U of A looking at new ‘crisis’ protocols
Records identify ‘chaos’ during shooting incident
When University of Alberta officials decided on the morning of June 15 to send out an emergency notice to 70,000 students, faculty and staff about a deadly on-campus shooting that had occurred six hours earlier, the mass e-mail failed to send. It took technicians another three hours to fix the problem.
Details of the “e-mail notification failure” are described in dozens of pages of records documenting the chaotic hours following a violent robbery that left three armoured guards dead and one seriously injured, and students and administrators scrambling for information.
Thee-mail sand notes reveal that even with emergency management protocols in place, officials still ran into delays reaching members of the crisis management and campus security teams. The records reveal “confusion” over people’s responsibilities, questions over whether to activate the campus-wide notification system, and “overwhelmed” counselling services staff.
A news release posted on the university’s website this week said that two internal reviews found the response to the incident was handled “appropriately and in a timely manner.”
“Bearing in mind that emergency response to violent crime such as this is the responsibility of the city police, who did their job very well, we believe our emergency response processes and actions functioned effectively in this situation,” Philip Stack, associate vice-president of risk management services, said.
In an accompanying seven-page report, the university defended its decision not to broadcast a campus-wide alert immediately after the shooting, saying that campus security had not confirmed the “exact nature of the event.”
Officials, however, said they were looking at amending protocols for dealing with shootings and hostage situations “with a possible view to lowering the minimum threshold required to issue a mass emergency communication.”
Anne Glavin, president of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators and chief of police at the California State University, Northridge, said Wednesday that social media have conditioned people to expect information right away. But when an incident breaks out on a campus, “you have to give emergency responders time to figure out what they’ve got.”
Travis Baumgartner, the man accused of killing G4S guards Michelle Shegelski, Brian Ilesic and Eddie Rejano, and seriously wounding Matthew Schuman, is scheduled to return to court on Friday.
The shooting broke out at 12:08 a.m. atthecampus’sHUBMallastheguards were servicing bank machines.
Campus patrol supervisor Sgt. Tony Larson reached Bill Mowbray, director of the university’s protective services team, by phone at 12:40 a.m. about a possible shooting. Mowbray’s initial response, according to a briefing note, was that shots-fired complaints are common and could be the result of firecrackers and for Larson to get back to him with more details.
At around 1 a.m., Larson had more information and reached a couple of superintendents on the protective services team, Grace Berry and Jim Newman. The pair discussed activating the emergency notification system but opted not to.
The university sent out a Twitter message at 2:10 a.m., saying that “people are unharmed” and that the HUB Mall was in “lockdown” and for people to “avoid the area.”
Student union representatives later told university officials that many students still felt the university’s response was lacking.
An external review of the university’s response is expected to be complete later this year.