Best Practices in Wireless Emergency Alerts

This material is based on work funded and supported by Department of Homeland Security and is also available at FirstResponder.gov in the Technology Documents Library. This report presents four best practices for the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) program. These best practices were identified through interviews with emergency management agencies across the United States. The WEA "Go Live" Checklist identifies key steps that an emergency management agency should perform when implementing WEA in a local jurisdiction and provides guidance for completing each action. The WEA Training and Drilling Guide identifies the steps for preparing staff to use WEA and includes suggestions shared by alerting authorities that have implemented WEA. The WEA Governance Guide identifies steps for using or preparing to use WEA to ensure coordination between participating alerting agencies. The WEA Cybersecurity Risk Management (CSRM) Strategy describes a strategy that alert originators can use throughout WEA adoption, operations, and sustainment, as well as a set of governance activities for developing a plan to execute the CSRM. Because best practices will evolve as WEA matures and becomes more widely used, an appendix provides information on how a best practice–driven organization can search for best practices, adapt them to the local context, and adopt them for everyday use

A Multiple Case Study Investigating Principles of Design and Implementation of Operational Safety Plans for Crises at Colleges, Universities, and Affiliated Institutions

In the wake of the 2007 Virginia Tech tragedy, the Virginia state legislature mandated that all college-affiliated institutions create an operational safety plan for natural and manmade crises. Previous empirical research has mostly focused on documenting faculty and students’ perceptions of campus safety, preparations for manmade crises over natural disasters, and enhancing specific aspects of emergency responses for future incidents. Thus, design and implementation “best practices” for higher education operational safety plan protocols is an understudied, yet burgeoning area of inquiry. To address this literature gap, a comparative case study of five institutions was conducted using a novel document analysis protocol and interviews to analyze current operational safety plans through the lenses of open systems, rational choice, and chaos theories. Data revealed three guiding principles for design, four factors identified for successful implementation, and five candidate “best practices,” which aligned with the training, emergency threat assessment, emergency management, resources, communication and coordination protocol themes. A practical implication from this study was that the selected institutions placed more attention on operational safety plan response elements than on preparation components, which may mean less than optimal plan execution. Moreover, a significant theoretical implication was the discovery that emergency managers rationalized their operational safety plan decisions based on perceived costs and benefits, which may deprive these plans of the most up-to-date, peer reviewed information. Future studies will contribute additional novel practical and theoretical guidance regarding the essential components for effective operational safety planning that would increase the capability of senior administrators and campus safety personnel to manage risks associated with emergency disasters

Fear of becoming a victim of crime on a college campus: a visual and factorial experimental design survey analysis of location and demographic factors.

Vanessa LoBue (2013) states that the emotion of fear, “a signal of impending threat” (p. 38) is common among mammals. For over five decades, there has been substantial research into what in society, or our communities, makes us fearful. It is this author’s intention to examine how college students’ fear of crime or fear of victimization may be heightened or intensified by specific factors that are commonplace on college campuses and areas adjacent to those campuses. Nicole Rader (2004) argues that the fear of crime discourse needs to be expanded to a larger “construct” called “the threat of victimization” (p. 689). Rader suggests that research on fear of crime and perceptions of risk needs to include a third component, constrained behavior, such as engaging in self-protective tactics or limiting activities on or around campus. According to Rader, these three components are engaged in a relationship that is reciprocal, where each informs and impacts (cause and effect) “the threat of victimization”(p. 689). Jackson (2006) argues that “criminological literature reveals a body of knowledge that has struggled to clarify” (p. 254) the concept of risk, and subsequently found in his 2011 study that there was usefulness in demonstrating the difference between perceived likelihood, perceived consequence, and perceived control for risk, in worry about crime. This research, which began with my master’s thesis, will address some of the limitations disclosed in that research (Steinmetz, 2012) and the subsequent journal article (Steinmetz & Austin, 2013), regarding fear of victimization on a college campus, by utilizing photographs of nine specific locations on or near the University of Louisville’s Belknap campus in Louisville, KY. The nine photographs will answer some of the limitations noted by this author’s previous research, such as time of day, whether the space is occupied or not, and who is occupying that space. Other factors to be included in this research are the race and gender of those occupying the space in the photographs, as well as additional personal characteristics of the students responding to this research, such as, their race, gender, age, course load (e.g., part time or full time), housing status (live on/off/adjacent to campus), whether or not they have been a victim of crime (property and/or personal), and their level of involvement, outside of classes, on or around campus. Variation in those common-place factors such as time of day, open or occupied space(s), and specific locations, will be used to gauge respondents’ assessment of their “threat of victimization” (Rader, 2004.) According to prior research (Rader, 2017; May et. al. 2010; Jacobsen et al. 2020; Hignite & Naumann, 2018, Tomsich et al. 2011), these factors can play a role in the students’ assessment of their feelings regarding safety. The data for this survey was obtained through an online survey service (QuestionPro Online Survey). Working under the expectation that, at the time of this survey being conducted on the University of Louisville campus, the university was still adhering to the most current Covid-19 CDC pandemic protocols and guidelines. These protocols may have served to reduce the number of students, faculty, and staff on campus to help reduce community spread. This survey utilize the Factorial Experimental Design (FED) Methodology. This methodology, developed by Peter H. Rossi (1951), was specifically developed to “assess the judgement principles that underlie social norms, attitudes and definitions” (Auspurg & Hinz, 2014:1). The FED methodology’s impact on respondents allows stimuli resembling “real-world” evaluations and compels respondents to make better determinations of judgement principles that bring about evaluations of their fear of crime than do single-item questions (Auspurg & Hinz, 2014)