Remember the Shooting at Berkeley on Feb. 10? The local police are being pretty closed-mouthed about what led to the shooting by someone without an affiliation to UC-Berkeley. But beyond that issue, there have been repercussions about how students were, and weren't, notified when it occurred. Basically, students learned more from the Daily Cal than from official sources. The San Francisco Chronicle has a timeline:
Friday night was the second time UC Berkeley junior Riley Cooke planned to hang out with friends and instead ended up covering a shooting. Cooke, the university news editor for the Daily Californian student paper, was on her way to get frozen yogurt with former managing editor Anna Armstrong when their phones started buzzing with texts and Slack messages about students hearing gunshots on the south edge of campus.
Later, the university would announce that a 59-year-old man had fired several shots into the air above Lower Sproul Plaza, hitting no one, and was quickly arrested by University of California police. But the first news that a shooting had happened at all came from student journalists reporting on it, even as they themselves took shelter.
As soon as the shooting happened, information began to pour into the Daily Cal’s Slack from students across campus, according to Matt Brown, the newspaper’s managing editor and a former Chronicle intern. Some reporters had walked past the shooting as it happened, another had a friend who recorded a video of the incident, and yet another heard informally that police officers had already arrested the suspect, Brown said. But students didn’t receive a notification about the incident or the arrest until about 40 minutes after the shots were fired.
University of California police use a system called WarnMe to communicate with students about emergencies. The first WarnMe notice about the 8:40 p.m. incident went out around 9:20 p.m. Asked about the timing of the alerts, Janet Gilmore, a spokesperson for UC Berkeley, said the university was “looking into the matter.” ...
Full story at https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/uc-berkeley-shots-journalism-18660486.php.
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