At the University of Chicago, the third Monday in November began with an hour of violence. Around 12:30 a.m., an assailant fired a shot at a staff member who was walking on the campus. At 1:15 a group of men robbed two female students on a nearby street. Just before 1:30, Amadou Cisse, a doctoral student, was shot and killed while walking to his apartment, a half block from the campus.
Minutes later, administrators discussed the situation by telephone. Like many colleges, Chicago has a new emergency-notification system, installed after the massacre at Virginia Tech last April. The system can quickly send short text and e-mail messages. But officials did not consider using it in the middle of the night, says Henry S. Webber, vice president for community and government affairs.
Instead the university first informed the campus of the murder at 10:40 a.m., in a detailed e-mail message. Some students believe that administrators waited too long. Security on Campus, a national crime-prevention group, says the university should have sent a warning minutes after learning of the murder.
Chicago officials say they held off because they were still gathering facts, and because police officers had determined that there was not a continuing threat to the campus.
“When you make these decisions,” Mr. Webber says, “there are always judgment calls.”
Nearly eight months after the shootings at Virginia Tech, colleges continue to grapple with questions about how — and when — to alert students to potential dangers. As more students and parents demand immediate information about crimes that occur on or near campuses, colleges must weigh the speed of responses against the quality of information.
“The complete focus now is on how fast can you communicate with your campus community,” says Dolores A. Stafford, chief of police at George Washington University and a former president of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators. “And the trouble is, sometimes you don’t have anything to say.”
The Meaning of ‘Timely’
The Clery Act, the federal law that requires colleges and universities to disclose information about crimes on their campuses, was enacted in 1990, long before the era of text messages. The law does not require colleges to issue immediate alerts — only “timely warnings” of reported criminal offenses that present a continuing threat to students and employees. The Department of Education released a Clery Act handbook in 2005, but colleges still have little clarity as to what “timely” means.
Some, like George Washington, typically issue warnings within four to eight hours (in the form of e-mail messages and fliers) about robberies, arson, and serious assaults. Students might not learn of other crimes, such as a string of burglaries, until 36 hours after the first incident. In the meantime, police officers are investigating: interviewing victims and witnesses, for example, or reviewing surveillance video to develop a description of the suspect.
“It’s just not as simple as people who don’t have to do this believe it is,” Ms. Stafford says.
The sophisticated emergency-notification systems that many colleges adopted after the shootings at Virginia Tech have, in some people’s minds, conflated the meanings of timely warnings and near-instant alerts.
“In some cases,” says Douglas F. Tuttle, another former president of the campus law-enforcement association, “people have jumped past the intent of the Clery law and have come to expect that whenever anything happens, like a robbery at the convenience store, you’re going to text everybody and tell them about it.”
Some lawmakers share that expectation. Richard J. Durbin and Barack Obama, the two Democratic U.S. senators from Illinois, introduced a bill shortly after the shootings at Virginia Tech that would require colleges to report any “law-enforcement emergency” within 30 minutes of discovering it. The bill is pending.
The Clery Act does not require colleges to send timely warnings about off-campus crimes, although it does include public property adjacent to college campuses. Alison Kiss, program director at Security on Campus, argues that the spirit of the law should have compelled Chicago officials to notify students immediately, even if the message contained only a few details.
“In 30 minutes or less,” she says, “they should have at least put out a warning about the crime and location, especially when there was a suspect at large.”
Urgent Alerts
Some colleges have emphasized speed. In November, Villanova University sent an alert to registered users of its new text-messaging system nine minutes after someone fired several shots in a campus parking lot at 2:30 a.m. The message urged students to lock their doors and move to a safe location, and said more information would follow. The university sent two follow-up messages before 8 a.m., finally informing students that the shooter had left the campus.
David G. Tedjeske, Villanova’s director of public safety, says he was able to dash off the first message because a police officer had contacted him before arriving on the scene. “We knew all we really needed to know in the first 10 minutes,” Mr. Tedjeske says. “It was an obvious alert.”
This fall Delaware State University earned praise for its quick response to a shooting on the campus (The Chronicle, September 24). Police there received a call at 12:54 a.m. on a Friday and began posting fliers in residence halls — headlined “Timely Warning Notification” in large boldface — at 2:01 a.m. Meanwhile, resident assistants in the dormitories closest to the site of the shooting were knocking on students’ doors.
The swift response was possible largely because the public-safety office was in charge, says James T. Overton, the university’s chief of police. Student-affairs staff members initiated the door knocking, but Mr. Overton drafted the warning, which he ran by public-relations and legal-affairs officials. If they had not been available, he says, he would have issued the alert on his own.
“In other places, there are layers of bureaucracy you have to go through to put something out,” Mr. Overton says. “Here it is left up to public safety.” That makes the most sense, he says: “In terms of a criminal activity, we’re the ones investigating, we have the most information, and we have the information firsthand.”
Lacking guidelines on timeliness, he tries to announce basic information quickly and update it later. The “bare minimum,” he says, is the date and time of the incident, what happened — as simple as “shooting” — and a tip, often simply to stay indoors.
The Delaware State police updated their initial warning about the shooting at least three times throughout the night, as more information became available. “If we learn more and the campus at large can benefit from it, then we put it out,” says Mr. Overton. The police do withhold details that might compromise the criminal investigation.
Value Over Speed
Still, quick information is not always useful, some police chiefs say.
“We believe the better practice — rather than to say, ‘Gotcha, we got it out in 27 minutes,’ something that’s useless — is to put out a helpful alert,” says James F. McShane, associate vice president for public safety at Columbia University.
If an e-mail message goes out in the middle of the night, students who are out or sleeping will not read it, he says. A text message may be faster, but it is too short to suggest more than to take shelter or flee, advice that in many situations may not be practical.
Technology raises expectations, but it also has its limits.
Eugene L. Zdziarski, assistant vice president for student affairs and dean of students at the University of Florida, says systems that can process no more than 2,000 messages per minute may not help a campus of 50,000 handle an emergency.
Besides, the information is only as good as the people who provide it. What matters, he says, is “not just informing them that something happened. It’s telling them how to respond.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Students Volume 54, Issue 15, Page A1