Shin Wakabayashi

If you are part of the 63 percent of students who have registered to receive messages from RIT Alert — our campus’ Emergency Mass Notification system — you probably received an ominous phone call or text message the morning of Friday, March 16: “Shelter in Place. Person allegedly with a rifle spotted outside Kate Gleason Hall.”

Earlier that morning, a Regional Transit Service (RTS) bus driver spotted a student carrying a samurai-sword-handled umbrella in his backpack, but alerted the police after mistaking it for a rifle. What would follow over the next hour were repeated messages and updates from RIT Alert, advising students, faculty and staff: “Shelter in place — STAY indoors. Lock or barricade doors. Nathaniel Rochester Hall or Kate Gleason Hall residents.”

There were erroneous updates on social media — including one tweeted under the #RIT hashtag claiming, “MAN WITH GUN, REFUSING TO COMPLY, PERPETRATOR ON FOOT RUNNING NORTH, CANINE UNIT BEING DEPLOYED.” There was even a live breaking news spot on CNN.

Ultimately, RIT Public Safety and the Monroe Country Sheriff’s Office would successfully identify and locate the purported gunman — a first year photography student — in his dorm room, and would ascertain that the “rifle” was no more than a collectible umbrella. Public Safety confiscated the item, and will return it to the owner at the end of the academic year.

Overall, local media outlets report that the campus community was, on the whole, pleased with the management of the incident: “The bus driver did everything he was supposed to do by alerting Public Safety,” says RIT spokesman Paul Stella. Many students allegedly agreed: “False alarm or not, they say they appreciated the alerts,” reported 13 WHAM’s Angela Hong.

However, for first year Fine Art Photography major Caleb Statser — roommate of the umbrella-bearer — the reporting may have been a little too congratulatory. In the search for the alleged gunman, Statser was mistakenly taken to be the suspect and briefly detained by the Monroe County Sheriff ’s Office after they entered his room:

“I was kind of half-asleep, honestly. They literally pulled me out of bed, in my boxers, and put handcuffs on me,” says Statser, “There was me, in my boxers, and a bunch of guys with assault rifles and combat shotguns.”

Ironically, Statser says his roommate was in the next room over when the authorities came in: “He told me later he heard them burst into [the] room.”

Statser does report that after the misidentification was discovered, authorities apologized for the mix-up and took some personal information. Later, a Center for Residence Life representative also came to offer an apology.

That the honest misidentification went largely unreported is Statser’s only qualm with RIT’s management of the incident: “[The reports] didn’t say anything about the fact that before [the authorities] got [the student they were searching for], they pulled some other kid out of bed and handcuffed him, and I figured, at least, that people should know,” he says.

Thus, while the overall assessment of the response has been relatively positive, there is always room for improvement — a point that Assistant Vice President for Global Risk Management Services John Zink noted in an interview. “We have learned a few things that could [have been] done differently, and we are looking into [them],” said Zink. “This is an opportunity for us to look at what happened, see what worked well, [and maybe] see what could be improved upon, and then take those steps necessary to improve the things we can improve.”

For instance, social media presented a challenge for communication during the alert because of misinformation spread in the heat of the emergency: “With social media [and] as many students as we have, it can be very hard to stay out in front of that, and it can result in misinformation being out there,” Zink observed.

Thus, Zink advises that “in any emergency on campus, pay attention to the website [and] watch for Message Center — you’re going to get the most accurate information there.”

Even with the challenges of mobilizing a massive, rapid response to an emergency situation, Zink notes: “Overall, if you consider that the entire situation lasted just over an hour, in [which] time, we were able to communicate with over 16,000 people, a total of over 83,000 messages went out … a lot happened in that hour.”

Zink also praised Public Safety’s skill in identifying and locating the student within a very short period of time, having only a phoned-in description and an unidentifiable video shot of the student — feats not easily accomplished on a campus consisting of almost 18,000 students.

“Every response will have its unique characteristics,” says Zink. “And you just have to manage through those and do the best that you can.”

TO REGISTER FOR RIT ALERTS, VISIT http://finweb.rit.edu/buscont/massnotification.html