MTSU Mondays: Police secures $1.8M for upgrades; CSI camp trains high school sleuths

Courtesy of Middle Tennessee State University
·4 min read

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Middle Tennessee State University Police Lt. Jon Leverette shows off the department’s new radar speed trailer, which the department applied for and purchased with the help of a Tennessee Highway Safety Office grant.
Middle Tennessee State University Police Lt. Jon Leverette shows off the department’s new radar speed trailer, which the department applied for and purchased with the help of a Tennessee Highway Safety Office grant.

Middle Tennessee State University’s Police Department recently used funding from two state grants — totaling over $1.8 million — to put toward safety improvements across campus.

MTSU landed the funds from the Office of Criminal Justice Programs’ Higher Education Safety Grant within the Tennessee Department of Finance and Administration earlier this year as part of a larger pot of $30 million split between other state higher education institutions.

The university formed an internal committee that met several times over a month to decide how to allocate the $1.8 million. The university has a deadline of completing the upgrades by next summer.

“The largest expenditure from this grant will be to replace the existing lighting in all of our parking lots with LED lighting, which is much brighter and energy efficient,” Kaup said. “We will also add solar-powered lighting to all bus stops on campus.

“We’ll be able to purchase mobile weapons detection systems to be used at events on campus to scan for weapons and also purchase RFID, or radio frequency identification, cards to add additional, more secure electronic doors to buildings.

“For the police department itself, we’ll purchase new in-car radios that allow for our officers to send and receive transmissions from the Murfreesboro Police Department and Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office, allowing for an open communication and coordination channel in the event of a multijurisdictional response. Along with these radio upgrades, we can replace the battery backups in our radio towers used both for police and the university as a whole.”

The department also earned a $5,000 High Visibility Enforcement Grant from the Tennessee Highway Safety Office to improve traffic safety across campus.

“We designated $4,000 to be used for the purchase of equipment — namely a radar speed trailer — and $1,000 to be put toward officer overtime pay for enforcement campaigns,” said Lt. Jon Leverette, who led the effort to pursue the grant.

Since receiving the trailer this spring, officers tow and set up the trailer at key roads across campus where the device displays oncoming vehicles’ speed and collects data ranging from speed to traffic patterns, helping the department not only increase speeding awareness but also better analyze and work to improve traffic flow issues.

MTSU’s FIRE sponsors CSI summer camp for high schoolers across state, nation

Lt. James Abbott, a detective with the Murfreesboro Police Department and a Middle Tennessee State University adjunct professor in criminal justice, instructs attendees at a mock crime scene at the 2024 CSI: MTSU Forensic Summer Youth Camp for high schoolers held June 11-14 on the MTSU campus in Murfreesboro, Tenn.
Lt. James Abbott, a detective with the Murfreesboro Police Department and a Middle Tennessee State University adjunct professor in criminal justice, instructs attendees at a mock crime scene at the 2024 CSI: MTSU Forensic Summer Youth Camp for high schoolers held June 11-14 on the MTSU campus in Murfreesboro, Tenn.

Middle Tennessee State University recently hosted 32 high school students from as far away as Alabama, Kentucky, and New Mexico who converged on campus recently for a summer camp to learn about forensic science and what is really involved in crime scene investigation, also known as CSI.

Sponsored by the MTSU Forensic Institute for Research and Education, better known as FIRE, the 2024 CSI: MTSU Forensic Summer Youth Camp allowed participating rising ninth to 12th graders to hear from working professionals from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, the Murfreesboro Police Department, and faculty from the College of Liberal Arts.

The annual camp, which ran June 11-14, was held this year in and around the MTSU Honors College and culminated with the students working a mock homicide scene in teams and presenting their findings to a panel of judges, which awarded a winner, at the MT Center.

Among the hands-on activities offered at the camp, attendees were given a tour of the Murfreesboro evidence response van and received a lecture on how to document a crime scene from current MPD investigators, and graduates of the MTSU forensic science program, Anna Yuhas and Regan Edwards.

The highlight of the FIRE camp was getting to solve a mock homicide scene set up at the Honors College, organizers said.

The annual camp allows students to explore many unique career possibilities in forensic science by providing a “real life” reason to tackle higher-level math and science courses, develop skills in teamwork, learn to observe and interpret details, and hone critical thinking and presentation skills.

Forensic science, at the most basic level, is the application of science to matters of legal significance — fingerprints, toxicology, ballistics, DNA, skeletal analysis — any area of science that can assist the legal system in resolving a case or controversy, according to FIRE’s website.

FIRE is currently led by Director Thomas Holland. For more information about the program, email fire@mtsu.edu or visit www.csimtsu.com.

MTSU Mondays content is provided by submissions from MTSU News and Media Relations.

This article originally appeared on Murfreesboro Daily News Journal: MTSU Police secures $1.8M for upgrades; CSI camp trains young sleuths