That delay is the subject of a lawsuit filed on behalf of two of the slain students contending that campus police delayed a campuswide notification that a gunman was on the loose, which the families contend might have prevented the Norris Hall shootings, The New York Times reported.
In deciding to not alert the campus of the first shooting sooner, university officials weighed the potential for creating panic over what was originally seen as an isolated incident. As a result, one of the event’s impacts is how it redefined what it means to err on the side of caution.
“The side of caution said, ‘Treat this as an isolated incident, don’t panic everyone, catch the gunman and we’ll be done with this,’” said Gerald Baron, a crisis communicator and director of PIER Strategic Systems. “Now erring on the side of caution is going to be, ‘Tell everyone as quickly as you know anything that may affect their safety.’ And really the investigation is applying a different standard of communication than these guys were operating from.”
Information Empowers
In her studies of individuals’ reactions during mass evacuations, Jeannette Sutton, a disaster sociologist with the University of Colorado at Boulder, discovered that people don’t panic when they get information. “What they do is become information seekers, and they look for more information to help resolve the questions in their minds,” she said. “If the university doesn’t release something that is official, people are going to look for other sources of information. And those could be rumor-driven sources of information. It could be inaccurate. It could be intentionally misleading. It could be inadvertently misleading sources.”In a situation such as a campus shooting, releasing information — even if it’s incomplete — puts people on alert so they can be more vigilant, Sutton has found.
And not only does the public seek information during disasters, but people can network to separate the good information from the bad. For example, following the shootings at Virginia Tech, students used Facebook to learn and confirm the identities of those who had been killed and injured — and the list they came up with matched the official list. “They challenged people’s postings and said, ‘How do you know that your information is correct?’” Sutton said. “So there were not only the individuals who were posting accurate information, but then there was this process online of people actually saying, ‘How do you know that that information is correct?’ They didn’t want to post incorrect information.”
