The Division of Public Safety’s release of a UPennAlert in response to last Friday’s assault provoked mixed reactions among students.
Issued 50 minutes after the incident on the 3800 block of Sansom Street was reported, the alert initially misreported its location as the 3600 block. In addition, it did not specify that the assault had been a stabbing.
While College sophomore Maria Bellantoni acknowledged that she was “very appreciative” of the alert, she admitted to finding its “ambiguity and timing … a little disconcerting.”
“It’s news to me that the ‘assault’ half a block from my dorm was a stabbing incident,” Bellantoni wrote in an e-mail. She lives in Sansom Place, located on 37th and Sansom streets.
College sophomore and fellow Sansom Place resident Anne Wang was in class when the alert was sent and did not see the message until 11 a.m.
“I was a bit concerned, but not too scared,” she wrote in an e-mail.
Her roommate, College sophomore Kambiri Cox, was about to leave their room when the alert was issued.
“It was pretty scary because I have to walk along that block to get to any of my classes,” she said. “Then, my mom back in Trinidad got the text message and later called me freaking out.”
Cox said she was apprehensive about leaving the building to attend classes after learning of the incident.
Wang, however, maintained that she “still trust[s] that campus security tries their hardest to keep us safe.”
“I generally believe that incidents like stabbings are isolated, and that campus security probably could not have prevented it,” she said.
According to Vice President for Public Safety Maureen Rush, it is difficult to decide how much information alerts should include to notify the community that an incident has occurred without prompting undue alarm.
The activation of the alert system is intended to “help, not panic” students, she said.
She emphasized that text message alerts, which are currently limited to 140 characters, aim to provide a “snapshot” of accurate preliminary information. The messages direct students to the DPS website where they can then access more comprehensive information.
Text message alerts “are a means of instant communication we only use when we believe there is potential danger to the community still at hand,” Rush said.
Rush attributed the delay between the assault and the corresponding alert to DPS’s efforts to ensure the accuracy of the information released.
“We have to know what we’re talking about before we put something out,” Rush said, adding that the information provided by last Friday’s alert had been obtained from the victim’s account of the assault.
Rush said DPS lacks the time to interview victims at length immediately after such incidents because of the community’s need for “instant messaging” about crimes of this nature. She added that DPS “will continue to work on timeliness, but we also want to be as accurate as possible.”
She explained that when the stabbing was reported, the injured student originally believed the incident had occurred on the 3600 block of Sansom Street. After detectives consulted camera footage and spoke with the student, however, they confirmed that the attack had actually taken place on the 3800 block.
The location of the incident “shouldn’t be a big issue,” Rush said, because the suspect did not remain at the site of the assault and could have gone in any direction.
She added that DPS has received a significant amount of favorable feedback for releasing the alert.
“People said they were glad we were able to put out the information that made them more aware of their surroundings,” she said.
Rush characterized the stabbing itself as an “aberration” in many respects — ranging from the time of day it was reported to the circumstances under which it occurred — and added that it was the first such incident she had witnessed in her 17 years at Penn.
Due to the arbitrary nature of the incident, she said, she didn’t “see any way it could have been prevented.”
Sansom Street — like all streets on and near campus — is patrolled regularly by security officers.
