*EDIT: CMU and Duquesne students were not alerted*

On Monday, April 10th at around 11:15 PM, many of us found out through various group chats about a threat of an active shooter at Hillman Library, but with no response from the Pitt ENS alert system, we had to lean on each other through texting, calls, and social media.

I am thankful for the swift response from the Pitt Police and the City of Pittsburgh Police in bravely responding to a potential threat and evacuating students as quickly as possible, and I will reiterate that this petition is solely to criticize the slowness of the ENS system. 

We demand that we have campus admin that is first and foremost committed to student safety and well-being. This means having ENS alerts going out as the threat is ongoing and keeping us updated; we should not have to stay updated through our friends' Snapchat stories and even stories from local news. We need to know where to avoid as the situation is unfolding, instead of having to piece together what is happening through group chats and videos showing students jumping over railings to evacuate on Twitter.

This cannot happen again on Pitt's Oakland campus and we were fortunate that this was a hoax. Many lives could have been tragically lost since we were not formally informed by the Pitt ENS system until almost 1.5 hours after this incident started.