It seems like every day you hear about the MU Police Department investigating a new sexual assault case or asking for help identifying a suspect. Email alerts weren’t coming as frequently, up until recently when MU’s safety was at risk because of a bomb threat and a near campus shooting.
Students were upset last week when they were not formally informed on what was happening around them and made sure word got around concerning the events and how they should have been handled. Though the students were absolutely correct with being angered and fearful of how our administration handled such a tragedy, it is important to not forget about the roots of these problems.
For someone to threaten to bomb or set ablaze one of the biggest and most-used spaces on campus means they were angry or uncomfortable with something. It is out of everyone’s control to stop someone from doing something that extreme, but we should still be striving to make everyone comfortable and included so that things like this won’t happen.
There is nothing wrong with complaining about not being informed of things happening around campus, but after the complaints and worries were tended to, there should have been discussions about the state of our campus. I see this as a safe campus, and I hope everyone feels the same. But when events that put everyone in danger are happening too often, it is definitely time to talk about what we can do to make MU a safer place.
It is time to start thinking about and acting on what we can do to stop sexual assault on our campus. We have professionalstrying to implement plans on how to make campus a safer place, but the student body should also needs to be involved. Letting people who don’t truly know what goes on behind closed doors make decisions for a whole student body can be dangerous.
Students need to reach out to each other at all moments where something could go wrong and make sure to stick together and help each other. No one should walk alone at night unless they have to, and everyone should know some kind of proper protocol for dangerous situations.
We have the emergency posts around campus that can be used for emergency situations, but there are a lot of other situations that require direct action of some sort, or students are put into extremely vulnerable situations. Students need to be ready and willing to help in addressing these situations.
All students and faculty on campus need to be actively working and educating themselves on what they can personally do to make campus a safer environment for everyone. It is inevitable that incidents will happen on campus but what we can do is make sure that we know what to do and how to handle these incidents.
In the future, technological alerts regarding threats, shootings, or assaults shall be sent out in a timely manner with as many details as possible. Students need to know what to do if they were in the presence in one of these events. People’s fears should be taken seriously.