By Ella Grady, Guest Writer

A recent shooting off of Brewster Avenue has led some students to be concerned with the reliability of the XU Alert Me system. 

Currently residential students have the option to move off campus at the start of their junior year and have the choice of living in various surrounding neighborhoods adjacent to campus. The Xavier Police Department (XUPD) works directly with the Cincinnati and Norwood Police Departments in order to serve the campus community, as well as providing students, faculty and staff with the XU Alert ME system with direct communication if a campus-threatening event was to occur.  

At 7:33 p.m. on the night of Sept. 26, a 911 call from a Xavier off-campus student was received by the Cincinnati Police Department (CPD) reporting that they heard gunshots in the area. 25-year-old Jawan Tyree Bates was the victim of a shooting, occurring down the street from Xavier University’s main campus, on Montgomery and Brewster Avenue. XUPD did not send a warning or an alert to the student body.

The off-campus shooting has sparked debate about what level of severity warrants an alert and why the Xavier community was not notified. 

“There should be more openness about what happened. There was no continued threat, but I think that there should have been some kind of communication after the fact saying that it happened,” junior history major and Brewster resident Donovan Murphy said. 

The XU Alert ME emergency alert system is Xavier’s variation of the RAVE Alert system used at many other college campuses. It provides 7,000 members classified as Xavier faculty, staff and students messages about emergency situations through text, phone calls, and email. It is tiered into three levels.

The first tier is sending a text, phone call and email for a high-magnitude emergency event needing an immediate emergency response. For example, shelter in place, active shooter, fire, explosion or major threat. The middle tier consists of lesser messaging to notify the Xavier community of an on going situation. For example, the FBI threat to campus resolved in late September, before the shooting. And lastly, the lower tier is for general knowledge and things XUPD wants people to know about, typically sent just through email. For example recent break-ins of Kia’s and Honda’s on campus.

“That’s (Brewster Ave shooting) a situation that we struggle with. Again, I don’t want to send out an emergency message and alert people and get folks nervous or up their anxiety unless there’s truly a reason to do so,”  Director of Public Safety and Police Chief of Xavier University, Aaron Jones said.

“From that call of service, XUPD responded and assisted with shell casing collection, but there was no active threat to Xavier’s campus. The system is used for threats to campus, and at that time, it was not believed that there was a threat to campus,” Jones said. 

Xavier, Norwood and Cincinnati Police Departments all provide coverage to the surrounding Xavier off campus neighborhoods, as shown in this map from XUPD.

Jones confirmed that in the future, XUPD will consider their coverage map and provide students with further information after the event to confirm no threats but still inform the public about the emergency.

“If we had a true emergency threat to campus, we would send out an emergency alert. If it’s not an active emergency, and we wanted students to know what was going on, we would send out an update the next morning just to give general information as to what occurred and why, and the things that we (XUPD) did,” Jones said.

Murphy also confirmed that XUPD was on the scene and contributed alongside Cincinnati Police, but as it was off campus, the investigation was led by CPD. 

If an emergent event were to occur in the future, Xavier believes that it has the tools to foster an environment that prioritizes the safety of its campus, where there is clear communication between both XUPD and its campus community.