Why Must UC Berkeley Tell Us About Stolen Bananas and Bubbly Water?
By Annie Koruga
On Monday October 30th at 5:36PM, UC Berkeley, via the WarnMe email system, took it upon themselves to inform the entire student community that someone had stolen two bananas, two cans of Bubbly soda, and two waters from Golden Bear Cafe, and that this occurred sometime during the preceding weekend. While absurd and perhaps hilarious, this event – which occurred sometime between seventeen and forty-one hours before the campuswide notice was sent – did not appear to be an immediate threat to anyone's safety by the time it was reported, nor likely was it ever an immediate threat to the safety of our campus community. Instead, it was exemplary of the problematic overuse of the WarnMe notification system, which in turn dulls the impact of actual emergency notices sent out through WarnMe.
Stepping back, having systems to disseminate information about emergencies, immediate threats to public safety, or events such as on-campus power outages which will impact many students is important. And, that's ostensibly what WarnMe is. According to the university, emails are sent out via WarnMe “upon confirmation of a significant emergency or dangerous situation occurring on the campus that involves an immediate threat to the health or safety of students or employees.” It's important for students to trust the system tasked with alerting our community of danger, as opposed to seeing it similarly to the boy who cried wolf. However, when we get report after report and email after email concerning non-emergencies which don't present an immediate danger to anyone, it gets harder and harder to take WarnMe seriously while concurrently getting easier and easier to ignore. That means WarnMe is failing at its job. When we get emails about some produce and soda being stolen two days ago, most of us probably don't think it's an emergency. If the 1,326 people who liked the Free Peach, our satirical newspaper’s, Instagram post on the matter are anything to go by, we think it's a joke.
Many times, WarnMe alerts do not fit the definition provided by the university concerning what they should be used for. Instead these non-immediate threats to public safety tend to fall into two categories. Sometimes WarnMe alerts are used to report conduct which, though harmful, is not an immediate threat to public safety. Other times these alerts are used to call attention to conduct which may or may not once have constituted an immediate threat to public safety but which is being reported long enough after the fact that if the immediate threat ever even existed it probably long since dissipated.
The former category consists of a diverse array of conduct, which to be clear, if the UC Police Department (UCPD) is accurately reporting what is occurring, should not have occurred. However, not all damaging conduct causes an immediate threat to the safety of the campus community, and therefore these alerts should not have gone out by way of them not informing anyone of an immediate threat. Some recent examples of such reports include multiple WarnMe alerts about stealing construction tools and industrial equipment, usually from areas outside of the immediate vicinity of students. On May 28th in the afternoon, we got a WarnMe alert reporting that metals and industrial equipment had been stolen from UC Berkeley owned property in Richmond sometime between May 23rd and May 28th. It is worth noting both that this did not occur near campus, and that it
took up to five days to report, suggesting that it was not an immediate danger. Somewhat similarly, on March 5th in the morning we were informed via WarnMe that construction tools were stolen earlier that morning, while on February 21st we were told that construction tools were stolen either that morning or the previous evening. On both January 2nd and January 6th we received WarnMes about tools being stolen from Richmond Field Station, in Richmond, between December 27th and January 2nd, and on January 5th, respectively. In all of these cases, the perpetrators’ conduct makes it seem like they’re much more interested in unlawfully obtaining construction tools than they are in harming people, and most of these incidents occurred far away from students.
Much of the rest of the harmful, though not immediately dangerous conduct which ends up in WarnMe notifications also concerns theft of some sort – similarly to the infamous bananas and bubbly water incident. In the recent past these incidents include the WarnMe on July 14th at 4:06am telling us all that at 5:30am on July 13th an unknown person stole unknown items from Golden Bear Cafe. Presumably, if this constituted an immediate danger it would have been sent out sooner, and the university would know what was taken – in fact, query how those allegedly stolen items were unknown twenty-four hours later. Other incidents include the May 27th WarnMe which reported headphones, a projector, and a cellphone had been stolen sometime between May 24th and May 27th, and the January 10th WarnMe which reported that a resident’s clothes had been stolen from the laundry room the previous day. Interestingly, and likely falling into this category as well, is a March 5th WarnMe, where the subject line claims a burglary occurred, but where this may not have actually been so as the emailed description reports that “two males prowled the inside of the garage, but quickly left after being confronted by a uniformed security guard” suggesting they may not have stolen anything.
It is also important to examine the latter category of WarnMes which do not inform anyone about immediate threats to public safety as they did not get sent soon enough. These WarnMes, if sent sooner, may very well have provided useful information, but in their current temporal form they did not. One such exemplary WarnMe was sent on March 3rd, and reported that at approximately 4:00PM the day before an aggravated assault occurred. While two people were arguing, it said, one picked up a stick and struck the other in the head. Query if this situation was likely to cause any larger threat to public safety, as the violent conduct – as described by UCPD – seemed contained to the context of an argument which escalated, though fights where parties get violent may get out of hand, so there's a chance it could have escalated. However, that this incident occurred was not useful information for the campus community to know nearly twenty hours later as any potential hint of a threat to public safety due to this incident did not exist this long after it. Therefore, this WarnMe was largely unhelpful. Similarly, on December 27th, a WarnMe was sent out reporting that there had been a break in and burglary at someone's residence in Albany Village, sometime between December 19th and 27th. As those who lived in the residence were on vacation they did not know when exactly the burglary occurred, though query if when they got back there was still a potential immediate threat to public safety, as up to a week could have passed between the burglary and the WarnMe. Finally, on July 7th we received a WarnMe about three attempted car thefts also in Albany Village, with the first of which occuring at 8:45AM.
However, this WarnMe was not sent out until 4:57PM that day, meaning that those around Albany Village could not take action in response to this conduct – as they did not know about it – until eight hours after it occurred.
When these types of WarnMes, which either describe conduct that does not endanger the campus community or incidents which are long enough ago that they are no longer an immediate threat to public safety, are sent out I ask myself a few questions. Namely, what’s the point of this information and why am I being told this? More importantly, the repeated use of WarnMe to report these sorts of incidents trains students to think of WarnMes as often providing unhelpful or irrelevant information, decreasing the impact of WarnMe when reporting on actual emergencies or dangerous situations in progress.
Some WarnMes are actually important and relevant when they’re sent out – for example on January 8th we received a WarnMe about a robbery which involved the use of a gun less than an hour after it occurred – but that's all the more reason we maintain and reserve WarnMe for only serious incidents, so our campus community pays better attention to them. When we get 20 million irrelevant WarnMes, it can turn from a safety tool to an unserious joke, and that makes our community less safe.
WarnMe needs to be focused on and only used to send out reports about serious, immediate threats to public safety so it can be trusted and not mocked as a tool the university thinks it's appropriate to use to blast reports about two bananas stolen days ago.