Emergency communications need work, officials agree,

The president of the University of Texas, UT’s police chief and Austin’s interim police chief agree that they need to step up social media communications and accelerate text messaging during emergencies such as the stabbings Monday that left three students injured and one dead.

“The events of the past day are a reminder of how diligent we must be in communicating accurate information in the age of social media,” UT President Gregory L. Fenves said in a message posted online Tuesday. “We were too slow to let the entire campus know about the stabbings after they happened. And UT police were too quick to report there was no threat west of campus because, as we learned later that evening, an incident had taken place. Students rely on us to make decisions for their safety and well-being, and we need to do better. We will do better.”

UT police received a call about the incident along Speedway in the heart of campus at 1:46 p.m. Officers took the suspect, biology junior Kendrex J. White, 21, into custody two minutes later.

Most students reported getting a text message about the incident from the university’s alert system at 2:14 p.m. In the meantime, and for hours thereafter, social media was rife with rumors.

“There’s always room for improvement. We are going to evaluate the issue in terms of communications,” UT Police Chief David Carter said at a news conference Tuesday.

Brian Manley, interim chief of the Austin Police Department, said his department was slow in posting information about a separate incident Monday in which a UT student was stabbed in the leg by an unidentified man near 26th and Nueces streets, west of campus, about 3 p.m. Austin police learned of the incident at 4 p.m. but didn’t release information until 9:38 p.m.

“We should have put that out earlier,” Manley said.

Ideally, UT would have sent a text message as early as 1:49 or 1:50 informing students, faculty and staff members that officers responding to a report of criminal activity had apprehended the suspect, UT spokeswoman Cindy Posey said. Two civilian dispatchers fielding calls at the station would have needed management’s authority to send a text, and no one told them to do so until an assistant chief returned to the station, she said.

Campus police try to reserve text alerts for serious situations that warrant, for example, a lockdown, Posey said.

The UT Police Department turned to Twitter and Facebook to send out several messages Monday, as well as several retweets of Austin Police Department and Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services messages.

“It would have been great had we replied to some of those replies to us” in an effort to knock down false assertions, Posey said. “We did do some of it, but there was a massive, massive volume of social media.”

Karen Freberg, a University of Louisville associate professor who studies communications, crises and social media, credited UT officials for acknowledging that things could have been handled differently.

But because the university didn’t send any official communications to students in the immediate aftermath of the stabbings, it lost control of the narrative, Freberg said. In the absence of information, students were left to speculate and become frustrated.

“They want to have the right information to confirm their message, but they also need to know that timing is important to reduce our levels of uncertainty,” Freberg said.

Freberg said the university might consider undertaking a communications audit and performing simulations.

Warnings of violent attacks on two other college campuses went out much quicker.

Ohio State University’s Buckeye alert system sent an alert two minutes after an incident was reported in November, according to news reports. An 18-yearold student struck multiple pedestrians with a car before crashing into a university building, exiting the car and attacking people with a butcher knife. A police officer shot and killed the student after he refused to put down his knife.

In November 2015, a knife-wielding student injured four people at the University of California, Merced. Before the attack had ended, the university had sent out social media notifications that a stabbing had been reported and that students should avoid the area. The 18-year-old student behind that attack was also killed by police.