Student stabbing highlights campus safety push

All buildings on a Leicester university campus will have secure card entry by the beginning of next year.

Katie Normington, vice chancellor at De Montfort University (DMU), said the move was among a number of precautions, including removing pointed knives from halls and kitchens to make the city campus as safe as possible.

Speaking to BBC Leicester, she acknowledged that the fatal stabbing of DMU student Khaleed Oladipo in February had highlighted the issue of student safety, but emphasised work had been ongoing.

A safety group was set up in the aftermath of the killing and Normington said its discussions had finalised plans for the tightening of security for its buildings.

In August, 19-year-old Harper Dennis, of Bath Lane, Leicester, was found guilty of the manslaughter of Oladipo, 20, after a trial at Leicester Crown Court. He was sentenced to a total of 10 years' imprisonment.

Oladipo was pronounced dead at Leicester Royal Infirmary just over an hour after he was attacked near the DMU Innovation Centre in Oxford Street.

Normington said the death had been a huge shock but said the response of the community, including a "reflective event", had been important.

She also underlined the practical safety measures the university had been putting in place, both before and after the attack.

"Since that incident, I have set up a vice chancellor's safety group because we wanted to look at how we join together different parts of the university to make sure we are doing everything we can," she said.

"So one of the things that has come out of that - at the moment we are a pretty open campus and, in fact, you have to walk across it to get to the west end from the city centre - but we have taken the decision we will put all our buildings on to card control.

"And so things like that have come out of it.

"In a sense, it is not related to the stabbing, which happened on the edge of campus, and if the buildings were locked down, it would have made no difference.

"But we have to acknowledge that cities are places where things happen, but Leicester is no more violent than other cities."

In January, in what it described as a national first, DMU declared itself a safe knife campus.

In partnership with the Let's Be Blunt campaign, it had replaced all large kitchen knives with alternatives without a sharp point.

Normington said: "Knives are weapons, and yet we keep them in our house in unlocked drawers or on display in a block.

"That's a big piece of work we have been doing, we are trying to get other universities to come alongside us and do the same thing.

"Our halls of residence, pantries and kitchens and all our offices, we changed those knives a good 18 months ago."

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