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Thursday, March 28, 2024
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Emergency blue light system broken across campus

System receives little use, starting to show age

<p>UB’s Blue Light emergency system provides students with additional safety on North and South Campus. But many of the systems are over 10 years old and starting to show signs of wear and tear.&nbsp;</p>

UB’s Blue Light emergency system provides students with additional safety on North and South Campus. But many of the systems are over 10 years old and starting to show signs of wear and tear. 

The emergency Blue Light Phone system on UB’s North and South campuses is meant to provide students with added security when police aren’t physically present. From escorting students to their car after a late night class or investigating a suspicious person, UBPD will arrive with the push of a button.

But seven of UB’s blue lights are broken, unable to help students if necessary.

According to University Police’s monthly service receipt, systems in Spaulding Parking Lot, Governor’s E Lot and Governor’s Hadley do not have working sirens, but UPD confirmed that new ones have been ordered. The Frontier and Flint Rear Lot have bags over them. The system in the Special Events Parking Lot needs a new microphone, and the South Lake Community Center phone is not stable.

UPD plans to fix the phones, according to UPD Deputy Chief of Police Joshua Sticht, although there is no scheduled date to fix them.

There are 63 blue lights on North Campus and 22 on South. The phone towers are scattered across the campuses, towering over students from the dorms to the academic spine.

But over the last year, UPD received 13 calls from the 85 phones.

Sticht said the base price for each unit is $15,000, but it can vary depending on the location of the phone and the amount of work needed to install and connect the unit to UB’s infrastructure.

“The price goes up if it is further away from buildings [and additional work is needed] for trenching and installing conduit,” Sticht said. “This price would include the tower, phone and data lines and the cameras. Most of the phones that are in place now are part of a major revision and upgrade to our system back in 2006. Since then there have been a few additions here and there.”

Sticht said when calls do come in, they rarely end up being serious. He said students shouldn’t be hesitant and encourages them to use the system.

“The most common calls are welfare checks when someone presses the button and then leaves without talking to us, [that happened] nine times,” Sticht said.

“There have been a few calls for people that needed assistance with their vehicles, [if someone’s] locked out or [has a] dead battery. We only had one call that was reporting a suspicious person. I actually wish that people used them more frequently, quite often people report suspicious conditions after they have left the area.”

Sticht said fixing the systems can be tricky. Phone tower and camera maintenance is handled by Digital Surveillance Systems, but sometimes the phone is taken offline accidentally as part of a larger problem, he said.

“For example the phone tower outside of Squire [Hall] on the South Campus is offline because a construction project cut an underground conduit,” Sticht said. “In cases like that, DSS cannot fix the phone until University Facilities has fixed the underlying issue with the conduit. A very similar thing happened to the phone outside of Greiner [Hall] at Fargo Lot.”

As systems are beginning to fail, campuses across the nation are moving away from phone systems and instead turning to mobile security apps to help protect students.

At comparably sized universities like University of California, Los Angeles and University of Florida, students can download AppArmor, a customizable safety app that can change from campus to campus. The app has numerous features, like allowing users to report crimes, share a location with police and receive safety alerts.

Students have mixed feelings about additional on-campus security. Some view the towers as outdated, while others like having a safety net should anything go wrong.

Florebencia Fils-Aime, a junior computer engineering major, said she’s never used one, but likes having the phone towers on campus. She feels comfortable walking around at night seeing the towers’ blue sirens illuminated across campus, but she wishes the broken ones would be fixed.

“I wish they would fix them so they would be working, just in case someone really needed to use one during the weekend,” Fils-Aime said. “If they replace the broken ones with new ones or buy a new security app, it might be a lot of money. I think the system we have now, despite getting little use, works fine.”

Senior business major Luke Matthews, thinks UB’s security should progress at the same rate as other technology on campus. He likes the idea of emergency help at the tips of his fingers.

“Honestly, I feel like the phone towers kind of go unnoticed on campus. Everyone seems to walk by them but never uses them,” Matthews said. “It’d be way easier to unlock your phone and call 911 or use an app to report a crime. Everyone these days has a smartphone, so I think it’d be a wise investment for the university.”

Sticht said he’s hesitant about switching to a blue light phone app because only people with a UB email would be able to use it. Anyone who walks on campus is able to use the blue lights, which he argues already features the same options as an app.

“Our blue light phone system is integrated with our surveillance camera system. The next time you walk into the Student Union look at the phone outside near the walkway over to the UB Commons. You can see the phone integrated into the top of the tower,” Sticht said. “Our blue light phone system is also integrated into our emergency notification system. The phones have public address speakers that are linked to our UB Alert system. We would be able to broadcast an announcement through those speakers in the event we had to evacuate part of the campus or something like that.”

Sticht said Digital Surveillance Systems has been replacing the cameras as they fail, but the next step will be the replacement of the towers themselves. There is no scheduled date of completion yet. UPD’s plan is to repair all of the phone towers that are currently broken first, according to Sticht.

Max Kalnitz is the senior news editor and can be reached at max.kalnitz@ubspectrum.com

@Max_Kalnitz

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