Students continue to doubt Alert Carolina’s effectiveness

Less than a week after revising its emergency alert system, the University sounded its sirens for the first time in campus history for something that was not a drill.

“I ran outside looking for a tornado,” freshman Kane Borders said. “It was kind of a let down because there was no tornado.”

University chief of police Jeff McCracken said the Alert Carolina system is not, and may never be, completely fine-tuned.

“Part of the process of the emergency plan is evaluating the process after the fact,” McCracken said.

“It will never be a complete plan because emergency plans are always evolving based on current circumstances.”

In September, the University revised the system in response to student complaints in the spring that it had failed to accurately inform them of threats.

Since the change, some students have complained that the emergency service has been inconsistent with what it reports.

For instance, Alert Carolina did not notify the campus community of a reported rape on campus but did send an email Sept. 12 about a reported sexual battery on the P2P in the early morning, including the student suspect’s name and a link to a photograph.

But DPS officials stand behind the system.

“There has not been one (instance) that we have not sent a warning out on the current protocols that should have been sent out,” McCracken said.

McCracken said the reason students are confused with why some warnings are sent out stems from the fact that the University cannot always reveal all of its information.

“We obviously will always have more information that we use to make our decision,” he said.

Because of the confusion, an informational poster is in production that will detail the step-by-step process people can take if they hear a siren on campus, McCracken said.

University spokesman Mike McFarland added that the sirens and text messages are the two most effective ways to reach people but neither are perfect.

He said the University has the capability to text about 96 percent of about 40,000 text-capable registered phones in the UNC community in less than a minute.

Department of Public Safety spokesman Randy Young added that the alerts are not designed to reflect the proportional number of crimes that occur on campus.

“That’s not the goal of the program,” Young said.

“The Alert Carolina goal is to take people out of harm’s way.”

Having an accurate representation of crime has never been discussed in the logic of the plan, McFarland said.

“Obviously, there are things we are trying to fine tune,” Young said.

Contact the University Editor at university@dailytarheel.com.