SU, DPS need to mend the relationship between students and them
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On March 27 at 9:57 a.m. in Nashville, Tennessee, the Covenant School shooter first indicated their violent intent on Instagram. At 10:10 a.m., the first shots echoed across the campus. It took 13 minutes for a threat to turn into active violence and cause danger throughout the school.
On Sunday night, at 10:47 p.m, the Twitter account CNY911 tweeted that police had been dispatched to a shooting on College Place, a central Syracuse University campus street. SU’s Department of Public Safety remained entirely silent until tweeting that the shooting was false at 11:54 p.m. If it took only 13 minutes for a shooter to open fire at Covenant University from the time of an initial warning, how is it acceptable for DPS to remain silent for over an hour?
In our current climate of persistent and senseless gun violence in schools, tensions consistently run high. When a credible threat of an active shooter arrives on our campus, anxiety and fear will only heighten. We have a right to hold confidence in the fact that DPS will adequately respond to a situation and protect our campus community. Silence on such a leading issue only worsens the already strained relationship between DPS and the SU community.
When DPS first released a message to students, it was on their Twitter account and only to deny that there was an active threat to the SU community. This does not negate the fear students felt when they believed that there was a potential danger on our campus. Quickly, word of the situation spread throughout the student body. Misinformation and fear took over as news spread through word of mouth, on YikYak and other social media, while the department sworn to protect us offered no information.
A day later, at 4:42 p.m. on Monday, DPS made their first campus-wide official announcement about the incident. The email titled, “How DPS Communicates in the Event of an Imminent Threat to Public Safety,” immediately and clearly demonstrated a purpose of defending the department’s lack of communication. In the email, Chief Craig Stone cites their protocol, stating that in the event of a potential active shooter, DPS is to issue a broadcast in the form of an “Orange Alert.” That broadcast did not come in Sunday’s incident because DPS did not deem the threat “imminent” enough.
Even after DPS discovered that this situation was merely the result of swatting and not an active threat, they had an obligation to inform the SU community accordingly. Instead, they waited almost an entire day to formally advise us of the reality.
If there was a time to alert the school community of a threat, it was during that event. If the threat was substantial enough to require both law enforcement and EMS, how was it not substantial enough to warrant a mere warning? Students in nearby dorms lay either blissfully unaware or entirely fearful as their fate potentially played out only a few feet away.
While this situation fortunately came to a safe conclusion, SU is constantly vulnerable to a very real incident as school shootings increase. There have been 146 mass shootings so far this year. We cannot pretend that our campus is immune to such a threat. While the prevention of such an incident may be momentarily out of our hands, we can lean our focus upon staying vigilant with our response to such a crisis. We are at the mercy of DPS, and they have now shown us our reality.
From situations like DPS’ underwhelming reaction to the Watson Hall bias incidents or even its actions during #NotAgainSU, the department has consistently taken action that directly led to students’ distrust. We cannot trust that we will have all or any of the necessary information to stay safe or, at least, gain a peace of mind. If it took only 13 minutes in Nashville, an hour is far too long for Syracuse.
Caden Denslow is a social work major on a pre-med track. His column appears biweekly. He can be reached at crdenslo@syr.edu.
