Around 3:30 p.m. on June 28, a recent UW physics graduate launched an attack that left the professor of PHIL 202: Gender Issues and two students injured. However, according to a screenshot posted on Twitter by professor James Skidmore, chair of Germanic and Slavic studies, WatSAFE notifications weren’t sent out until almost 90 minutes later, at about 5:24 p.m.
WatSAFE, the university’s official safety app developed in coordination with the Safety Office, was launched on Sept. 28, 2015. Nick Manning, then-director of media relations and issues management, told Imprint that a key benefit of the app was the app’s ability to push information to people via notifications on their phone.
Skidmore was sitting in the Arts Quad when he saw the SWAT team run up the paved path from South Campus Hall.
“My first thought was, well they’re testing the WatSAFE app earlier today. Maybe this is a drill. Maybe there’s more to the test [than] I realized, maybe they were doing like a drill of how they would respond,” Skidmore said. “Then the SWAT team started yelling at people, ‘Where’s Hagey Hall, where’s Hagey Hall?’ … I realized that that seemed really too serious.”
Skidmore, having not received any notifications from the WatSAFE app, checked the UW Twitter, on which there was also nothing, before proceeding to the Waterloo Regional Police Service (WRPS)’s Twitter, who had posted at 4:07 p.m. that they were responding to a stabbing on campus.
At the press conference on June 28, WRPS superintendent Shaena Morris stated that SWAT “might’ve just been asking until right when they [met] up with somebody, but we have a Waterloo Region Police staff sergeant that works here every single day … so we have a direct link into the special constable services for any type of immediate response like this.”
Jordan Brenner, a first-year philosophy student, only heard about the failure when his friend informed him that the app had been tested on the same day as the attacks. “That, I think, is pretty awful, like, especially considering they had done tests before on the day, I don’t see why they wouldn’t effectively use it,” Brenner said in response to the failure.
The WatSAFE app had been tested at 2 p.m. on the same day as the attack, with the WatSAFE website announcing that the emergency communication channels being tested included the app itself and tweets to the UWaterloo and WatSAFE Twitter accounts.
Skidmore also described the conflicting emails he received from administrators of the faculty of arts: “Stay in your office, don’t stay in your office, that kind of thing.” He stated that while some confusing information was understandable due to the developing nature of the situation, he felt that it “didn’t even seem that there was clarity as to what was trying to be communicated.”
Skidmore said that was why he focused on the WatSAFE delay in his tweet, because it seemed to him that “in a situation like that, the WatSAFE app should be that sort of definitive source of information … and it wasn’t.”
Sumedh Singh, a first-year computer engineering student, pointed out the critical nature of working safety alert systems, stating, “If there’s an emergency, these systems should work, so I think that the university should work on it and … whenever there’s an emergency these systems should respond so that everyone’s safe.” Singh stated that he wasn’t aware of the app until hearing of the news, only that there was some safety system in place.
The university’s official emergency plan, dated February 2023, describes an Incident Management System with a chain of command including the director of the special constable services (SCS).
When asked about the role of the SCS in the incident, UW president and vice-chancellor Vivek Goel clarified that it is not standard protocol for SCS to respond to such situations. “When we have this kind of violent incident, it is WRPS that is responsible. We do not have a campus police service, we have special constables on campus. And, you know, while they’re trained and available to respond to emergency situations, if it’s any kind of violent event, it goes through 911… the protocol is, it is WRPS that leads the response.”
Out of five people Imprint spoke to, only one, Puneet Sharma, an analyst at the Institutional Analysis and Planning Department, had the WatSAFE app installed on their phone. According to a poll on Imprint’s Instagram, 38 per cent of respondents had the app installed on their phones.
“I got to know about it from a colleague, I don’t think I did receive a notification,” Sharma said. “[Information] coming from the right source, getting alerts, I think, does make a difference in calming everybody down too. I was worried when I got to know from a colleague instead of [an official] UWaterloo source.”
Erica Dang, a fifth-year biochemistry student, explained that she had never downloaded the WatSAFE app because she felt like the university “didn’t really publicize it or really have that much information coming out about it.”
Aparajita Bagchi, another fifth-year biochemistry student, said that the university could’ve better utilized other communications systems. “I definitely think they should’ve sent out the notification much quicker, like I obviously don’t have WatSAFE but they could’ve sent out an email or something just to tell everyone what was going on.”
With files from Eduardo Matzumiya.
