CalTV speaks with SafeBears about the WarnMe system

SafeBears president Sagar Jethani had an opportunity to speak with CalTV on October 15, 2023, about improving UC Berkeley’s WarnMe safety alerts. Click below to check it out!

Cal must do better with the timeliness and content of WarnMe alerts, which are supposed to help the university community avoid ongoing threats. With the assistance of our members, we’ve reviewed examples of these federally mandated notifications from other universities and found that Cal’s WarnMe system lags far behind.

Among other issues Cal’s alerts often come too late and with too little information to be useful. As just one example: Cal’s alerts typically contain little if any descriptive information about suspect(s), even in cases where we know from our monitoring of police frequencies that the victim(s) gave detailed descriptions of multiple characteristics like height, weight, age, clothing, hair, gender, race, etc. This refusal to provide suspect information makes UC Berkeley an outlier not only against other major universities, but compared to other UC schools including UCLA, UC Davis, and UC San Diego. It is vital that suspect description be regularly included every time the suspect is at large to help potential victims (like students) avoid crossing paths with them.

👉 View the WarnMe presentation SafeBears made on September 7, 2023, to Cal’s Clery Act compliance office.

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Fall ‘23 Safety Update