When should students be notified if a gunman starts firing on a college campus? Within a half-hour, say sponsors of federal legislation.
But college police say that?s too rigid a time frame because investigators need to interview witnesses and ensure warnings are accurate before they?re sent.
“You might end up putting out bad information just to meet a time limit,” said Paul Dillon, campus police spokesman at the University of Maryland, College Park.
“It takes a little bit of time for initial responders to gather information.”
When an armed carjacker targeted vehicles parked outside a College Park dormitory in September and then headed toward campus, police sent out text alerts to students about 30 minutes after officers learned of the assailant.
But, depending on the incident, more time may be needed, Dillon said.
As the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre approaches Wednesday, some students and families recall that two hours passed between the discovery of the first two shootings and the alert to campus. After the warning went out, the gunman killed 30 more people.
Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-New York, introduced a bill this week that would impose the half-hour time limit.
“You?ll get more cooperation if you update students instead of leaving them in the dark,” said Angela Hitomi Harris, the SGA president at Villa Julie College, who supports the measure.
But local and national campus safety experts disagree.
“There?s no distinction between a real emergency and a false alarm,” said Christopher Blake, spokesman for the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators.
“Every incident is different. A rigid and inflexible time frame doesn?t recognize that.”
The legislation would motivate universities to use text alerts or e-mail blasts to inform the community, but mandating that alerts go out quickly and too often, cause students could come to regard the messages as junk mail, said Robert Lang, a national college safety expert.
Blake said the federal government should leave campus security to police on the scene.
“We know of no other incident of the federal government micro-managing a law-enforcement agency,” he said.
