West Midlands Police have launched an innovative new website aimed at keeping the students of the region safe.
While the force has always had information and advice available to students, the new ‘Safer Students’ site conveys it in a fresh and exciting way which they are hoping will engage students and encourage them to take some time to learn how to keep themselves safe.
The ‘Safer Students’ site is a stand-alone website affiliated to the main West Midlands Police site.
It features short videos and information on how students can keep themselves safe in their homes, whether it be in halls of residence or private housing. It also looks at personal safety while they are out and about, travel advice and specific information around hate crime and sexual assaults.
The site also features links to other student sites such as the Suzy Lamplugh personal safety website and cyber crime advice sites.
Sergeant Andy Gregory, force lead for crime prevention, said: “We have over 200,000 students in the West Midlands and I cannot emphasise enough how important it is for us to get our messages out to them in order to help them stay safe. Students are often quite vulnerable, living away from home for the first time, often in unfamiliar surroundings.
“We are committed to doing all we can to keep them safe and this website is at the heart of that. We have kept the information short and direct so it’s easy to digest and we are also looking at getting as much student generated content as possible on to the new site.
“We want this to be the first place students go to if they need advice. The contact details for all the university officers are on there so students can contact their local officer directly if they have a specific question or something which is worrying them.
“The site also features the @SaferStudents twitter feed and information about the twitter feeds for the different university officers. We’ve got over 2,000 followers on Twitter for the student accounts and we use those accounts every day to tell students about events, give advice and promote drop in sessions with officers. ”