Three months after two students were killed and nine were injured in a shooting at Brown University, Northeastern students say they feel safe on campus, but the majority are not aware of the university’s safety protocols in the event of an active shooter.

The shooting, and subsequent murder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nuno Loureiro in his Brookline, Mass., home by the perpetrator Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, left students shaken and prompted universities across the country to tighten building access and institute other campus security measures. 

In a survey conducted by The Huntington News, more than 84.4% of student respondents said they don’t know what Northeastern’s on-campus active shooter procedures are, despite the Northeastern University Police Department saying it conducts training during new student orientation. 

Still, Northeastern’s Associate Vice President of Campus Policing and Chief of Police Ruben Galindo said the university is prepared for major incidents and takes a proactive approach to safety. 

“We are always on high alert here. In every single shift that we deploy, we deploy with the anticipation of a major incident happening on campus. So we’re not reactive … we work in a very proactive fashion here,” Galindo said in an interview with The News. 

In the wake of the Brown shooting, multiple universities, including Columbia University, Tufts University and Harvard University, implemented mandatory ID swipes to access university buildings. Northeastern has not announced similar restrictions, prompting concern from faculty and students. 

“Why don’t we lock the doors of the buildings so people enter with their ID cards?” associate professor of biochemistry and biology Veronica Godoy-Carter asked Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Beth Winkelstein during a Feb. 11 faculty senate meeting.

Winkelstein responded that doors will remain unlocked due to Northeastern’s “open campus,” but that safety protocols will be prioritized.  

Northeastern’s “open” Boston campus, located in the heart of the city, is patrolled by Northeastern University Police Department, or NUPD, officers and monitored through the department’s 1,200 cameras, according to Galindo.

When asked about the possibility of requiring ID swipes for academic buildings, Galindo said that over the past five years, the university has been working on a new security system which would require CBORD Mobile ID tap to access all exterior doors across the university’s global campus network.

“Will all buildings be closed? No. It would be more of a hybrid model depending on the threat level or security that a certain building needs,” Galindo said. “But, we’re a huge campus, you can imagine the backlog of students trying to get into Shillman if each one had to tap an ID.”

In February, The News conducted a survey of Northeastern students prompting them to reflect on the university’s on-campus safety and active shooter procedures. 

When asked to rate how safe they feel on campus on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 representing the least safe and 10 being the most safe, roughly 76.6% of students responded with an 8, 9 or 10. 

“I feel very safe as a Northeastern student, despite the recent shooting,” said Joshua Behar, a first-year business administration major. “I just came from N.U.in Rome, so I haven’t been on campus for too long to know all the resources we have, but so far I have felt very safe and I know I have great support on campus.”

Despite overall confidence in campus safety, 84.4% of student respondents said they do not know what Northeastern’s on-campus active shooter procedures are, and only 15.5% said they would feel prepared if an incident occurred.

Northeastern’s Emergency Planning webpage states that students must “determine whether to run, hide, or fight” in an emergency situation. The website advises students to evacuate if possible, find a secure place to hide if escape is not possible and, as a last resort, fight if their life is in imminent danger.

Galindo also recommended students use the SafeZone mobile safety app, which allows users to share their location with NUPD and send emergency alerts for assistance.

Galindo said the university offers several initiatives to train students on campus safety, including Preparedness Day, situational awareness training and information sessions during new student orientation. 

“Over the last eight years, we’ve trained about 58,000 people,” Galindo said. “But also remembering that we lose 25% of our population every year, so we have to keep that training going.” 

Each semester, Galindo added, NUPD sends a safety and awareness email to the Northeastern community that includes safety tips, information and a link to the university’s emergency response guide, which teaches students the procedure for active threats. 

In the event of an active threat, Northeastern has several emergency response systems to update students. This includes NU Alert, an emergency notification system which students are automatically enrolled in that sends notifications and alerts to registered phone numbers and emails.

“Make sure you update your information [on Northeastern’s student hub] to make sure your phone number is accurate. Because if we don’t have your phone in the system when we send out the alert, you may not get it,” Galindo said. “Email is fine, but the best form of communication is with your cell phone.”

Leone Daschek, a first-year business administration and design combined major, said he is not fully aware of Northeastern’s safety protocols, and campus alerts sent to students’ emails and phone numbers are “not enough.”

“They need to find a new way to communicate with us,” Daschek said.

One of the most noticeable safety systems in place are the Blue Light Phones, a network of over 100 emergency campus phones — often marked by a bright, blue light — designed to provide immediate connection with campus emergency response services.

In case of emergency, students can press the phone’s red emergency button and an NUPD dispatcher will answer the line. Similar to the traditional 911 system, university police dispatchers can send officers to the caller’s location. 

If a student has a non-emergency inquiry or requires an NUPD safety escort, they can press the phone’s black button or dial 2121. These safety escorts, who can be reached by dialing 617-373-2121 on a non-NUPD phone, can be requested any time of day and usually arrive within 15 minutes. 

“I think it’s important we do provide safety escorts on campus. So if anyone ever says, ‘God, I really feel uncomfortable about walking this particular night,’ you call the 2121 number, we’ll send out a community service officer, who’s more than happy to give them a ride anywhere on campus,” Galindo said. 

Students also have access to the university’s Red Eye Shuttle service, which offers transportation from campus to any location within a 1.5 mile radius. The service runs through the night, seven days a week. 

“If you’re caught in a library at three in the morning, you feel uncomfortable, really, you shouldn’t be walking home. You get on the app and request a ride, and they’ll take you to the area that you live,” Galindo said. 

While there has never been an active shooter situation on Northeastern’s campus, several recent safety concerns in and around Northeastern’s Boston campus have heightened awareness of crime in the area.

In May 2025, the body of 21-year-old Tatiyana Flood was found outside the Alice Heyward Taylor Apartments on Annunciation Road — about 0.2 miles from Ruggles Station. In June, a man was charged with Flood’s murder. In July, a man was arrested after allegedly groping a student outside of EXP.  

Earlier, in 2019, a 21-year-old man was arrested after shots were fired in Ruggles Station. No one was injured, according to an email The News received from NUPD at the time. 

Remi Aaron, a first-year cybersecurity major, said she often feels unsafe while walking through Ruggles.

“It gets a little sketchy at night,” she said. “I’ve had people try to talk to me and ask for money. I normally call a friend or a family member and just have them on the phone with me while I’m walking.”

Galindo attributes the lack of active shooter situations on campus to NUPD’s intelligence-based approach that focuses on incident prevention. 

“We’re an intel-based deployment police department, which means we have constant communications with something called the BRIC, the Boston Regional Intelligence Center,” Galindo said. “They have a morning call where they discuss any threats that are currently being spoken about in Boston, within the region of Massachusetts and New England and beyond.”

This approach, he said, allows NUPD to identify potential threats in advance.

“We do use our camera system primarily to identify early-onset threats, so any suspicious behavior that might be happening in or around campus,” he said. “We listen to all the municipal radio communications from police departments, so if they’re looking for a suspicious car, suspicious person, we immediately focus all our camera systems to see if we can identify a threat before it makes its way on campus.”

Valente, the perpetrator of the Brown University shooting, was spotted on the Brown campus multiple times in the days leading up to the shooting by custodian Derek Lisi, who reported him as a suspicious person to a third-party security vendor for the university. 

“If we go back to what happened in the Brown incident, he had been seen on campus for several days, and it had been reported to security, and no action was taken,” Galindo said. “As soon as we get information about someone who’s suspicious, we immediately respond, detain the individual for questioning and identify them.”

James Alan Fox, a research professor of criminology at Northeastern, emphasized that incidents like the shooting at Brown remain uncommon.

“Events like what happened at Brown University are extremely rare,” Fox said. “I have a list of all the cases of [incidents on] university campuses where there’s been at least two people killed in the shooting, and from 1990 to the present, over the 35 years … there has been an average of one a year, and that’s out of over 3,000 schools.”

Fox is the co-creator of the Mass Killing Database, an interactive research project designed alongside USA Today and the Associated Press that tracks all mass killing incidents in the United States since 2006. The database examines each incident through various data points such as offender and victim demographics, weapon types used and location details.

The database shows that while mass shootings receive the most attention from the media, they represent just a small portion of overall gun deaths in the United States. 

Galindo emphasized that while being in the city, especially at night, may put students on edge, NUPD is constantly working to ensure student safety. 

“We’re in a big city, urban setting. When I talk to orientations, to parents, I go, ‘2 p.m. in Boston and 2 a.m. are two different towns’ — they look different, they feel different,” he said. “We understand at night, in any big city, you’re going to feel a little uncomfortable, but we try to keep campus feeling as safe as possible with these strategies.”