After learning of a potential threat to the university community Saturday night, the response from University Police was — by almost all accounts — an unequivocal success. Officers worked with Office of Information Technology officials to track down the student who made online comments threatening a “shooting rampage [Sunday] on campus” and apprehended Alexander Song well before 1:30 p.m., when Song had posted he would “hopefully … kill enough people to make it to national news.”
When news of the situation broke Sunday night, the first response from those on and off the campus was perhaps some combination of surprise and relief: Surprise that this university could have been the scene of violence similar to the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech, and relief that University Police responded to the threat in a manner that ensured the safety of the university community.
But after taking time to commend the department for its swift action in response to the potential threat — which, it seems, was nothing more than an empty threat made by a stressed-out student — this editorial board is left wondering: Why did it take University Police so long to inform the community of this incident?
Police say they apprehended Song about 10 a.m. Sunday, but the department didn’t post a press release until about 8:55 p.m. Officials tweeted a link to the release at 9:54 p.m., then sent a crime alert to the university community about 11:30 p.m. A statement from university President Wallace Loh gives two reasons for not issuing a campus alert during the nearly 11-hour period. First, Loh states “detectives were actively tracking the student’s whereabouts throughout the morning and a public alert might have disrupted those efforts before they were able to take him into custody.” It’s understandable that officials were concerned about issuing an alert before apprehending Song — officers should do whatever is necessary to track him down. But that doesn’t address the period after he was located, which leaves Loh’s second claim that “any threat to [the] community was mitigated once the student was taken into custody at approximately 10 am” as the explanation for not alerting the campus until nearly 11 hours after resolving the situation.
Basically, Loh claims there wasn’t an actual threat once Song was taken into custody, and therefore informing students of the matter wasn’t particularly important. We beg to differ. Within minutes of posting the first article about the incident, visits to The Diamondback’s website increased 10-fold. Hundreds of media outlets across the country have covered the story since Sunday night, and University Police Chief David Mitchell held a press conference yesterday to answer questions about the incident. Meanwhile, students complained about hearing of the situation via text messages from concerned parents, and one student even tweeted an important inquiry to Loh: “Is it safe to go on campus tomorrow[?]” In response to other tweets about the university’s failure of communication, Loh promised to “meet with all appropriate campus units to review safety and communications procedures.”
Given the university’s recent track record of failed communication, it seems more than a “review” is in order. Students may recall the tornado false alarm last fall, when the university was criticized for sending emergency alerts about an impending tornado — despite National Weather Service confirmation that no such tornado existed (officials stood by their decision, citing information received from the AccuWeather service). After an explosion in the chemistry building injured two students last September, this editorial board questioned the inefficiencies and glitches in the university’s alert system, which led to uneven notification of students. In a published response, Mitchell wrote, in part, “the community expects and deserves prompt and timely notification in the event of an emergency … our notifications could have and should have been timelier.”
If the claim that students were never actually in danger is true, why not alert the community anyway? University Police did great work to apprehend Song, then spent the rest of the day letting the issue simmer until it boiled over to Facebook and media outlets Sunday night. Officials could have avoided confusion and fear — especially on the part of students and parents — by sending a campuswide alert sooner than 11 hours after the incident.
Loh and University Police are always repeating the slogan, “If you see something … say something.” But that’s a two-way street — if officials apprehend a student threatening a shooting rampage on McKeldin Mall, they need to tell the community about it.
