Anna Tart and Nylah Alexander | GNP contributors
Amaria Dexter remembers being “completely terrified” the day East Carolina University police shut down College Hill Drive.
It was Feb. 13 in the early afternoon and police a bomb threat had been aimed at Legacy Residence Hall on “the Hill.” Dexter, like many other students, did not learn about it from the police, even though she subscribes to the ECU Alert system.
She found out through ECU Barstool, a popular Instagram account, before authorities sent an official notification to students.
“We thought it was a joke because Barstool is meant to be funny,” said Dexter, a sophomore who lives in a dorm on College Hill.
Dexter was not alone in that. Other students interviewed by the Greenville News Project felt the same and more when it comes to campus safety.
“We’ve never had the talk at ECU about, like, what happens when there is a bomb threat or an active shooter on campus,” she said.
The bomb threat came as one of many alert notifications sent to students during the 2023-2024 school year. They include alerts to gun violence, larcenies and phishing scams.
However, campus safety involves far more than crime. It can also be felt in way the university responds to an emergency.
How ECU Alert works
The ECU Alert notification system has over 50,000 registered users among students, faculty, parents and Greenville residents. It is one of the university’s largest modes of communication, according to Bret Wilson, ECU police’s Clery coordinator.
The federal Clery Act require transparency in university policing and crime statistics.
Wilson works with his colleagues to issue warnings to ECU Alert users in a “timely” fashion, he says. Sometimes circumstances on the ground delay that.
The ECU Alert about the bomb threat to Legacy Residence Hall was issued an hour and a half after police arrived at the scene. In this case, police first had to check if there was a threat, Wilson said.
That day’s events started around noon when ECU police received reports about a Snapchat post that alluded to a student having a bomb in the dorm, said Jason Sugg, the university’s chief of police.
Officers tracked down the Snapchat post to the student who made it and found the “suspicious item” was a class project and was made as a joke.
Still, police “were still unable to definitively state that the item was not 100% harmless without further investigation,” said Sugg.
The investigation likely delayed the ECU Alert notification, said Wilson.
“The issuance of an alert was in question because there was no direct bomb threat, but a vague video shared for people to question if a bomb was present,” he said.
Sugg said that responding to campus threats in a timely manner is a priority, though the definition of “timely” is murky.
“It would be hard to find someone who can give you a real strict definition of what timely means,” he said. “Timely to you might be something different than timely to me, or timely at another university, so it’s hard to nail it down.”
He said that “timely” is defined by various elements of an incident, such its type, location and potential threat to campus. They came into play about half a month after the College Hill lockdown with a near-campus shooting on 5th Street in Greenville police territory.
ECU police “learned after the fact, that the suspect was headed towards ECU,” Sugg said. An Alert went out, asking the university community to stay away from the area.
Alert messages relayed to students are often put out by the university or “various people on campus,” Sugg said.
Safety in phones
ECU is decorated with cameras and what it says are “approximately 100 Emergency Blue-Light Phones.”
The phones connect the caller with a police officer and pins the caller’s location. The phones typically are in the sightline of ECU’s CCTV cameras.
Some schools are phasing out their on-campus emergency phone network because nowadays most everyone carries a smartphone, Sugg said.
ECU is taking a different path. It is turning its Blue-Light Phone pole into something “more like a technology platform” by installing cameras and emergency messaging features.
In early March the university also began installing a MyTag testing system onto the emergency phone poles, said Paul Cuthrell, the network analyst at ECU’s Office of Environmental Health and Safety.
Every 30 days ECU’s security guards scan the MyTag with their mobile devices, and the system verifies that “the poles are being tested on a monthly basis by requiring a security team to press the button and assess and damages,” Cuthrell said.
The MyTag system was first installed on the Blue-Light poles around the health sciences West Campus in the ECU Health complex. They will soon come to the poles around downtown East Campus.
The system is a “large step forward” in keeping the emergency phone system in good working order, Cuthrell said.
Not so long ago that was not the case. Outgoing SGA President Javier Limon remembers that several Blue-Light Poles were out of order more than a year ago when he was campaigning for office.
“I was out until probably like nine or 10 p.m. campaigning and I'd be walking down the mall and see a few broken ones along the way,” he said.
Limon said the SGA provided about $4,000 in leftover funding from the previous SGA president’s budget to ECU police to fix broken phones and upgrade their poles with cameras on them.
‘Live safe’ by app
In 2017 ECU introduced the LiveSafe app that was already being used at other universities in North Carolina such as UNC Chapel Hill, Wake Forest University, UNC Charlotte and UNC Wilmington.
The app serves as another safety feature, with a panic alarm, safety map, and an option to stay anonymous when reporting a crime.
The problem with it, Sugg said, is in figuring out the best digital channel to use to tell students about it.
“The university in general, we could probably do a better job of trying to advertise that we’ve had the LiveSafe,” he said.
Social work major Aaliyah Hoefer said she “never heard of the app,” but she is registered for ECU Alerts.
After a reporter described the app, Hoeffer, a junior, said “it would have been nice to use, especially as a freshman when I would walk to my car late at night when it was in the parking lot far from my dorm.”
Many students opt into ECU Alerts when they receive their acceptance letter from ECU. But the Live Safe app is not so automatic. IT has to be downloaded.
Sugg said ECU police “partner with groups across campus such as student affairs, Environmental Health and Safety, and the Dean of students to promote” the app.
SGA safety initiative
When it comes to the Blue-Light Phones, Limon said he understands that they cannot fully stop crime from happening, especially with ECU being an open campus.
Other things help too, he said, adding that the SGA is working with faculty to put instructions in their syllabus about what students to know and do in an emergency.
Sugg said ECU police are working on suggestions for adding links to short safety videos course syllabuses. The videos are “designed to be as short as possible and to have as much information as possible that we can give to people in different spatial settings,” he said.
However, Limon said there has been pushback from faculty on ideas like that. Teachers may feel that “if in case an assailant happens to be a student in my classroom, I don't want to give out the information of what I'm going to do,” Limon said.
Tart and Alexander produced this story for the course, In-depth Reporting Capstone, at the School of Communication, East Carolina University.
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