The Online Reflector

The University of Indianapolis campus is supposed to be a safe one—the alert notification system Watchdog is supposed to make students aware of potential harm on campus.

On Feb. 9, however, students were left without notification of a very dangerous situation.

According to a Watchdog message sent after the incident, an armed man approached two people near the Campus Apartments on separate occasions and asked for cash. When the students were unable to produce any, the suspect fled south.

Residence halls were then put on lockdown while the campus police officer on duty proceeded to search for the suspect.
The question remaining was why hadn’t there been a Watchdog message sent earlier to warn students what was happening?

UIndy students have jobs. They go grocery shopping. They go to the mall with friends. Just because students have classes on campus and live on campus does not mean they stay on campus all the time.

What about the students who were away from campus earlier in the day, and were arriving back during the time of the lockdown, or the students leaving a night class at that time? They would be locked out of residence halls.

The suspect fled south from Campus Apartments, which are located at the north end of the campus. The direction the suspect fled leads to the rest of the campus.

What about students with impeccably bad timing?

Many students could have come back when the residence halls were locked down, unaware of the situation and unable to do anything about it.

For students living in Cravens Hall and Warren Hall, located on the south end of campus, things could have ended especially badly. There could have been many more victims than two—and if the suspect indeed had a gun, the results could have been significantly more traumatic.

These students were left in danger because they were not notified that anything was wrong.

I’m not at all saying that what the campus police officer on duty did was wrong. Faced with the choice of catching the criminal or updating Watchdog, catching the criminal was a commendable choice.

However, this should never have to be a choice.

Why did UIndy not have the resources available to try to capture the gunman and also send a Watchdog notification? These are the things that should be investigated, instead of why a dispatch was not sent. The officer tried to catch the criminal. That seems obvious enough. But why couldn’t campus officials both send a Watchdog alert while still having a campus police officer go after the criminal?

Students were very angry. Facebook news feeds and Twitter tweets were overflowing with messages, statuses and questions about Watchdog and why no one had received any notification about the incident.

The Watchdog message used as an explanation of what happened two hours later just added aggravation.

Watchdog has been unreliable before. During a storm on Oct. 26, students received personal e-mails about lockdowns and class cancellations because Watchdog was not working properly. If this were a similar situation, students would not be as outraged.

The explanation sent by Watchdog hours later showed that Watchdog had been working properly, it just was not used.
Some students never received the message, even though they had registered with Watchdog, for reasons unknown to the students.

There are also several students who never received messages because they were not registered to receive them. UIndy should mandate a safety program that requires every student and faculty member to be registered to receive messages as long as they are a part of the university.

I do not doubt that the faculty at UIndy care about safety, as Kory Vitangeli stressed in her e-mail to the campus community on Feb. 10.

There just needs to be something else done to ensure situations like these do not happen again.