It has been over a year since the shooting at Virginia Tech University, but campus safety is still an important issue and is continuing to be improved throughout the University of California system.
The BruinAlert system, which simultaneously sends various forms of notifications to students in the event of an emergency, was used for the first time this summer in its first non-test use in response to the earthquake that hit the L.A. area. The system is being updated and will be used in future emergencies.
Prior to the Virginia Tech shooting, the UC system was considering creating a UC-wide security system similar to systems such as BruinAlert that individual UC campuses have since adopted.
After the shooting occurred in April 2007, most campuses scrambled to put systems in place on their own, said Mark McGilvray, associate director of Strategic Projects at UC Santa Barbara.
Jack Powazek, the assistant vice chancellor of general services at UCLA added that the administration is aware of the School Safety Enhancements Act of 2007 that was recently passed in the House of Representatives, and that the security updates are much needed.
He added that the updates are the right thing to do to ensure that the campus community receives emergency messages. The School Safety Enhancements Act of 2007 would amend the Higher Education Act of 1965.
The bill would require any institution of higher education participating in any federal student financial aid programs to “conduct an annual campus safety assessment in consultation with local law enforcement officials, and develop and implement a campus emergency response plan that addresses a comprehensive set of emergency situations, including natural disasters, active shooter situations and terrorism,” according to the bill.
The BruinAlert system, which UCLA implemented last November, sends students text messages and e-mails in the event of an emergency.
There are also speakers installed in three areas of the campus ““ the residence halls, the Intramural Field and Royce Quad ““ to warn students.
The speakers were not used in the system test after the July 29 earthquake. They were tested for the first time in August.
“We’ve installed three of four locations. The fourth will be installed this month. Although we’ve tested during installation, the November test will be the first time it’s done with everything else,” Powazek said.
Notifications are also provided on AM 1630 and UCLA Channel 3, as well as other channels with UCLA cable.
“One input into the system sends out four messages because we’re trying to get the message out as many different ways as possible. There’s no one optimum way to send the message to constituent members of our community, faculty, staff and students,” Powazek said.
The system runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and is not used for advertisements or non-emergency announcements, and will cost the university about $132,000 a year.
“It only takes one incident. If the system assists in providing a safe environment for students, faculty and staff, then it’s worth the cost,” Powazek said.
The next step in the program, said Powazek, is the inclusion of 18,000 faculty and staff to the program, which, in addition to the 30 percent of students already signed up for the program, would make a total of 60,000 recipients.
McGilvray said the system has been successfully used several times at UCSB. As a result of one of the warnings, the police were able to apprehend a suspicious person on the campus after a student used the description sent out to identify the man.
“It’s nice to be aware of things that are going on, and it’s comforting to know that I would find out about something before hearing it on the news. It’s important to find out about what’s going on on-campus,” said Brittany Flynn, a first-year biology and sociology student.
She added that though she doesn’t think a system like BruinAlert could have completely prevented an incident like the shooting at Virginia Tech, it definitely would have prevented a lot of casualties.
Similar systems are in place or in various planning and testing stages at other UC campuses as well. The campuses have all conceived systems that follow the same concepts of multiple types of warnings in the event of an emergency.
The Report of the University of California Campus Security Task Force gave guidelines for each campus to follow, one of them being a year-by-year contract in the event of the creation of a UC wide system.
“Every campus should be able to expeditiously communicate both internally to the entire campus community, and externally with its local public safety mutual aid and emergency services providers,” says the report, which was released in January 2008.
“The UC campuses approached this individually, although the goals are the same. We went through an open bid process in 2007 and we got a particular vendor. … The key is that you have a system that works, and you test it and have some procedures that trigger it when you need to,” Powazek said.