Monday's "Secure in Place" Order Shows Need for Improving Emergency Communication

Image: ELPD's Captain Jeff Murphy, courtesy of ELPD

On Monday, an online threat to schools triggered a “secure in place” order at the East Lansing Public Schools (ELPS). ELi Twitter follower Ross Fort asked us to find out why the order went only to the public schools and not the private schools in East Lansing.

The answer has been provided to us by Captain Jeff Murphy of the East Lansing Police Department (ELPD).

Murphy explained, “This threat was received initially by the MSU Police Department and came to them from a tip in reference to what someone had seen on Yik Yak,” an online forum. “The threat was basically that someone was going to do a school shooting that day. The whole thing was rapidly evolving because they (MSUPD) were actively tracking down the suspect and trying to get him in custody.”

While that was going on, Murphy spoke to the ELPS superintendent, Dr. Robyne Thompson. She decided to initiate a “shelter in place” order for the ELPS schools.

“At about the same time,” Captain Murphy told me, "I was hearing over the police radio that the MSU Police had identified the suspect and were arresting him at Akers Hall, so no other schools were contacted.”

Murphy takes our reader’s basic point, saying, “It would be nice to have a system that instantly notifies all schools in the city at the same time but we don't have that.” He adds, “Hopefully it will be a rare occasion when we need to notify all schools in the city because of a single incident but we need to make sure that capability is as good as it can be.”

Right now, the way to do that is to get as many people as possible signed up for Nixle, the local emergency notification system. As Murphy notes, Nixle isn’t perfect because ELPD can’t know “who got the message and who did not.” For that reason, “what we prefer to do is make a notification either by phone, Nixle, or both, and then follow up with a police officer in person. Depending on the emergency, this may or may not be possible. In this case the suspect was thankfully arrested very quickly which did not allow time for all the things we normally do to be accomplished.”

Murphy says Monday’s event has helped to tighten the system: “Our School Officer has been contacting the schools that are not part of the East Lansing [Public] School District since this incident to make sure we have proper contact information and to make sure they are monitoring the Nixle system.”

Murphy asked me to “let people know that if they monitor Nixle, they should monitor both the East Lansing Police Department and the Ingham County 911 Center. This is because after business hours some of our Nixle messages could come through [the County 911] dispatch if our supervisors are engaged in an incident and can’t get back to the office to make a notification.” The way you do this monitoring is to go to the Nixle site and sign in. It will then display for you the ELPD and Ingham County 911 postings.

You can sign up for Nixle at: https://local.nixle.com/register/

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