On Saturday afternoon, minutes after a masked gunman entered a classroom and sprayed gunfire on students studying for an economics exam, Brown students, faculty, and staff were notified of an active shooter on campus. However, nearby neighbors without connections to the school did not receive a comparable notification from the City.
While Brown University issued updates about the shooting directly to their campus community through their BrownU Alert System, city officials pushed messages through social media, the City’s 311 information service and the platforms of local politicians. City communications systems designed for emergencies appear to have gone unused and unmentioned. The Providence Eye reached out to the Mayor’s office to ask about this decision but did not receive answers in time for publication.
Holing Up and Looking for Information Anywhere, Everywhere
Behind the counter of a landmark Providence coffee shop on Saturday night, over 30 people sat crowded on the ground trying to stay clear of the windows. The typically warm and lively Coffee Exchange at the foot of College Hill was dark, with the doors locked. Dim phone lights illuminated anxious faces looking for updates about the mass shooting at Brown University ten blocks away.
“It got really tense when CNN reported that there were shots at Governor Street,” said Sam ten Thij, an MFA student in Rhode Island School of Design’s Digital+Media program. Thij was walking back from the grocery store when his roommate texted him about the shooting, and he took shelter in the nearby cafe. “That felt like the active shooter was going towards our area, and that was really terrifying.”
For hours, Thij remained inside with cafe customers, employees and college students who could not return to their dorms. The tension relaxed after the Governor Street reports were revealed as false, and Coffee Exchange’s owner bought everyone samosas, chicken curry and rice from Taste of India across the street. But with the shooter still at large, the crowd kept waiting for news.
“It was hard to gather information,” said Thij, who only saw an alert from RISD hours after it arrived because his email notifications were off. “It kind of weirded me out that my roommate had to text me about it because there was no other reports.”
Providence residents are now raising questions about the alert systems that might have informed residents near the Brown University shootings, and others, about the emergency.
Three Different Alert Systems in Providence
Providence’s 311 system is designed for connecting residents to relevant authorities and sharing information about non-emergency services. It was redesigned in March to streamline communications, but residents had to create new accounts in the new 311 portal in order to submit requests. (The Providence Eye previously published an article regarding the 311 system.)
“If you want to know if your trash is delayed a day or if there’s a parking ban, that’s a 311 system,” said Providence Emergency Management Agency director Clara Decerbo in an interview with Providence Eye intern Kendra Eastep on December 2, a week and a half before the Brown shooting. “If you want to know if there’s a hazardous material release and you need to evacuate your home, that’s going to be a CodeRED notification.”
Providence uses the alert system CodeRED to notify residents about emergencies through phone, email and text. The CodeRED service requires users to sign up online or through an app in order to receive messages. The Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency contracts with CodeRED but allows Providence officials to use it.
The software suffered a cyberware attack on November 26 and was shut down temporarily. Multiple people working with the Providence Eye were unable to access the service either online or by using its designated app in recent days, but the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency reported that CodeRED was functional this weekend.
“During the events of Saturday evening, both the City of Providence and Brown University utilized messaging systems they independently determined to be most appropriate for informing the public and the university community,” said Courtney Marciano, RIEMA Chief of Information and Public Relations.
The city can also push massive text messages to phones in a designated area using a Wireless Emergency Alert System (WEAS) that requires no sign-up. Controlled by the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency, WEAS can contact any phone within a nearby cell tower range in case of a life-threatening event. Beyond extreme weather conditions, it has only been used twice in the last decade.
In June 2020, an alert was issued after former Mayor Jorge Elorza declared a state of emergency and curfew in response to protests against racist police violence. In December 2023, alerts went out when the Washington Bridge closed suddenly after engineers identified construction flaws that risked a collapse. However, city officials did not mention CodeRED or WEAS in the hours after the shooting at Brown University this weekend.
Social Media For Emergency Communication
While authorities continue searching for the individual who killed two students and injured nine others this weekend, Providence residents are looking for timely updates, and warnings, more than ever.
“As it pertains to official updates regarding the shelter in place or any future announcements, please follow the city of Providence official social media channels,” said Mayor Brett Smiley in a press conference Saturday night. “We will also put out updates through our 311 system… If that did not come from an official channel, then that is not official.”
The city, the Providence Police Department and Mayor Smiley have been actively sharing updates on social media. Within 48 hours of the shooting, those three Facebook accounts posted at least 15 unique posts sharing information related to the incident.
The first of those was at 4:51 on Saturday night warning, “There is currently heavy Providence Police and Fire presence on Hope Street near Brown University. Please exercise caution and avoid this area until further notice.” The first contact from PVD311 shared the same message in email at 5:33 p.m. under the subject line “Brown active shooting.”
Reports from students and neighbors on the East Side, including Mayor Smiley, reveal how most people learned something was happening from police sirens, phone calls from family members, or fellow students.
Lynn Holstein lives just two blocks from where the shooting occurred at Brown’s Barus & Holley engineering building. She was making gingerbread houses at around 4:30 with her grandchildren when her daughter-in-law called to warn her about the shooting. Despite using the city’s 311 system in the past, she did not receive any messages on that channel and never checked City social media.
“That is not where I would think, ‘Is there an emergency going on? Let me see, I’ll look at Twitter,’” said Holstein, who spent the rest of the evening hiding out in the dark with her family. “It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that [my grandchildren] would have gone down right there to walk the dog.”
Brown University itself distributed at least 28 updates on their website within 36 hours of the shooting, often with detailed descriptions of the shooting location, police perimeters and safety advice for students. The school newspaper published a detailed timeline of events, including reports the gunman opened fire around 4:00 p.m. and the first 911 call was first received at 4:05 p.m.
“There’s an active shooter near Barus & Holley Engineering,” said the first message to Brown students, staff and faculty at 4:22 p.m. Saturday night. “Lock doors, silence phones and stay hidden until further notice.”
But outside of Brown, neighbors found themselves in the dark. Holstein’s first notification from a Providence official came from her City Councilman John Goncalves in a newsletter at 6:02 p.m., almost two hours after the shooting began.
“People in this neighborhood should have known right away,” said Holstein. “Two blocks is not very far from the scene of the crime.”
State Senator Tiara Mack, in a letter to constituents, suggested that concerned residents access the following sources of information:
- x.com/pvdcitycouncil
- x.com/CityofProv
- facebook.com/pvdcitycouncil
- facebook.com/CityofProvidence
- facebook.com/MayorBrettSmiley
Instagram: @pvdcitycouncil, @pvdmayor, @brownu, @providencepolicedepartment
Eric Halvarson is a multimedia journalist based in Providence, Rhode Island.
Kendra Eastep is a Brown University SPRINT Fellow at The Providence Eye. She is from New York City and studies English and History with a focus on Southeast Asian studies. In her free time, she illustrates for the The Brown Daily Herald and copyedits for The College Hill Independent.
Want to comment? Click!