UC Davis Testing Emergency Alert System After It Failed The Night Natalie Corona Was Shot
DAVIS (CBS13) — "Lessons learned" is a phrase used when reviewing practices and protocol to an emergency. On the night a Davis Police Officer was murdered, tens of thousands of students in the surrounding campus community were not notified.
The company that pushes these alerts is used by more than half of higher education institutions nationwide, which is one of the reasons why colleges across the country are taking a closer look at what happened the night officer Corona was shot.
"This is the first time we have had a problem," said UC Davis spokesperson Andy Fell.
For the past five years, UC Davis has used Rave Mobile Safety to manage its emergency notification system. But when a Davis Police Officer was gunned down just steps from campus, and only a third of the 72,000 students were notified to shelter in place.
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"People should be aware we are looking very hard at this. We are working with the company to take steps to make sure it doesn't happen again," said Fell.
Representatives with Rave Mobile Safety met with the UC Davis Chancellor and other authorities to go over what went wrong Tuesday. The chief technology officer says there was a temporary technical issue that impacted the process responsible for loading lists, which affected a subset of those who receive messages.
However, the message delivery itself was not affected. Rave has identified the issue and corrected it.
UC Davis students are automatically enrolled in the alert system through campus email and they can add more numbers or contacts online to http://warnme.ucdavis.edu, but Davis police suggest students sign up to receive text message alerts through their platforms as well.
Lt. Paul Doroshov with Davis Police said, "The stuff we post on Nixl is cross-posted on Twitter."
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He says most students live in city limits and it's important to know about crisis not only on campus but in their community.
"Most people think it's campus parties involving students, but there are robberies and sex assault crimes too," said Doroshov.
The Los Rios Community College system uses Rave for all four campuses in the Sacramento area. School officials have been in contact with Rave since the incident on January 10. They will be conducting an emergency alert test Thursday and UC Davis will conduct a campus-wide test next Wednesday at Noon. Both schools say they typically test the system several times a year. Sacramento State uses another vendor called Regroup for its emergency notifications.