Chief Squires, chief of the University of Utah Department of Public Safety, told the Legislature’s School Safety Task Force that the university rebuilt its public safety operation after the 2018 murder of student Lauren McCluskey and is prioritizing prevention, mental‑health partnerships and data‑driven policing.

The university’s safety team now includes more than 315 employees, of whom about 55 are sworn police officers; just over 80 are non‑sworn campus security officers; and more than 180 serve as health security personnel for the hospitals and clinics that are part of the institution, Squires said. The university serves about 36,000 students and roughly 46,000 employees, and the campus includes nearly 300 buildings, he added.

Those facts matter because the university’s mix of academic, research and health facilities presents different security needs than K‑12 schools or a single‑building campus. “It is no secret, there has been articles done and legislation passed about the increasing violence against health security workers staff,” Chief Squires said, describing why the university created a separate health security workforce that focuses on hospitals and clinics.

Squires told committee members the department has focused on prevention and preparedness, including a crime data analyst position that examines where and when incidents occur and a public‑facing dashboard that the department uses daily to adjust patrols and deployment. “We use what I refer to as information led policing,” he said.

The university also has expanded behavioral threat assessment capacity. Squires said his office created a Threat Assessment and Management Partnership (TAMP) roughly one year ago; the unit has handled “just over a 140 cases” in its first year and often requires sustained follow‑up. He described the TAMP as intended to “identify threats early on and hopefully intervene before they’re acted upon.”

Squires credited closer coordination with the Salt Lake City Police Department and the Utah Department of Public Safety for helping the university respond to large events, protests and spontaneous incidents. He said the university has been an early adopter of practices pushed after the McCluskey investigation, including lethality assessments and trauma‑informed approaches to student victims.

Committee members pressed Squires about the department’s biggest concern. He said the campus’s size and decentralization are the main challenges: “The biggest challenge that we have, I think is the fact that, because of how big it is and how diverse the campus is, is also how decentralized it is,” Squires said, adding that his current project is a campus safety framework to set a foundational training and response level for staff and faculty across many buildings.

Squires also described emergency management, a behavioral intervention (BIT) team and closer work with university mental‑health professionals and external community resources such as MCOT and Huntsman Mental Health to respond to persons in crisis. He noted the open nature of the campus and the scale of special events — he said the university runs more than 650 special events annually, from athletics to conferences and political events — as factors that increase security demands.

Several legislators asked about data and Clery Act reporting. Squires said the university created a dedicated Clery compliance position and that the office reports required data to the Department of Education. He described the federal reporting rules that sometimes increase annual counts when a single complainant reports multiple incidents, and he said the university is working to make Clery reporting more usable for policymakers and the public.

Squires closed by offering to bring recommendations back to the task force and by describing ongoing efforts to coordinate training, integrate hospital security with campus policing, and expand threat‑assessment capacity.

The committee thanked Squires and asked him to provide follow‑up recommendations to the group before the end of the year.