February 10, 2006
Volume 41, Issue 16

 
Nick Ngo/ The Advocate
A panic button (above) is fastened under an administrative assistant’s desk. The buttons are thought to be less effective in emergency situations and their use is being discouraged.

Campus panic-button use discouraged

By Nick Ngo

Panic buttons are little buttons found under the counter of different departments on campus used to alert and inform Public Safety of a situation occurring in that region.

According to Director of Media and Public Relations Al Sigala, there are about 36 locations on campus with panic buttons and the majority of them are active. Out of those 36 buttons, about 30 buttons work and the others are disconnected due to remodeling of the school.

Some people have an idea of what the panic button does, says Chief Operating Officer Gary Murph. They think if the panic button is hit a security officer, or number of people, will arrive immediately on the scene.

When a person hits the button, the message is sent out, which is now on a paging system to Public Safety, saying there is problem in the area. However, there is a small time delay. It takes about a minute for Public Safety to receive the message.
When they receive the message they know where the message came from, and they call that area to find out what the situation is in order to respond.

“There’s some time wasted using that system, that’s why we don’t encourage it,” Sigala said.

He prefers the staff use the phone instead of the panic button, since it would be a faster method.

Rather then pressing a button and waiting for a response, picking up the phone and calling the appropriate number and informing Public Safety of the situation is faster.
According to Murph, campus protocol in the event of an emergency is to dial 33, then Public Safety would determine whether emergency services should handle the incident.

Public Safety is only an intermediary in an emergency situation, meaning they mainly help in general assistance situations. Sigala said the school does not have a staff of emergency people to respond.

For example, if a medical problem arises they would call the hospital, for a fire they would call the fire department, and if there is a serious confrontation dealing with endangering people’s lives they call the police.

Murph believes people in that area should try to band together and defuse the situation.
“Security can’t respond immediately,” Murph said. “The need is try to defuse the situation immediately. If you’re trying to wait for 10 minutes for someone to get there, a whole lot can happen.”

That is why he said people should assess the situation, and then in their own area have a strategy for dealing with it. “I would hope that the strategy would be that the workers and co-workers help their fellow worker to help defuse any situation,” Murph said.
Also, Murph said people might have the wrong impression of the types of situations that they can get into. They should look at the terms of what can really be expected to happen.

According to Sigala, the only real situation that occurs is an angry student trying to vent their anger. In that case, he said Public Safety usually comes and calms down the student.

“I think that people have an idea in their mind of what might happen, but people have to judge what can happen,” Murph said.

“Its the bigger picture of how we take care of ourselves, how we take care of the students, how we take care of the staff.”

To improve the safety of the campus they would have to look at the lighting situation on campus, the problems in the parking lot, and security cameras.

“Are panic buttons the solution?” Sigala said. “I don’t think so.”