INTERACTIVE MAP: Campus Security

Two key Virginia universities, Virginia Tech and Virginia Commonwealth University, have strengthened alert systems by giving campus law-enforcement agencies the authority and technical ability to warn students and faculty about imminent dangers.

Those shifts bring the two schools into line with most others across the state.

But questions remain about how quickly universities can react under any response system, given last week's puzzling encounter at the University of Richmond involving a disguised man armed with a pellet gun.

Beyond the millions of dollars colleges have spent for messaging systems, sirens and security measures following the Tech shootings lies a more immediate question:

Who issues the alert and when does it go out?

"There's no question in our minds that University of Richmond Police acted appropriately and quickly," said Henrico County Police Lt. Doug Perry. "They did everything right."

Henrico and Richmond city police responded to the UR situation, sending air surveillance teams and multiple police units to the scene based on long-established response plans.

But in the UR event Tuesday, as much as an hour passed between the time police say Seth A. Newman, 19, of Henrico wandered onto the campus and the school issued its first alert of a dangerous person. And nearly two hours elapsed before students received a description of the man that said he had a gun.

Newman left the campus by 3 p.m., about a half-hour before the first alert was issued, police now believe. He was arrested at home, police said.

University officials said the delays occurred because, initially, a communications office employee who literally pushes the button to enact the emergency alert system was briefly out of the office. Time passed as police sought out witnesses, confirmed descriptions and tried to confirm the presence of a gun.

"We think we did well, but we can be faster," said UR spokeswoman Linda Evans. "Our police department has the authority but not the technical ability to issue the alerts."

Even after the UR alerts were issued, some students milled around the school's 300-acre campus, which had all but emptied after exams last week, unaware they needed to check e-mails. About 44 percent of students, faculty and staff are not signed up to receive alerts on their cell phones. A siren system at UR is only used for tornado alerts.

. . .

In retrospect, the UR incident bore little resemblance, in severity or consequences, to the massacre at Virginia Tech.

But at their outsets, both incidents bore an eerie similarity: Police were responding to reports of someone on campus with a weapon.

At Tech, police spent more than two hours tracking down a suspect wrongly believed to be the gunman in two fatal shootings early April 16 last year.

The actual gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, had remained in the immediate campus area and followed up his initial killings with the massacre some two hours later at Norris Hall.

The first alert at 9:26 a.m. reported a shooting but failed to say it occurred two hours earlier and resulted in the deaths of two people. Not until 9:50, after the multiple Norris Hall deaths occurred and one minute before Cho killed himself, was a second, more explicit message about a gunman on campus sent out.

At 10:15, a third message canceled all classes. At 12:15, Tech was closed.

Initial responses by police and administrators April 16 last year in Blacksburg prompted bitter reactions from some observers.

Among the earliest and fiercest voices was Dale Yeager, president of SERAPH, a law enforcement training organization in Pennsylvania. He argued that Tech officials who are part of an emergency policy group should be charged with obstruction of justice.

"It was a failure on many fronts but most of all by Tech administrators who required the police to follow the decisions of Tech's Policy Group when responding to a threat," Yeager said in a recent interview, reiterating thoughts he first expressed in the aftermath of April 16.

Family members of victims considering suit against the school took up Yeager's allegations; and so did the panel formed by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine to investigate the tragedy.

"The police had to await the deliberations of the Policy Group, of which they are not a member, even when minutes count," the panel report found.

"The university administration failed to notify students and staff of a dangerous situation in a timely manner," the report said.

Virginia Tech Associate Vice President Lawrence G. Hincker said in interviews that the panel report in some respects misrepresented Tech's policy on and before April 16.

"There is nothing in our policy or past operating practice that would require the [Tech police] to get permission from anyone in order to send an emergency message to the university community," he said.

What the police lacked, Hincker said, was the physical access to the alert system: the ability to push the button to actually issue an alert.

That has now changed.

Tech has installed hardware and software giving its police force for the first time the capability to unilaterally issue campuswide alerts. The same shift has been implemented in recent months at Virginia Commonwealth University.

. . .

Today, universities and colleges almost uniformly heed the "minutes count" dictate.

Police departments at Virginia Tech, VCU, the College of William and Mary, the University of Virginia, James Madison University, and Old Dominion University all have independent authority and the technical ability to issue alerts.

"We came to the conclusion that in the case of an extreme threat where there are seconds to respond, you've got to conclude that being two steps removed [from enacting an alert] is not going to be quick enough," said VCU's John M. Bennett, vice president of finance.

In the past, Bennett had to sign off on alerts. Now, VCU police do not have to consult him first.

VCU Police Chief Willie Turner and more than a dozen other law enforcement personnel now have authority to enact alarms and other campus alerts.

An already-formatted series of text messages has been created to address specific scenarios, from weather threats to hazardous spills to active shooters and bomb threats.

Administrators remain a key part of the alert process at all these schools; emergency management teams typically and quickly get together to oversee ongoing responses in the aftermath of the immediate police response.

Yeager is pleased with the shift to police authority but said other problems persist.

"What we are seeing is a huge focus on response," he said. "But what needs just as much attention is training and the ability to recognize a threat or troubled student before something happens."
Contact Bill McKelway at (804) 649-6601 or bmckelway@timesdispatch.com.