By Julia Berkman
CW: Sexual Assault
During the current epidemic of sexually charged crimes, some Western students are wondering why Western Alerts feel inaccessible and sporadic when it comes to assault and voyeurism.
After timely alerts of high winds and an off-campus theft blew up their phones in November, Western students took to Twitter to complain of reporting times they felt did not match the severity of the crimes being committed.
Simrun Chhabra, AS President, was concerned that students aren’t feeling heard or validated by Western administration when it comes to Western alerts.
“I understand that there’s a lot of factors to consider when making a Western Alert and they want to get as much information as possible, but they’re not coming up with an answer why. Clearly there’s student concern, and it feels like they’re trying to invalidate them based on presumption,” she said.
Paul Cocke, the Director of the Office of University Communications and Marketing, said that much of the criticism Western has received online could be mitigated with more knowledge on the process of forming and sending out a Western Alert.
According to Cocke, there are three different kinds of Western Alerts: Weather Advisory, Western Alert and Western Alert Advisory. While they may be hard to differentiate, they each have a specific functionality, according to Cocke.
Weather Advisory Alerts are self-explanatory: they have to do with the weather. Heavy snow, fast winds and flooding are all alerts that have been sent out in the past few years.
According to Cocke, Western Alerts usually contain an imminent threat to the safety or wellbeing of the school. This is the category things like fights, assaults or dangerous individuals usually fall under. For example, the hat theft on Nov. 3 was issued as a Western Alert because the individual was not caught and the act was a violent crime, Cocke said.
Western Alert Advisories are, in Cocke’s words, for more low-level threats or suspicious activity. When a man was thought to have trespassed in Ridgeway Kappa over Halloweekend, the Communications office sent out a Western Alert Advisory more than a day later.
The backlash from many students comes from the thought that Western’s Communications Office may not have taken the threat of the Kappa intruder seriously enough by not issuing an immediate Western Alert.
“Often, details are murky, fragmented, incomplete and conflicting. These can require further police investigation, which can cause delays in issuing alerts,” Cocke said.
Natalie Kim, a fifth-year psychology student, was appalled to hear that the Kappa intruder was issued as an Alert Advisory.
“By Western not sending out true alerts, it’s only perpetuating that sexual assault isn’t important and you shouldn’t talk to people about it, because Western’s not going to take it seriously,” Kim said.
Other students on Twitter shared similar complaints. Many criticized Western for sending out rapid alerts for theft or high wind and slower ones for sexual assault, harassment or voyeurism.
After reading complaints from students on Twitter, the official Western account replied to a tweet by junior Maddy Ruppel and called the event “definitely of concern,” but argued that, on the other hand, the hat theft was a “direct act of violence.”
Ruppel, a design major, said she felt that those in charge of the alerts had failed to take into account how threatening the incident in the bathroom could feel to students.
“[The] tweet was about how scary it felt for students,” Ruppel said.
She felt her tweet about Western being dismissive about student’s fears was, in turn, dismissed.
“They wanted to fix everything with a tweet,” she said.
Cocke agreed with what Western’s account had tweeted.
“The man in the shower certainly was of concern but it was unclear soon after this occurred what exactly was happening,” he said in an emailed response to questions. “This is a co-ed residence hall. Did a male student or visitor become intoxicated and wander into the wrong bathroom?”
Cocke also disputed the notion that the man was trespassing.
“It is highly doubtful that an intruder would break into a residence hall without shoes in white stocking feet. It is much more likely that he was a resident of the dorm or a visitor,” he said.
“[Western] thinking this is not a threat is really concerning. If I was in my home and somebody was waiting for me in the bathroom, I would be very concerned. For some students [the dorms are] their home. This is breaking and entering,” Chhabra said.
Ruppel said she ran into the student who encountered the man in the bathroom on a later weekend. The student was on-watch in her dorm room because she was worried something else like that could happen again, she said.
Safety tip tweets from Western’s twitter account were sent out a week after a student was groped walking home from the library on Nov. 14. They also received backlash from students on Twitter.
“What really made me upset was when they started sending out all these ‘safety tip’ tweets that, in my mind, were just thinly veiled victim blaming,” Kim said.
Ruppel said she would appreciate more accessibility for info about campus safety services, such as the phone number for Green Coats, student public safety assistants who provide free escorts around campus at night.
Alec Regimbal, a green coat, told King 5 that he’s been getting an average of three calls per day to escort people. Last year it was once a week, he said.
Ruppel said she felt like the university was responding to incidents instead of being proactive about stopping them.
“I don’t feel like the university has our backs,” Ruppel said.
While the tweets directed at Western’s twitter account were, according to Cocke, a bit inaccurate, Cocke said that the University always appreciates constructive criticism.
“Feedback from our students, faculty and staff helps us to continuously improve the Western Alert emergency notification system,“ Cocke said.
How could the system be improved? According to Kim, more transparency.
“I think what causes a panic is getting four Western Alerts about sexual misconduct and no update. Has this person been caught? Has the problem been solved? We don’t know,” she said.
“I think more information about the situation, including an action plan to make sure something will be done so we don’t get another Western Alert saying the same damn thing- that would help me feel better.”
Ruppel agreed that she would appreciate more information.
“Part of why I am so angry is because how little information there was [about the shower incident],” she said.
Among the information she would have liked to know was whether the intruder was, in fact, a student after all.
In Kim’s opinion, much of the problem stemmed from a lack of consequences for perpetrators of sexual misconduct on campus.
On December 5, The Western Front reported that out of 58 cases of reported sexual misconduct in the past seven years, there has only been one expulsion.
“This is why we get all these alerts- because there’s no consequences. Nothing is happening, Western doesn’t take things seriously. This is going to keep happening until there are direct and immediate consequences,” Kim said.