He sits in his car with the engine off, the lights off. It would be pitch black except a dim yellow glow shines from lampposts scattered around the parking lot.

Ten minutes later he revs the car to life, the sound jarring in the relative silence. He drives slowly to another campus building.

For Erick Anderson, being a Campus Safety officer can be more than discovering wrongdoings. It’s sometimes just about the silence.

“It can get really quiet around here,” he said.

He’s a man who enjoys the silence, providing brief answers to questions but not posing many of his own.

But, he seems to find a sort of calm in it. It’s quite different from being at home, where his three children, all under the age of 10, can make quite a racket.

Anderson – officer 206 – works the second of three Campus Safety shifts, from 3 to 11 p.m. He patrols solo.

He spent 10 months working the late shift, from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. and that’s when it would get really silent.

“At three in the morning, [there’s] just like nobody [around],” he said.

A large chunk of time on his current shift is spent checking buildings and locking them for the night. He also patrols parking lots and streets around campus to “stay visible.”

“My favorite part of the job is I get to keep moving around all the time,” he said.

On this particular evening, Anderson is responsible for the sector south of East Iliff Avenue. This includes some campus buildings as well as sorority row and the city streets surrounding Observatory Park.

Campus Safety officers rotate through the sectors, Anderson said, so they are not in the same place each night.

With six-and-a-half years on the job under his police belt, Anderson has his duties down.

He knows where the more than 15 doors that need to be locked at night in the Newman Center for Performing Arts are located.

He knows the perfect route through the five-story building to lock his last door so he’s only a step away from the elevator.

And he knows all the codes that the officers recite to dispatch to inform them of what is going on – although he said it took some time to memorize them all.

And he should know the campus well. He’s been around it on-and-off for over a decade.

A Denver native, Anderson received his undergraduate degree with a double major in English and history from DU in 1996. He graduated from law school in 2003.

In between those degrees, he spent time working at an immigration law firm and serving as a policeman in the army until he got “tired of sitting in an office.”

He said he’s amazed at how much things have changed on campus through the years, from new buildings to the proliferation of e-mail.

As a student in 1994, Anderson registered for an e-mail account. “I don’t think I even used it,” he said. “It’s completely different now.”

Now, he’s part of a team of eight on shift two, the “tried-n-true” shift as they call themselves on a comical bulletin board in the Campus Safety office.

Anderson said the most common incidents he deals with are service calls – people are locked out of a building, leaks are found, the power goes out or there’s a fire alarm – and theft reports.

“Anything that can cause damage to university property they like us to respond to,” he said.

Near the end of his shift and into shift three, there are calls for “a lot of stuff in the dorms, odor of marijuana, alcohol, things of that nature,” Anderson said.

Though he follows a similar routine five days a week, he tries to keep it unsystematic.

“I try to keep it random so if someone’s trying to do something they don’t know where I’ll be,” he said.

Twenty minutes before he’s set to drive the patrol car back to the parking lot, he spots something shiny and silver out of the corner of his eye in the parking lot just east of Olin Hall.

He drives over slowly, and then exhales. It’s just a plastic cup.

Though it turned out to be nothing this time, Anderson said he has an eye for discovering items.

“I tend to find lots of things,” he said. “I’ve found lots of jewelry over the years.”