Learning about a crime on campus used to mean spotting a campus police poster in a hallway or stairwell. Now, it can involve anything from text messages to sirens, leaving universities to decide how much information to send out, when to do it and what methods to use.
Factors that guide police at the University of Maryland include whether the suspect has been caught, whether the perpetrator was armed and the seriousness of the crime, Capt. Marc Limanski said.
At George Washington University, the school will deploy a slew of alert systems that include texts, emails, phone messages, a public address system and social media for crimes that pose immediate and continuing threats, according to Darrell Darnell, the senior associate vice president for safety and security. But for incidents that aren’t imminent dangers, like a warning about severe weather, the university will take a more moderate approach, like simply posting a notice on its website, Darnell wrote in an email.
George Mason University spokesman Dan Walsch said the school has fine-tuned its approach to sending messages through its MasonAlert system. When the system debuted, he said, the university community got texts about issues as minor as traffic tie-ups, which meant people started ignoring the messages.
“It’s not something you want to overuse,” he said. “We were compromising its effectiveness.”
— Emily Babay
