Michael Schirling, UVM chief safety and compliance officer, presented safety strategies in response to growing safety concerns in Burlington at a Sept. 10 SGA meeting.
Schirling presented resources his office created to safeguard students and addressed questions and concerns regarding recent criminal incidents in the Burlington area, such as the Aug. 24 homicide on Church Street and reported instances of violent crime perpetrated by large groups of people.
“[Safety has] taken on a little bit of renewed urgency this semester,” Schirling said. “There’s been quite a bit of focus, particularly on safety off-campus and in the Burlington area. So that was the primary reason that I signed up for this meeting today.”
Some members of SGA expressed concern about CATAlert, UVM’s alert messaging system. CATAlert notifies students and their families when a potentially dangerous event is happening on campus or in the Burlington area.
Liv Bednarik, SGA vice president, questioned why the University did not issue a CATAlert following the Aug. 24 shooting at local bar Red Square.
“The Red Square shooting that happened downtown the first weekend that students had moved in—I didn’t receive a CATAlert,” Bednarik said. “I don’t think students received that. Although it was after hours, many of my friends were down there and had witnessed the event, and it was just a little disturbing that I had to get notifications by them after they had gotten to safety.”
Schirling clarified the University’s response to the shooting.
“The University wasn’t aware of that particular event until probably the same time as you were,” Schirling said. “The suspect was in custody within four to five minutes. So again, there wasn’t an ongoing danger.”
SGA President Mahder Teferra also expressed concern with the CATAlert system and when the University decides to notify students.
“There’s people that didn’t know about what had happened until they heard it through the grapevine, which isn’t really a great way to find out,” Teferra said.
Schirling also discussed the CATSafe app, which allows users to create a SafeWalk that shares their location with their peers so that they can be virtually escorted.
The CATSafe app also allows students to message police services if it doesn’t feel safe to call or send a basic report to police without having to dial 911, Schirling said.
“There are now almost 10,400 people using the CATSafe app,” he said. “It started two years ago for just about 1,000 users.”
Kevin Hytten, UVM safety and compliance coordinator, was also present at the meeting and discussed the Vermont Violence Prevention Project. The program was made possible by a federal grant that could be used to fund four initiatives aimed at terrorism prevention and violence prevention, he said.
The first of these is the Healthy Campuses and Workplace Symposium Conference. Many different organizations and agencies will congregate in the Grand Maple Ballroom of the Davis Center to communicate on strategies to better protect Vermont, Hytten said.
The VVPP also created the Violence Prevention and Response Toolkit, a series of images and videos with the goal of educating the public about violence prevention and safety awareness, Hytten said.
“We developed 11 short videos,” Hytten said. “They’re each ranging from about a minute to maybe a minute and five seconds on a number of different topics, including active threat response, run, hide, fight.”
The VVPP also revised the Department of Homeland Security’s Communities Acting to Refer and Engage Curriculum into the Bystander Intervention Training Curriculum, a two-hour course that aims to give individuals the tools to prevent violence in communities, Hytten said.
“We’ve already conducted [the curriculum] with about 325 members of the University of Vermont’s community, and have gotten great feedback,” Hytten said.
Hytten said VVPP has established the Threat Assessment Team Training initiative, with the goal of improving threat assessment teams in various organizations in communities.
“We’re trying to encourage communities to create more collaborative, community-based threat assessment teams,” he said.
Hytten said Campus Safety Week will be taking place from September 16-20 at various locations around UVM. The goal of this event will be to engage students in safety and prevention through interactive games and activities, he said.
