Policy brief on campus safety requirements for Hawaii and Pacific island universities.
Policy brief on campus safety requirements for Hawaii and Pacific island universities. Free under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 — no registration required.
Summary of the paper
"Campus Safety in Isolation" is an ISPI policy brief on why Hawaii and Pacific Island universities need their own security framework. It argues that campus safety plans adopted from large mainland universities assume rapid law enforcement backup that geographically isolated island campuses do not have.
The brief draws on ISPI's direct administrative experience in Clery Act compliance, Title IX coordination, security audits and emergency preparedness at a Hawaii university.
What the paper finds
- Response-time assumptions do not hold. Standard active threat protocols such as ALICE were developed around metropolitan law enforcement response times. On rural, neighbor island and Pacific territory campuses, the brief finds actual response times are much longer, so those protocols need fundamental revision rather than adjustment.
- Isolation compounds the gap. The same isolation that lengthens response times also limits mutual aid and backup during an emergency.
- Clery Act compliance is more complex. Island campuses face jurisdictional questions, including territorial boundaries, Native Hawaiian land adjacency and noncontiguous territory legal frameworks, that mainland guidance does not cover.
- Self-reliance has to come first. Pre-positioned resources, trained campus emergency response teams and shelter-in-place protocols should be primary strategies, not supplements.
What it recommends
- Calibrate active threat response protocols to each campus's verified law enforcement response time.
- Create Clery Act compliance guidance for island campus jurisdictional issues.
- Mandate pre-positioned security resources for isolated campuses, including emergency response team training, redundant communications and medical response capacity.
- Commission island-specific campus threat assessment baseline research.
Who it's for
Campus safety directors, Clery and Title IX coordinators, university leadership and emergency managers at Hawaii and Pacific Island colleges and universities.
This research connects to the 39 Small Island Developing States worldwide through the Samoa Pathway and BPOA+30 framework. Every ISPI research product carries a mandatory SIDS global bridge per the ISPI Research Architecture.
Further reading
Cite as
Pulley, Warren (2026). Campus Safety in Isolation: Why Hawaii and Pacific Island Universities Need Their Own Security Framework (ISPI PB-02). Island Security Policy Institute, Honolulu. https://ispiglobal.com/papers-landing/pb02-campus-safety https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23449968
BibTeX
@techreport{ispipb022026,
author = {Pulley, Warren},
title = {Campus Safety in Isolation: Why Hawaii and Pacific Island Universities Need Their Own Security Framework},
institution = {Island Security Policy Institute},
address = {Honolulu, HI},
number = {ISPI PB-02},
year = {2026},
url = {https://ispiglobal.com/papers-landing/pb02-campus-safety},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.23449968}
}For a practitioner's guide on this topic, see Campus Under Siege by ISPI founder Warren Pulley, published separately from ISPI research.
Related analysis
AnalysisCampus Safety for Geographically Isolated Institutions — A Worldwide Problem →AnalysisRunning Campus Safety on an Island — What the Clery Act Doesn't Prepare You For →AnalysisWhy Island Police Departments Face Structural Officer Shortages That Continental Solutions Cannot Fix →PaperPB-01 — Insider Threat Programs for Small Island Organizations →PaperPB-03 — Public Safety Policy in U.S. Pacific Territories →GuideHawaii Law Enforcement Workforce & Recruitment: Research and FAQ →Pulley, Warren. "Campus Safety Policy Brief — Island Universities." Island Security Policy Institute, 2026. https://ispiglobal.com/papers-landing/pb02-campus-safety
