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Editor’s Note: This article includes mentions of sexual assault.

When Syracuse University freshman Margaret Kirby was touring college campuses before applying, she noticed that all of them had a blue light system in place as part of their campus safety programs.

Now a full-time college student, Kirby, a political science major, understands the need for such safety resources as she is aware of the prevalence of sexual assault and violence against women on college campuses.

“As many safety measures that you can have, the better,” Kirby said. “We have phones, we have safety alerts, and women still get sexually assaulted every day.”

Blue lights have been a fixture of college campuses since the 1980s, but the past decade has seen drastic reductions in their usage due to cell phone accessibility. Despite the decline in use, some SU freshman students new to campus, as well as DPS, still feel that blue lights are necessary to ensure campus safety.

SU first announced plans to install blue lights on campus in 1989, adopting the technology after several other universities, including SUNY-Buffalo and Lehigh University, began to do so.

Today, SU has 85 total blue light locations, including 54 on main campus and 31 on south campus. The SU system also includes several locations in the downtown areas surrounding SU properties, such as the Nancy Cantor Warehouse and Veterans Administration Medical Center areas.

When a person activates a blue light on the SU campus, they will immediately be connected to the DPS Communication Center. The average response time of campus police arriving at the scene of a blue light activation is two minutes, DPS Chief Craig Stone said.

The locations and purpose of blue lights are easily recognizable, said Truly Bunker, a freshman music industry major. With their widespread use across the United States, Bunker said, the blue lights feel like a symbol.

Over the past ten years, however, the usage of blue lights has decreased across college campuses, raising the question of whether or not they are still necessary.

Stephanie Zaso | Design Editor

Multiple academic institutions, including University of Colorado Boulder, New Mexico State University, University of California – Davis, and University of Nebraska – Lincoln, have suspended blue light systems due to the rapid spread of mobile phones and university safety apps.

At SU, the use of the blue light system has fallen significantly over recent years. In 2012, there were 809 activations, the highest number of activations in a year at SU, Stone said. In 2020, people activated the system just 17 times, a decrease of almost 98%.

Although SU has mobile safety resources currently available in the Rave Guardian app, in addition to past usage of LiveSafe and future plans for implementation of the Orange Safe app, there is still a need for physical lights on SU property to keep people safe when safety features on phones are not accessible, Stone said.

“Blue light phones are an added security measure,” he said. “You could be out jogging and may not want to take your phone with you. Your phone battery could die. Maybe internet service goes down.”

In those situations, blue lights can put people in contact with the emergency services they require, Stone said.

While Katelin Ravelo, a freshman neuropsychology major, said she would utilize her cell phone over a blue light in a potentially dangerous situation, she acknowledged the importance of having safety apps and blue lights available.

Ravelo echoed Stone’s opinion, saying that the system can be useful if someone’s phone is dead. However, she added that phones have made the blue light system less of a priority.

Ravelo also said that DPS should install more blue lights across campus because there are some locations on campus where there isn’t always a blue light visible.

The SU blue light system has been misused in the past. In 2016, The Daily Orange reported that of the 10,000 activations of SU blue lights since their installation on the campus, only 12 were instances where the person was actually in need of assistance.

When someone activates the blue light for a non-emergency situation, the activation will still prompt an emergency response from DPS.

“Misusing the blue light phone is the same as going into a residence hall and pulling the fire alarm,” Stone said. “You’re creating an emergency response to an incident that is not an emergency, so that’s actually a criminal offense.”

Stone added that since he started working for SU he has been aware of pranks with blue lights, but few actual emergency situations.

Stone later said in an email that there were 29 total activations in August, but only two resulted in someone in need of assistance for medical emergencies. The other activations were accidental, pranks or unfounded, Stone added.

Kirby said that the misuse of blue lights might impact how seriously people take them in true emergency scenarios.

“You don’t want it to be like a ‘boy who cried wolf’ situation where if people start misusing them, then no one takes it seriously,” Kirby said.

Bunker added that she felt DPS should make students aware of the penalties for misusing blue lights. She said that knowledge could “help people feel more comfortable using it because they know that it’s going to be taken seriously.”

Despite concerns about decreasing relevance, some colleges and studies have found that the system can still be useful. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign published an article explaining that most blue light activations were for mental health crises and that blue lights provided “a sense of immediate safety”.

That sense of immediate safety is one of the main reasons why blue light systems are seen as important. Blue light phones “produce affective experiences of ‘safety’ among students, parents, and administrators” according to the 2018 IJCS study. Another study at Rice University reported that campus crime fell 67% after blue lights were installed.

There are no planned expansions of blue lights at SU at this time, Stone said. He explained that when there are new property additions to the campus, DPS considers the need for a blue light in the facility.

“There’s no one or two things that’s going to eradicate violence, but the more that we can do to make it less likely to happen and to make women-identifying people in specific feel safe, especially on college campuses, where there’s like a lot of rape and party culture,” Kirby said. “I think that it’s really important just for a sense of comfort.”

Published on September 5, 2022 at 12:34 am

Contact Stephanie: spwright@syr.edu