Cal Poly’s delay on Clery alert about students who fired guns troubles faculty | Opinion
Local news media reported on the November 11 arrests of two Cal Poly students who fired guns on campus and amassed a small arsenal in their dorm rooms. As a concerned community member and Cal Poly faculty member, it worries me that the university has not been forthcoming with information about the incidents connected to these students.
It’s hard to imagine innocent reasons for why two students possessed (either on their person or stored in their dorm room at the time of arrest) a 12-gauge shotgun with an expended shotgun cartridge, a semi-automatic pistol with eight live rounds, a bandolier with live shotgun rounds, a rifle, 650 additional rounds of ammunition of various calibers, a ski mask, machete, three large fixed-blade knives and a butterfly knife.
Cal Poly did not issue the legally required “Clery timely warning” until four days after the arrests, on Thursday, November 16 at 5:59 p.m., after many students and faculty had left for fall break. The university said it chose not to issue an alert because the students had been arrested and didn’t pose “a serious and ongoing threat to the campus community” (the third required criteria for a Clery alert).
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However, Cal Poly had been alerted that students posted bail within hours of their arrest and were no longer jailed. Cal Poly sat on this information for four days, choosing not to warn students and faculty.
The Clery alert, when it was finally issued, indicated that the students were barred from campus and anyone who saw them should call 911. Yet, for four days, no one had a reason to report them. No one knew they had been in possession of multiple weapons, had amassed an arsenal in their dorm room and had been shooting weapons on campus (including in their dorm room).
Cal Poly’s claim that they didn’t think a warning was needed doesn’t stand up to even the lightest scrutiny. Cal Poly couldn’t possibly have known the scope of the situation when these students were arrested: Who else had access to their guns? Had they stored weapons any place other than their dorm room? Did other students have access to their weapons? One of the students had a gun registered to his father — did he have access to more family-owned weapons? Had these students been planning to hurt people? How could Cal Poly possibly determine these students did not pose a serious to the campus community?
As a faculty member, one of my greatest fears is an active shooter on campus. All I have been told to do is hide, run or fight. And I will do these things, but I also deserve to know that my employer is doing everything it can to keep me and my students safe. Waiting four days to issue a timely Clery alert doesn’t fit that that metric. As a result, I, and many of my colleagues, do not think the university has taken our safety seriously and is instead more concerned with bad press and optics.
Brenda Helmbrecht is an English professor at Cal Poly.
