University email alert

It didn’t take much — just a text, in fact — for University Police to alert the campus of a possible armed man near Route 1 on Saturday night.

Students received word about an unidentified man with a gun near the campus at 9:03 p.m. through UMD Alerts, a system meant to keep students aware of possible safety threats. The message was simple and abbreviated: “Advisory: pg/um resp to 7313 bal for man w/gun. sus blk m, 6’ gr sw/shrt, jeans 40’s.fled in unk dir.not believe to be in area.” With another text at 9:42 p.m., police declared the area all clear.

Through this system, the university community can stay aware of what and where possible issues are. If the issue poses a threat, said University Police spokesman Maj. Marc Limansky, then an alert will be sent out immediately.

Federal law requires updates on major campus crime, Limansky said. According to the Jeanne Clery Act, universities must inform students about incidents such as murder, some burglaries, sex offenses and others, in a timely manner.

“As technology advanced, law enforcement saw it as an opportunity to alert people as to pending threats,” University Police Chief David Mitchell said. “We developed a very robust alert system.”

University Police started to develop and test the system after the Virginia Tech shootings, Mitchell said. By sending messages directly to phones, the electronic system could keep students away from danger efficiently.

Before email, police had to staple posters and paper around the campus to inform students about crime incidents. Now, students can subscribe to get the alerts delivered to their phones or email inboxes.

Saturday’s incident on Route 1 is an example of something the police considers a threat students need to know immediately. Yesterday, police emailed students a safety notice with more details about the incident.

“We use the text messages to alert the campus to imminent danger. It needs to be a here-and-now sort of situation,” Limanksy said, “where the email system — the safety notices — are for situations that we want to warn and to provide resource information and make suggestions on how to better protect yourself.”

Not every student uses the system. Craig WeisenfeldWiesenfield, a sophomore journalism major, does not subscribe to receive text alerts and said most of the messages he would receive do not affect him.

“If I did get [UMD Alerts], it would be unnecessary for me to get all of them,” he said. “If I was in any serious danger, I would hear about it from my friends or from social media.”

University Police does not send out incidents immediately if the issue is contained and no one is in immediate danger, Limansky said. A text alert was not sent when a security guard accidentally shot a woman at the McDonald’s on Route 1 during an Oct. 19 altercation between the security guard and a customer.

Police were already on scene and the guard stayed at the McDonald’s; thus, there was no immediate threat and no need to alert students, Limansky said.

“We don’t want to appear as though we are crying wolf, that there is no real threat and it is just a disruption,” Mitchell said. “The service is not meant to be a disruption.”

April Monu said she thought some of the messages were too delayed to be impactful. She said she had already heard about the incident from a friend before she received the message about the McDonald’s shootings.

“Usually, they come after the fact or are an hour too late,” the freshman English major said. “They become irrelevant because I’ll hear about it from others.”

In the past, students have told University Police they felt overwhelmed by alerts, Mitchell said. They used to send students traffic alerts, severe weather updates and crime reports via the system. They found out that the large volume of alerts made students feel unsafe, so they tuned back the amount they sent out.

“I don’t feel that we’ve sent out anything that we should have not sent out,” Mitchell said. “It’s a very conscious decision to send out an alert.”