A School Shooting, a Failed Fast-Response System, and JuicyCampus.com
Thursday, February 7, 2008 by Kelly Sutton Last night at about 9:50 pm PST, 7-8 gunshots rang out across the campus of my school, LMU. Within a half hour, I could see half a dozen LAPD cars 200 yards outside of my window with a helicopter circling over my building. My roommates and I wondered what exactly was going on.
I'm just going to say the two phrases that everyone is thinking of right now to get them out of the way: Virginia Tech and Columbine. There.
I, personally, did not hear the gunshots. My roommates did. LMU was hosting a basketball game between two rival high schools, Westchester High and Fairfax High. A young guy, aged 15, was shot after the game directly off campus. The location of the shooting happened to be 200 yards outside of my bedroom window. Technically the shooting didn't happen on campus and the technically LMU students weren't involved, but the geographic proximity to me was close enough and guns bullets don't only kill fellow students.
In response to what happened in Virginia last April, LMU had established a fast-response system that would send out text messages and recorded voice messages to every student registered for the service. Many other universities have done the same, including Boston University and Arizona State (thanks readers!).
But these systems didn't work as advertised.
Last night's shooting occurred around 9:50 pm, I did not receive a phone call until 12:31 am. We didn't have the same problem as Arizona State's overflow problem (we're a mere 6,000 students or so), we had laziness of administration. As commenter jrock pointed out, the Virginia Tech massacre lasted all of 9 minutes. More people could have been injured or killed. So while I was in the dark last night for 2.5 hours, which news source did I turn to? Local news stations decided Britney being released from the hospital was more important as an LAPD helicopter circled over my building.
I turned to a website we don't often praise, JuicyCampus.com. JuicyCampus is LMU's Twitter. It's a knee-jerk site to visit and communicate what's going on around campus. Usually the information being communicated is some form of racism or libel. Last night though, JuicyCampus' slow servers eventually let me know the buzz around campus: a shooting. The topic was labeled "SHOOTING AT BACKGATES RITE NOW!!!"
I don't like JuicyCampus, but it did (potentially) save a life last night. The LMU administration dropped the ball. All students should have stayed in doors or in class. Gunshots should mean everyone stays put and locks down. I would have at least like the peace of mind to know whether or not the shooter was still at large.
So what can be done in the future? JuicyCampus.com is great, but it isn't necessarily an open system. And it's slow. These systems that our schools shelled out thousands for obviously aren't working. I suggest Twitter or Mozes as a means of campus-wide mass communication. These two services each handle thousands of requests per day. I'm sure they could accommodate one measly campus inside Los Angeles.
Hopefully a failure like this doesn't happen again...
Has anyone else experienced shortcomings with emergency response systems? Let us know in the comments!
Reader Comments (11)
I am student at VT and the system doesn't even work here either. They have tested it twice and the failure rate is astounding. It's sad that rumors and text messages from friends are the most reliable and timely information.
Word of mouth has been around for ages, you think someone would have reinvented this wheel by now...
Kelly,
Sorry to hear about this. Tragic. I didn't know about the speed limitations of our system here at ASU. That doesn't seem very effective to only send out only 15 text messages per second.
This Twitter idea is sounding better and better. I think I'm going to send an email to our Technology Office...
[...] couple of days ago, Kelly Sutton of HackCollege.com posted a distressing account of a shooting on his LMU campus in Los Angeles. Even though his school had an [...]
I think you got it as good as it is gonna get. If you talk to anyone involved in crisis communications like military radio operators (from patrol to command level) to police dispatchers you'll hear how dissemination of information in chaotic situations is not ideal. Whilst tweeter looks to be better I wouldn't rely on technology to save you in such a situation either. Tech can be a real scapegoat too.
Also, human communication skills for crises came from small group interaction when rural predators were about, so to expect us to be better at large scale, dynamic communication, where a lone predator can disappear into a crowded urban environment, is nigh-on impossible.
[...] A Shooting at LMU [...]
I agree with Dan above... Information dissemination in emergencies is never great, and has rarely been good enough.
In the ideal system, there should be three sources of information that should always be considered trusted sources, even if they contradict each other. This prevents a choke-point, where a slow response on the part of one person doesn't keep necessary information from getting out in a timely manner. Plus, in addition to the trusted source, an all-call warning system should be in place to let people know to check their trusted sources.
The all-call system could be a combination of loudspeakers on campus, perhaps used like the air-raid sirens, as well as the SMS message systems and pager calls. The goal of these systems is speed, not information, so only being able to send 15 pages/text messages per second is attrociously slow... Ideally, the all-call should alert 75% or more of the student population within 30 seconds... Word of mouth can (and will) inform the remaining 25%.
Next, the trusted sources should have different mediums to transmit their information. Radio is always good, because its signals can go through many walls and travel a fair distance, at least enough to cover the entire campus... Perhaps the school radio station should have an emergency broadcast protocol, and let the student and faculty population know to listen. Radio has two drawbacks, though: You must have a receiver, and if a person misses a piece of critical information, they have to wait for it to be repeated.
The second trusted source could easily be a web site. Obviously, they're quick to update, and they overcome the problem of needing to repeat the information periodically, because downloading one web page will provide all information necessary. The shortcomings are, of course, the need for a receiver (computer with an inter/intra-net connection), and the technical learning curve needed if a person is completely computer illiterate. And yes, there are college students who don't know how to click a mouse... I've tutored some of them. ;)
The third trusted source should always remain word-of-mouth... Create a chain of concern (similar to a chain of command, but *only* for emergencies). Natural chain of concerns include teachers to students in their classroom... Also, a point-of-contact should be delegated within the
barracksdorms, preferably at least one per floor. They should all be trained on how and when to contact their next-higher level, up to a group of decision makers who have direct contact with the city emergency services.Each intermediate link in the chain of concern should have no more than six people to disseminate information to, to increase the speed of spreading information... If one person has to call fifty other people, then that last person in the list will have to wait a long time to be clued in, although if each person only called two other people, then there would be too many layers for the information to go through, again slowing it down and making the information unreliable.
Finally, here's the key point. Instead of information only flowing down, it needs to flow back up. Shortly after the emergency all-call, a group of people should meet and set up a temporary command center with several phone lines and plenty of computers connected to the internet. If anybody has additional information, they should send it to the command center, where people will sort through the reports, coordinate with city emergency services, weed out the bad information, and give it to the group at the top of the chain of concern so that they can make decisions and begin any additional rounds of information dissemination.
The reason why there needs to be a group of decision makers is in case the emergency planner is away at a conference, has the flu, or was sleeping at home and has to drive to campus... The first decision maker on-scene can (and must) begin making decisions right away, because prompt action is the best way to mitigate any emergency.
And, of course, practicing the drills, testing the drills, and refining the system is always key... Let people know that the drills are happening, because one of the goals is to minimize panic during an emergency, not to create panic when there isn't an emergency.
I go to IU and as far as I know, the main emergency response system is geared toward text messaging. This doesn't work very well for me, though, because I don't have text on my phone. I'm not sure about the timeliness, but I can't imagine it being much better than at your school. One really good option for finding out about emergency information is your college newspaper's website. This year, the closest thing that we had to a huge emergency like that was a police standoff with a law student who was firing rounds off his balcony. Since I don't live in a major metro area, it wasn't on the news, and we didn't get any email about it until later. The IDS website, however, was updated regularly, so I had really up-to-the-minute news about what was going on.
[...] a weird twist of fate just a week after LMU’s emergency system failed, a shooting occurred yesterday at Northern Illinois University. Six people died, including the [...]
[...] on the same campus have a lot to gain from using Twitter (think emergency and non-emergency alerts via Twitter), but I think that Twittering across campus is a great way for [...]
my phone is not Twitter capable, and many of my friends aren't either. There's really no fast and easy solution here and it's just a shame.