An app designed for students to call 911 or alert the Augustana Police and Public Safety will be used this year at Augustana College. The Omnilert Subscriber Safety app can be downloaded onto any mobile device and is now available for students to make an account with their Augustana username and password.
Chief of Police Tom Phillis worked alongside the Public Safety team and Omnilert to make this app available for Augustana students.
“It will open up to a screen where you can press and hold for help. When you call for help, you can either call our Public Safety dispatch, you can call 911 or you can send a silent alert,” Phillis said. “If you send a silent alert and submit it, that goes to a phone down here in the dispatch center. We will pull up our Omnilert software, and we can find on campus where that cell phone is.”
Augustana has previously used blue light phones as a way for students to contact Public Safety in the case of an emergency. The blue light phones were free-standing telephones that were scattered around campus and located in public places. Starting this year, Augustana is switching to the mobile app, Omnilert.
“We took down our blue light phones because when the college went to a new phone system last year they did not support those emergency phones, and those emergency phones were important in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s before cell phones were popular,” Phillis said.
With the accessibility and popularity of cell phones, Augustana saw the need for a convenient
and modern take on updating our campus’s Public Safety. According to Phillis, Omnilert provides students with both on and off-campus safety resources.
Junior Aaron Afework works for Public Safety. He said the phones will make campus safer.
“[Omnilert is] way better than the standing emergency poles that we had,” Afework said. “People can use their own phones so it’s more reliable, and everyone has their own one rather than relying on something in a common area.”
In addition to the launch of Omnilert, student workers sit at the front desks of several residence halls to ensure safety during the late hours of the night,. These student public safety officers are there to provide help to anyone who might need it. Senior Kent Dao is a student public safety officer.
“After the CA (Community Assistant) is done with their job at midnight, we’ll have students there from 12:00 to 2:00,” Dao said.
Student officers look out for the residents coming into the building to ensure they are not in any danger. These students are expected to be there in case there is an emergency within the residence hall.
“I believe it’s preventing people from doing dumb things in the hallways, or they become more considerate to the living environment and quiet hours can be reinforced so people won’t be disturbing others as much,” Afework said.
