One bomb threat. More than 70,000 MSU alerts sent out.

For MSU police, the days before Thanksgiving break were hectic.

On Nov. 24, a vague shooting threat made to MSU forced a secure in place advisory on campus and prompted a lockdown for East Lansing Public Schools. An MSU alert was not sent out, although the threat said “I’m gonna (gun emoji) the school at 12:15 p.m. today,” according to court records.

MSU Police Capt. Penny Fischer said the entire ordeal lasted around 30 minutes from the time MSU received the threat and the time the suspect, later identified as finance freshman Matthew Michael Mullen, 19, was apprehended.

Mullen was arrested Nov. 24 in East Akers Hall after posting the threat on social media app Yik Yak. Mullen was later arraigned in East Lansing’s 54B District Court, and is set to appear in court again in January.

Last Tuesday, after operating in the aftermath of a shooter threat, MSU police activated the alerts system once more because of a bomb threat made to campus. Fischer said the investigation is still ongoing and police do not have a suspect.

The bomb threat was determined null after about 20 minutes, Fischer said. Police were alerted to the threat via sources who saw a threat on social media.

What made the quick response times possible, she added, was the high level of community engagement and communication with the police department.

“Somebody said ‘it seems like the time that it took you was the same time it takes on TV,’ and it almost never happens that way,” Fischer said.

Re-thinking MSU alerts

Fischer said her department is hoping to unveil a new system of signing up for MSU alerts as early as Jan. 1, which would allow faculty, staff and students to go online and modify or add contact information such as a cell phone number.

Currently, MSU police pulls their alert contacts from the information students give the Office of the Registrar when filling out emergency contact forms. If a student doesn’t fill in their cell phone number, voice and text alerts can’t be sent, Fischer said.

“Faculty and staff information is pulled from a different place than from students, so we’re trying to pull our best data from one place,” Fischer said of the new alert data pool. “Students data is actually quite good. Faculty data can be a little bad sometimes.”

Professor William Donohue, who also sits on the University Committee of Faculty Affairs, said a majority of faculty might not even get alerts as they happen because most professors don’t check their cell phones during lectures.

“I’m signed up of course, and most of the students in my classes are signed up,” he said. “When we had that active shooter alert last year about half or two thirds of my students found out about it while I was lecturing.”

Donohue said many professors didn’t follow secure in place procedure last week in part because of a lack of proper training and also because “students are going to decide what they want to do.”

“I, as a faculty member, would have to say proper protocol is secure in place, that’s what you’re supposed to do, and that would take a certain level of leadership and assertiveness. But what if there’s a back door — I can’t tackle people,” he said. “There’s no such thing as a perfect system, and hopefully more faculty get trained.”

How much is too much?

In light of the frequency of the alerts, Donohue said MSU police might have to deal with “cry-wolf” situations in which students and faculty might not take the alerts seriously.

“If you ping people on every little thing, while bomb scares are pretty important, what’s the threshold of (importance) you have to cross?” Donohue said, referring to the threshold of importance or emergency an incident has to have to warrant an alert.

Biomedical laboratory science junior Amanda Lisabeth said the alerts reach a good number of people, but many of them don’t need to be sent out.

“I think they’re effective. I signed up for them my freshman year and have gotten them ever since,” Lisabeth said. “Although there are some I don’t think they need to send out alerts for, like what happened at Beaumont Tower,” referring to a criminal sexual assault that occurred at Beaumont Tower in October.

Some students have complained that they don’t need emails, text messages and phone messages that all contain the same warning. Others, like human resource management senior Emily Gussert, feel alerts should be constant, saying students and faculty should be alerted no matter the situation, saying, “MSU might be liable if they don’t.”

Improving response time

While it would appear email alerts are delivered faster than text messages or voicemails, Fischer said in the past, email alerts were notoriously slower than the cell phone ones.

Fischer said the improvement in speed came after MSU allowed the alerts to surpass firewalls into MSU email accounts.

“We found a way to  speed up our firewalls, so it doesn’t really slow down our texts. It’s been the same speed but our emails are hitting us faster,” Fischer said.

For text messages and alerts, the alerts’ speed depends on the cell phone carrier’s individual speed.

For professors and faculty responding to the alerts, Donohue said what faculty and staff need is more accessible training.

“I think more faculty have taken the training... but it’s not the majority of faculty by any means,” he said. “Some kind of online training would be good, if I could see a video in 10 minutes and be prepared.”

Since faculty can’t be glued to their phones during classes, Donohue said MSU should consider having alerts sent to media carts or appear on laptops, which most professors use in lectures.

As for MSU responding to the threats, Fischer said the police force’s response time was optimal.

“The beauty of both of those things was our community was engaged to let us know,” Fischer said. “And that makes all the difference in the world, the community being vigilant to calls or things they see in social media or things they hear. All those things help. That was really the difference. Once we got our processes going we could solve things or do things, but until you get that information at the very beginning you don’t have anywhere to go.”