Text alert sign ups surge after carjacking

Freshman Jay Selig felt "behind the times" after last week's carjacking near Easton Hall.

His friends' cell phones lit up, buzzed and chimed as text message warnings from University Police alerted them of the incident, but not Selig's.

"I just felt a little behind," said Selig, a letters and sciences major. "I didn't have my computer and that's what I've been getting them through."

So Selig signed up for the service, along with more than 1,000 others, marking a 12-percent jump in the number of students registered for the text message alerts since the Sept. 18 carjacking.

"We want as many people as possible signed up for this system," said University Police Spokesman Paul Dillon. "It's one of the positives that comes out of a very serious incident."

Dillon said 9,400 students and other members of the campus community have signed up for the service, which debuted last semester shortly after the Virginia Tech shootings. The service allows police to alert students of a violent crime or imminent threat via text message.

Jenna Holke, a junior hearing and speech sciences major, also registered for the service after last week's carjacking, because she was with her roommate, Amanda, when she received the alert.

"I didn't really know too much about the text messaging thing until I saw Amanda got one about the carjacking," Holke said. "Part of joining it was because I wasn't really aware of it until my roommate got it."

But since its inception, the service has received mixed reviews from students, many of whom say the idea of text message alerts is a good one, but the implementation has been shaky.

Freshman communication major Da'Veda Johnson isn't signed up for the service because when she tried to register via text message earlier this year, the system rejected her.

"I just texted the number and it said 'access denied'," Johnson said. She said she tried another number but again received no response.

Even for students who have been able to register, the program hasn't been seamless.

Some students said they received three alerts the night of the carjacking, others received two and others only one.

Sophomore letters and sciences major Jordan Levin received a message that was cut off halfway through.

"I got like half of a text message," Levin said. "They sent out more so eventually it made sense."

Dillon said the system hasn't experienced any wide-scale issues, but like all brand-new things, there are some kinks.

Some students, even a few who had trouble with the texts, spoke highly of the system, though, saying the text messages on Sept. 18 did exactly what they were intended to do: alert students to danger.

"It was good that I got the text message because I would have had no idea about it," Levin said.

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