Two weeks after armed men came into a student’s home near campus, shooting one in the leg, many students are still learning about the incident and calling for more university alerts on crime.
Amie Cipolla, a junior residential property major, lives less than a block away from the West Rex Street residence where three men with guns burst into the house that three students live in an apparent burglary attempt. Even though she can see the house from her window she didn’t learn about the event until a friend posted the story to Facebook late last week.
Rumors had been floating around that something had happened, Cipolla said, but without an alert from the university she was hesitant to believe anything she heard.
“Anyone that lives close to campus should be aware that something had happened,” she said.
University Spokesperson Joan Todd said an emergency alert wasn’t sent out because “The situation was contained, and there was no need to send one out.” She said the university wasn’t made aware of the situation until at least an hour after the shooting took place.
Ball State offers students an option to sign up to receive alerts of campus emergencies to their cell phones. Also, every student and staff member automatically receives emails to their university accounts when the university sends out an alert.
Todd said the university doesn’t send an alert unless they believe students need to take immediate action to stay safe or should have a heightened sense of awareness because of an increase in crime.
Cipolla is far from the only student upset that Ball State didn’t send out an alert. In an poll of campus, 97 out of 100 students asked said they would have liked to receive an alert, even if it was an hour or more after the event took place.
“It doesn’t matter if it came out the next day, the next morning they should have told students,” Cipolla said. “Yeah they should have just let people know it happened, knowing that it was under control it would make people know that it happened [and that students were safe].”
Although Ball State hasn’t sent out a single emergency alert so far this school year, an email was sent out to all students last week warning of an increase in burglaries on and near campus. The email didn’t specifically mention any crimes.
More than half the students polled said they did not know about the armed attempted burglary and would have liked to know.
“[The email] did make me aware but it didn’t seem as serious as it should have been,” Cipolla said. “Burglaries just sound like a small thing.”
Indiana University, in contrast with Ball State, has been accused of sending out too many alerts to students.
In one recent event several convenience stores near the Bloomington campus were robbed at gunpoint, and at one location the perpetrator shot a gun at officers, according to Mark Bruhn, IU’s associate vice president for public safety and institutional assurance on the IUPD’s website.
The university sent out several alerts beginning around 1 a.m.
“… the decision between waking a bunch of people unnecessarily or having even one person get hurt or killed is really a no-brainer even though we know the alerts can be inconvenient,” Bruhn wrote on the department’s blog.
The university recently instituted a mandatory review process to look at every crime that occurs near campus and, as a committee, determine whether the best choice was made whether an alert was sent or not.
“In situations where the danger is known, and the risk to campus is known, the decisions are easier,” he wrote. “In cases where there are unknowns — well, we’ll all have to accept some level of inconvenience in order to ensure the safety of some.”
For Cipolla, even in a sea of emergency alerts the shooting would have stood out.
“I think this was a more serious crime than most,” she said. “So if they would have sent something out [for the attempted burglary] even if they sent out a bunch of alerts people would have paid attention to it.”
Last year, Ball State sent out several emergency alerts informing students of several gas leaks, a bomb threat at the Burris Laboratory school off campus and a report of a gun in the Jo Ann Gora recreation center. Several possible gas leaks have been reported this year, at least one prompting a partial evacuation at the Teacher's College.
All but six of the 79 polled who have attended Ball State for more than this year said the alert system has not been used effectively this year.
Making students aware that violent crimes have taken place will make students take the warnings, like last week’s email, and safety information available online more seriously, Cipolla said.
“Because if they aren’t aware more of these situations are going to occur,” she said. “I think if there is an issue there needs to be a [warning] ‘Hey this happened to your fellow students,’ puts it into perspective.”
“If they want people to live near campus and come to this campus they need to know what is going on otherwise if something bad happens they won’t have a student anymore.”
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