection (browser) and any back-end storage (longterm warm or cold storage).
Security camera capabilities:
- Privacy-First Design: Cameras do not perform facial recognition or identify specific individuals to protect privacy. Instead, they detect and track persons as objects for incident response while avoiding biometric identification.
- Cross-Camera Tracking: Enables tracking a person of interest across multiple cameras based on unique traits (not facial recognition), facilitating faster incident investigations while preserving privacy.
- Attribute Search: Allows filtering video footage by attributes such as clothing color and vehicle make/color to quickly locate relevant events.
- Motion Search and Motion Recap: Summarizes activity in video clips to speed up review and investigation.
- Smart Retention: Automatically trims non-key event video to optimize storage while retaining important footage, supporting up to 120 days of HD storage.
- Audio Analytics: Detects alarms, sirens, and ambient noise levels to enhance situational awareness and faster incident response.
- Granular Access Control: Role-based access to live and recorded footage with export restrictions and audit logs to secure video data.
- Secure Video Storage: Video is encrypted in transit and at rest, with hardware security features like secure boot and firmware signing.
Security cameras do not offer facial recognition due to privacy, accuracy, and legal concerns. Instead, the system focuses on privacy-preserving features that detect and track objects without identifying individuals.