Campus Safety: How Indiana University prepares students in light of UNLV shooting

SOUTH BEND, Ind. (WNDU) -Campus safety is a topic that’s probably on the minds of a lot of students and parents considering the recent shooting that took place at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Wednesday afternoon.

And here locally people might be wondering what schools in our area might be doing to prepare for these scary situations.

Unfortunately, these mass shootings are starting to become more frequent and happening at places we would never imagine in the past.

That’s why schools like Indiana University are preparing their students and officers for these situations.

Indiana University implements a universal training that can be used at any of their 9 campuses, including here in South Bend.

The first step is signing students up for the Rave guardian app, after enrolling in classes this app allows officers to send out alerts for situations happening on campus.

“We give information out we tell people what to do to best protect themselves,” said Shannon Bunger, Deputy Chief at IU’s Bloomington campus. “Then follow the instructions from the other alerts that’s coming out too you. All of that information coming out is going onto our Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook as well.”

The university officers are also trained to be ready for any active shooter and aggressor situations.

Using that training to host seminars teaching the students and faculty on campus about an active shooter scenario.

“We want our communities to be prepared for stuff that can happen that can be bad,” said Shannon Bunger, Deputy Chief, IU Bloomington. ”We don’t live in a glass dome, we hope this never happens in our place. But if it does? We want to make sure we are prepared. Our officers do a great job of training year round. To make sure if something like this does happen they go towards the problem and they address the problem as fast as they can and make sure everyone is safe.”

Indiana University officers are always learning themselves, using active shooter responses from universities across the country, to better prepare themselves.

“We follow the timelines, said Bunger. “Our emergency management folks do a great job of having us do timelines for that and then we go back. They did one from Michigan State and we learned a lot from them , Michigan State did a great job with their response last February. And we’ll learn stuff from Las Vegas as well.”

Indiana University police train year round for these scenarios.

Officer Bunger says there is no step-by-step game plan as each active shooter scenario can be different.

The department trains students in the run, hide, and fight protocol, a nationwide training for dealing with an active shooter scenario.

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