Awareness, preparedness must accompany alerts
This time, what the student body did not know could have hurt them.
The college’s police department is still in its infancy,
less than a year removed from the decision to become armed police rather than unarmed security.
That does not excuse the lack of free flowing information
to students regarding just how dangerous the “person of interest” in the purse thefts on Feb. 10 could have been.
Apprehended on Feb. 18 at a traffic stop in Lawrence,
Kan., the suspect is in the custody of the Overland Park Police Department (OPPD) for a string of thefts at colleges in the area.
No charges have been filed for anything that happened at our college, so only limited personal information is available.
On the surface, the college police department took many proactive steps to keep the college safe.
They released a crime alert on their website with camera screenshots of the person of interest.
The OPPD plastered flyers with his mug shot on windows and doors across campus. InfoList, the college’s e-mail news service, provided multiple updates.
However, one critical detail was never publicized to the student body: college police considered the person of interest to be armed and dangerous.
While searching through various buildings on campus, some officers used that very phrase to describe the suspect to at least one faculty member.
Police department or not, the students have a right to know if a potentially armed and dangerous suspect with warrants out for his arrest is lurking in their shadows.
The date of April 16, 2007 still haunts many who felt school shootings were limited to high schools. It was the date of the Virginia Tech massacre, an event that the Virginia Tech review panel found should have been publicized after the first murder was discovered.
The college used the massacre at Virginia Tech, as well as the shootings at Northern Illinois University, to justify arming their Department of Public Safety.
The weapons, while controversial, are a useful tool if a dangerous situation does ever present itself at the college.
But the college cannot afford to stop there. While it is true that publicizing such information could spur hysteria and rumors, the consequences of not publicizing the true danger is even greater.
Say a do-gooder takes it upon himself to confront the purse thief himself after seeing his mug shot on a door. The ramifications of that confrontation could be ugly.
What if the person of interest saw his own face in a window? Would that put him on a path of destruction?
The college has a plethora of tools to inform students
when they are in danger.
Digital signage, TXTJCCC and The Campus Ledger are avenues of information for the student body. But the college cannot withhold any suspicions they have that directly impact the community’s safety.