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Monday, March 3, 2008
university tailors its
EMERGENCY RESPONSE
Wisconsin acts as indicator for Ohio primary By Charles Brace THE DAILY CARDINAL
CHRISTOPHER GUESS/CARDINAL FILE PHOTO
JACOB ELA/CARDINAL FILE PHOTO
AMANDA SALM/CARDINAL FILE PHOTO
Past emergencies, including last fall’s UW Hospital scare and lockdowns near Park Street, have exercised UW-Madison’s crisis response.
UWPD explores campus lockdown alternatives By Abram Shanedling THE DAILY CARDINAL
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After a gunman burst into a lecture hall and opened fire at Northern Illinois University last month, many students have asked if universities should lock down their campuses during emergencies. But at UW-Madison, where the student body is close to double NIU’s, campus security officials have deemed a lockdown policy infeasible and instead stress the importance of prevention, education and threat assessment. “There’s a rush to assume that locking doors is the right approach to every scenario,” UW System spokesperson David Giroux said. “But, if you have a shooter out in the open and you lock the doors, you may actually block people from seeking safety.” In April 2007, a month after the tragedy at Virginia Tech University, UW System President Kevin Reilly formed a security commission to review and make recommendations for security policies of campuses across Wisconsin. UW Police Chief Susan Riseling chaired the commission and presented the report at a Board of Regents meeting in July 2007. The commission’s final plan outlined 17 major recommendations for UW campuses. The recommendations called for awareness campaigns, more advanced training for intervention, better distribution of campus safety information and improved monitoring of suspicious behavior. “We’ve put into place a system-wide approach that addresses security issues at a broad level,” Giroux said. “We do require each UW campus to have in place a general plan, but the actual procedures to respond to a given emergency are to be enacted at a local level.” To help implement many of the commission recommendations, UWPD hired former UW-Madison lockdown page 3
New text message system aims to shorten alert time By Lexie Clinton THE DAILY CARDINAL
911...
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An emergency alert e-mail takes almost 20 minutes to reach the thousands of UW-Madison students and faculty. A text message could shorten that to a few minutes. Factor in police investigation and the decisionmaking process to employ a mass alert, and it could be nearing a half hour before students know about a gunshot or toxic gas leak, according to University of Wisconsin Police Chief Susan Riseling. When UW-Madison’s mass text messaging system launches in upcoming months, it will add the quickest layer to the emergency response plan, but university police say any alerting tool will be far from instant. “Even in the unbelievable magic world of high technology, from the point of a gun fire … it’s going to be at least 20, to 30, to 40 minutes to get a message out, realistically,” Riseling said. The new text alerts could be the fastest way to reach the nearly 60,000 people in the university community. The opt-in text service will act as one prong of the entire emergency response plan—called WiscAlerts—which includes e-mail, voicemail and Dane County’s Reverse 911 program that calls area landlines in an emergency. UW-Madison students, faculty, staff and possibly outside employers near campus will be able to submit their cell phone numbers in a confidential module at MyUW once the service debuts. Why use text messaging? John Lucas, a university spokesperson and member of a team to implement emergency response systems, said a mass text message system is unique because it can quickly reach mobile students. “The service is so timely, so we can get a message out with pretty much confidence in a matter of min-
MATT RILEY/THE DAILY CARDINAL
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The presidential campaign of U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, DN.Y., might be decided by primaries in the delegate-rich states of Ohio and Texas Tuesday. However, the Wisconsin primary’s trends could show how the upcoming contests will be determined. Ohio, like Wisconsin, has mostly white voters. Around 85 percent of voters are white in both states, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, DIll., won among white men in Wisconsin, with Clinton and Obama tied for support among white women, according to CNN exit polls. Wisconsin has almost twice as many voters aged 65 and older than Ohio, a demographic that voted for Clinton over Obama by 58 to 41 percent. Texas’ population is 35 percent Hispanic and Latino, and polls have shown Clinton garnering more Latino votes than Obama in states like Wisconsin and Nevada. Yet, Obama increased his level of support in Wisconsin among voting blocs that had previously supported Clinton, including those without a college education and women. Byron Shafer, Hawkins Chair of political science at UWMadison, said in an e-mail that primary page 3
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U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., campaigns in Texas. Primaries in Ohio and Texas could determine whether Clinton stays in the race.
“…the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”