campus safety after Virginia Tech

Many of my colleagues in the campus security community are feverishly spending money to buy various emergency notification systems, because, apparently the lessons learned from Virginia Tech, it is believed, include some kind of emergency notification system. Buz thinks that they might be useful, not so much to help in an incident such as this, but just so that the school can say they have it to defend itself in a lawsuit.

Even if such a system were in place at VT, it would not have been used because the police thought the incident was confined and under control. In fact there were officers in the dorm where the original two murders happened, but did not say anything about it to students who were entering and leaving. Besides, what would one say? Gee, we've got 2 people killed here, so watch out?! What should we do, Mr. Security!? Go to class? Go Home? Go to the dorm?

A cursory look at some of the uses of the emergency notification systems since VT show that they are only one tool of many and often are not terribly helpful.

The key component of any system such as this is: who makes the decision to send out the message and what message do they send out.

Only the largest schools, with some exceptions, want to spend the money to have skilled full-time professional-level people present or available to make the decisions quickly. Usually these incident happen very quickly and there is a sense of unbelievability and denial which accompanies it.