Shooting near campus reveals bugs in emergency notification system

Shortly after noon on Wednesday, Nov. 30, students, faculty and staff members who had signed up for the e2campus notification system received a series of text messages regarding, "three reportedly armed men, possible shooting, last seen in Palmer Park corner of Union and Austin Bluffs."

Chief of Police Jim Spice said their dispatcher was monitoring the Colorado Springs Police Department radio frequencies a few minutes after 12 p.m. when they overheard a call of shots fired near Brenner Place and Austin Bluffs Parkway, about 0.7 miles from University Hall.

"One of the CSP officers on the radio mentioned alerting UCCS since they could be heading our way," Spice said. "So we got on the radio and offered, you know, ‘What do you need?' and we automatically sent two patrol officers down to the parking lot N to watch for these three suspects."

"We also sent down Steve Linhart, who's our emergency manager, to do foot patrol inside University Hall to make sure that stayed safe as well," he added.

"About 12:20, we started making the decision to send out a text because we don't know anything else [about the situation], and we want to at least inform the campus about what's going on so far," he said.

The first text message was sent at approximately 12:26 and was cut off in the middle of the location details because the message went beyond the 160-character limit of standard text messaging systems. "This was a learning experience for us," he said.

The emergency messages were also simultaneously emailed via the student, faculty and staff email lists, but a technical glitch involving the migration of accounts to Microsoft Exchange prevented many faculty and staff members from receiving them; this problem is now being investigated and is expected to be resolved should the system need to be used again.

At 12:30, another message was sent saying that two suspects had been detained and they were still searching for a third suspect. By 12:34, a final message was sent indicating that all suspects were in custody.

The time from the first message to the last was just eight minutes.

Spice said they were required to send these messages under a provision of the Clery Act, a 1990 federal law, which requires an educational institution to give "timely warnings" of crimes that may represent a threat to the safety of students or employees.

Spice added that one benefit from the incident is that an additional 200 users registered for the emergency notification system in the 24 hours following the incident.

Spice said that a total of over 4,500 users have now signed up for the service, up significantly from the 2,400 number he gave last February; however, this is still less than half of the approximately 10,000 students, staff and faculty on campus.

The service is free to all members of the campus community: Just go to e2campus.uccs.edu, enter your UCCS IT credentials, and enter up to two cell phone numbers and an email address.