Breaking News: Campus on lockdown.
With so many campus crises this year, headlines like this one are ever-present, however, safety officials at UW-Madison and other campuses say blanket terms like lockdown"" are misleading and infeasible to implement.
""To lock down a campus makes no sense to me,"" UW-Madison Police Chief Susan Riseling said. ""People throw these terms around without really thinking them through.""
After the Virginia Tech shootings, nearly every college campus reassessed crisis security plans and decided how to contain thousands of students, faculty and staff. Along with these plans came terminology from past campus tragedies, like the mass shootings at Columbine High School in 1999.
Lockdown was one of the terms that blossomed from Columbine, according to Alison Kiss, program director at Security on Campus Inc., a non-profit organization promoting secure campus environments.
""A lot of what is attributed to a lockdown is from Columbine and high schools where it's generally locking down one building,"" she said.
For universities with multiple campuses and tens of thousands of students, the idea of a lockdown has never translated well, safety experts on campuses say.
""People have a lot of different definitions of what we're talking about,"" Riseling said. If locking down means closing all buildings, Riseling, who authored an extensive UW System-wide security report in 2007, said she does not know what that means.
Like many big state schools, UW-Madison is not isolated. It's located throughout downtown city streets, has a 24-hour hospital and 330 buildings, many of which need to be hand-locked by a security guard.
""The University of Wisconsin-Madison is a city,"" Riseling said. ""A lockdown is just not feasible. It's akin to locking down a city of 60,000 people.""
Declaring a lockdown can also have two very problematic effects, according to Terry Cook, director of emergency management at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
""Even if you lock the doors, it doesn't prevent them from being opened from the inside,"" Cook said. ""People can still leave.""
If it happens to be an intruder you want to keep out, that can be good, Cook explained. On the other hand, if it happens that students are trying to seek shelter and are stuck outside, that's not a good thing, he said.
At Minnesota, Cook said he cannot remember any time a campus-wide lockdown was used. He said there have been several bomb threats that involved evacuating multiple buildings.
Even at a much smaller university, like Delaware State University with about 3,700 students, safety planners also say a full lockdown is infeasible. Even though the number of students may be smaller, the campus in Dover, Del., stretches over 400 acres.
The university experienced a late-night shooting incident among a group of students this fall and decided to confine students to dormitories and close the campus for the weekend.
Delaware State spokesperson Carlos Holmes said simply calling those actions a lockdown is not accurate.
""Locking down makes it sound like we're bolting the doors shut,"" Holmes said.
""We don't have impassable walls all around campus,"" he said. ""There is no possible way that we could be sure that nobody comes in or goes out of the campus at any time.""
Although schools have strayed from calling crisis plans lockdowns, these officials say heightened media coverage of school safety after Virginia Tech may paint a false picture of information flow.
""We hear about everything that happens immediately,"" Cook said. ""It creates many expectations, but there are only so many resources.""
Even in the age of to-the-minute web updates, e-mails and mass text messaging systems, Cook said keeping the entire campus informed during a time of crisis is not the main goal. Rather, available resources would be channeled toward solving the situation at hand.
""The people making the decisions know who is in harm's way,"" Cook said. ""If the threat is a couple of miles away and located in another building, there is no threat to other people.""
Still, the idea that everyone wants to know what is going on can be frustrating for university police.
""Everyone thinks they need to be told everything, and that's just not rational,"" Riseling said.
UW-Madison experienced a gunman threat on the health sciences campus this fall. The incident was a half mile from central campus, but some central buildings decided to lock doors - an action Riseling said police did not ask for.
""To me, it's silly to lock a building down far from where the problem is. It's just not relevant,"" Riseling said. ""What's happening on one end of campus doesn't necessarily affect the other end.""
At the time of a crisis, Riseling said the police's main goal is to directly respond to the situation, not declare a blanket lockdown. ""I appreciate people who are scared,"" she said, ""but when we don't need to affect everybody, there is no sense in creating that level of fear.
