2 — Friday, March 22, 2019 The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com News ALEC COHEN/Daily BE HIND TH E STORY Stanford Lipsey Student Publications Building 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1327 www.michigandaily.com ARTS SECTION arts@michigandaily.com SPORTS SECTION sports@michigandaily.com ADVERTISING dailydisplay@gmail.com NEWS TIPS news@michigandaily.com LETTERS TO THE EDITOR tothedaily@michigandaily.com EDITORIAL PAGE opinion@michigandaily.com TOMMY DYE Business Manager 734-418-4115 ext. 1241 tomedye@michigandaily.com MAYA GOLDMAN Editor in Chief 734-418-4115 ext. 1251 mayagold@michigandaily.com PHOTOGRAPHY SECTION photo@michigandaily.com NEWSROOM 734-418-4115 opt. 3 CORRECTIONS corrections@michigandaily.com The Michigan Daily (ISSN 0745-967) is published Monday through Friday during the fall and winter terms by students at the University OF Michigan. One copy is available free of charge to all readers. Additional copies may be picked up at the Daily’s office for $2. 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Every event I go to I have that sensation but this one especially. For one, I knew I should not live tweet this event. I cannot live tweet somebody’s grief and somebody’s fear and somebody’s mourning. Especially then, it was important for me to be present in the moment, and to be there not only as a reporter, but to also grieve and mourn and show solidarity just like everybody else who was there.” “I think it’s such a huge shame that this event was disrupted, this event deserved coverage on its own for the event itself. I wanted to make the disruption of the event as small a part of the story as I could, because in the end, this was supposed to be a space for healing and sharing and solidarity, and that had already been interrupted once. I tried in my article to just use as many quotes as I could and to minimize summary, because I thought the speakers had beautiful things to say, and it would just be such a better reflection of the article if I did as little work as possible and let the quotes speak for themselves.” TUESDAY: By Design THURSDAY: Twitter Talk FRIDAY: Behind the Story WEDNESDAY: This Week in History MONDAY: Looking at the Numbers QUOTE OF THE WE E K After these events, it has become clear that we need to develop direct protocols for breaking news events that potentially threaten public safety. Our promise to our readers is that we will be better prepared if another incident of this gravity occurs in the University or Ann Arbor community. The Daily has consulted other media outlets for advice and tips and will continue to discuss different facets of our new protocols with professionals and members of our community.” The Managing Editors of The Michigan Daily, in response to Saturday’s active shooter scare and a now-deleted tweet about unsubstantiated reports of wounded students SUDOKU MEDIUM 5 3 6 5 3 8 7 3 4 5 8 4 9 1 5 7 8 4 5 1 8 9 3 2 6 7 2 5 © sudokusolver.com. For personal use only. Generate and solve Sudoku, Super Sudoku and Godoku puzzles at sudokusyndication.com! Sudoku Syndication http://sudokusyndication.com/sudoku/generator/print/ 1 of 1 3/30/09 10:03 AM IT’S MY B-DAY puzzle by sudokusyndication.com “ Overton said the main goal of officers is to get to the scene is quickly as possible and then, as soon as the officers are dispatched, the emergency alert is sent out. Some may have gotten it sooner than others — notably, doctors may have been notified prior to others on campus. Regarding the communication of different law enforcement agencies, Overton said everyone trains together for these scenarios and signs a mutual aid agreement. At a site, there is an incident commander in charge of all agencies helping to investigate the situation. Everything happens through this person in order to ease communication and coordination, according to Overton. When an incident like this occurs, DPSS utilizes their campus-wide emergency alert system. Students, faculty and staff can sign up for voice message and text message alerts, and in theory, everyone in the University email system receives these alerts via email. DPSS started receiving reports of a potential active shooter at 4:35 p.m., according to a statement from the Office of Public Affairs. DPSS’ first email alert urging campus to “run, hide, fight” came at 5:06 p.m. However, LSA sophomore Sumaya Tabbah, a member of the DPSS student advisory board and of the Muslim Students’ Association, said she did not receive any email notifications at all. “For the emails, I didn’t even get an email, which is concerning,” Tabbah said. Overton said DPSS has received many of these complaints of people receiving delayed alerts or receiving none, and is currently analyzing its system to figure out why this happened. “We did receive multiple complaints on the system,” Overton said. “ … We are aware that some of the alerts took a lot longer than they should have, and we are looking into that.” Overton urged people to download DPSS’ app, which is geared more toward alerts and push notifications. Business senior Elizabeth Fakhoury, chair of DPSS Student Advisory Board, said the board has been working with DPSS to promote the app and better configure it for students. She noted the student-DPSS disconnect has been a focus since the board’s inception. “Not signing up for alerts and being in the know-how is what we were tackling within the last year, and so DPSS created a Facebook page to update students on what’s going on and so through all of this, they were updating the alerts and they were saying you can sign onto emergency alerts here,” Fakhoury said. Currently, the emergency alerts via text are received via an opt-in system. Students, faculty and staff do not receive these unless they explicitly sign up. Overton said DPSS has recommended transitioning to an opt-out system for years, but that this decision is ultimately up to a higher University authority. Tabbah said she and other Muslim leaders on campus met with University President Mark Schlissel Wednesday morning to discuss some of these issues. She said making the alerts an opt-out system is a question they raised. “But for the text messages, we asked Schlissel this morning why is it an opt-in system instead of an opt-out system,” Tabbah said. “It should be you’re automatically signed up for it and then if you feel like you don’t want to get those then you should opt-out, instead of putting the responsibility on the students.” According to Tabbah, Schlissel’s response was that in the past, they had to make it opt-in due to complications with legality. Tabbah said Schlissel speculated that pay-per-text phone plans may have been the reason. II. The spread of (mis) information Michael Colegrove, a college safety consultant, said when there is a gap in time between an incident and when there is official information released, people cling onto information, regardless if it is verified or not. “The need for almost instantaneous communication is necessary, especially communication from a known source,” Colegrove said. “What happens if you have a gap that exists between the time of the incident and the time the word gets out from an official source — that vacuum is filled with a lot of misinformation.” This unverified information spread rapidly across campus, giving different people unique experiences. Standing on the steps of the Graduate Library reading her poem at the vigil commemorating the lives of people killed in the New Zealand mosques shooting, Fadwa Ashur, a student at Eastern Michigan University, saw the two police officers running towards the Diag before she heard them. DPSS had been at the event already, as organizers knew this was an event that could potentially attract hate and violence. When the police yelled repeatedly at the crowd to move, she ran with friends into the Graduate Library, where they stayed for two hours. Since she was not University- affiliated, she did not sign up for or receive the DPSS alerts. In the Graduate Library, Ashur discovered her phone had no cell service and could not connect to the University’s internet network. According to Ashur, she received information from a TV in the room they were in. “There was a TV in the middle of the room (I was in) that showed the three alerts, (my friends and I) got (the alerts) through that,” Ashur said. “I don’t know about other people, but I couldn’t connect to MGuest so I didn’t have Internet, and I had no network… I couldn’t call anyone through my phone. I couldn’t even reach out to my family or anything… That was the scariest part.” Ashur explained she and her friends saw police officers running nearby about one hour into hiding after they had taken refuge in the Graduate Library. The officers were responding to a false fire alarm; however, Ashur said she and her friends had no way of knowing this. Based on the alerts they had seen, Ahsur said they assumed the police were responding to an active shooter. At 5:28 p.m., in a video obtained by The Daily, an announcement can be heard informing students of the false fire alarm. The announcement also said the shooter was unconfirmed and told students they could either stay in the Graduate Library or leave. Ashur expressed she felt the announcement could not confirm they would be safe leaving, so she and her friends stayed in the Graduate Library. “My friends and I stayed (in Hatcher), and I think only a couple of people left,” Ashur said. “Because that (announcement) was not reassuring… ‘Unconfirmed’ means they did not tell us whether or not there was a shooter. We stayed there, we were like we’re not going to risk leaving.” LSA senior Brendon Cho expressed confusion at this announcement. He heard people inside the Graduate Library were told to stay put, while the police scanner speakers were saying they should evacuate. “From what I’m told there were conflicting reports from the police and the police radio, as well as from the announcement they had in Hatcher,” Cho said. “Apparently the police really wanted everyone to clear from the Hatcher building, but they were told by the PA system to kind of stay there and hunker down at Hatcher, so it was kind of hard to find who was really right and who to trust.” University alum Brittney Williams, who was in town visiting on Saturday, voiced her disappointment with the University’s communication protocol in a tweet that as of publication has received 200 likes and 28 retweets. In an interview with The Daily, Williams further questioned why certain staff members received phone calls immediately while other staff and students didn’t. “(The University’s communication protocol) was mindblowing, in particular because the people (my friends and I) were checking in on while we were waiting for an official alert were current students, who in my opinion should’ve known pretty much immediately,” Williams said. ALERT From Page 1 See ALERT, Page 3