Making the World Safer – Again

Yes those wild and crazy Emergency Services people at my old employer are back at it again. On Aug 25 2:54pm I got an email addressed to me which read as follows (yes, it came from the UK again):

To all Western. A Safety Incident is occuring at Weldon Libary and Innovation Building . Leave the area or stay away as required for your safety. Issued by Western Special Constable Service. ^mc^
Thank you,
Alert WesternU
Campus Safety & Emergency Services, Western University

Then, just to be sure, I got an identical copy of that email again at 2:56pm. I do not know what the ^mc^ is supposed to indicate. It is different from the ^no^ that came at the end of the last emergency emails.

Then, showing they are right on the ball, at 2:57pm, a mere minute later, I got an email that said this:

WSCS and London Police and[sic] investigating a threat to safety incident at Weldon Library. All community members are asked to shelter in place until further notice.
Thank you,
Alert WesternU
Campus Safety & Emergency Services, Western University

Sounds serious, eh? I mean, they do not say what is going on, this is a University, after all, and they are not in the business of conveying useful information. They are in the business of telling you what to do – ‘shelter in place’.

Not – ‘stay where you are’ or ‘avoid the Library’. I suppose ‘shelter’ has a nice comfy sound to it.

So, folks who got this were free to let their imaginations run wild about what might be happening around the library.

However, they did not have long to imagine things, because at 3:33pm, a mere 36minutes after the last email, I got this:

ALL CLEAR
London Police Service has determined there is no threat to safety at Weldon Library. Community members can return to regular activities.
Thank you,
Alert WesternU
Campus Safety & Emergency Services, Western University

Still no indication as to what prompted the alert, but whatever it was, the London City Police showed up and determined that in fact there was no threat to safety. I am soooo reassured, but you just know that the interweb thingy is chock full of stories about what this was reeeeally all about.

And then, as I was writing this all up to put in this post, I got an email from my gal asking if I had gone on campus with my rapier and pistol. (She was joking…..I think.) Clearly, people who were not at Western were more informed about what happened than anyone getting emails from Western.

As I wrote above, no info, no thinking, just do as you are told. That’s UWO.

Now really curious, I went to the London, Ontario Reddit to see what might be posted there, and indeed, the most recent post said

“Multiple (over 10) police/unmarked police cars screaming down Richmond?’

In the many many comments below that was all kinds of interesting stuff, including claims of everywhere between 18 and 60 cops on campus, including people in tactical/Swat gear, then one that said:

 ‘Weldon Library, Shelter in Place alert, things are escalating. Yes. confirmation of firearm.’

Confirmation of firearm? By who?

Then one that said:

‘I got three and tbh I’m impressed. I’ve had my western email for years and have never seen one. Good notification protocol, seems like.’

Yea, great protocol, man – say as little as possible in three emails.

Finally, this last one, meaning, I guess, that it was the first comment posted:

‘Came here for the same reason! They went further than Huron… Something big is going on’

Don’t know where ‘here’ refers to, but yea – ya might think that with all the police cars zooming around, something big was going on. But this (presumably) young person has not yet twigged to the 21^st century fact that Public Officials make everything into something big.

I would really like to hear the story of what actually happened over that 40 or so minutes, but we can be sure that Western will never tell us, and that no local media will be in a position to provide reliable information. They will simply parrot whatever scraps of info the London Police or UWO decide to release – and ask no questions.   

Epilogue: It’s now two three days after the incident. The London Police have confirmed that the report of a weapon was a hoax. Here is a sentence from the post on their website:

Shortly before 3 p.m. on Monday, August 25, 2025, police responded to a call in relation to a male with a gun outside of the Weldon Library at the University of Western Ontario.

Note the vague language, bureaucracy at its best. ‘A call in relation to…’. OK, what actually happened? Did someone call the library or campus cops with this report, who then called the London Police, or did the Police get a call directly? What did the caller actually say, in either case?

However, this is a waterfall of information compared to that coming from the university. They have said nothing, no email, no posts on their website explaining why they told people to ‘shelter in place’. As far as the ‘Latest News and Announcements’ page of the university website is concerned, the event never happened.

The decision to outsource these ‘emergency alert’ emails to a company in the UK was made by what Pournelle’s Law calls ‘org-types’. It was done not out of any concern for the safety of anyone on campus, but to fend off any legal liability for the org or its senior administrators. No threat to the survival of the university or the senior admins’ cushy jobs will arise from the fact that they provide no info to their ‘valued stakeholders’ as to what happened at Weldon Library. Folks working at the university long ago learned not to ask questions or raise a stink. No one will, they will just grin and bear it, expecting nothing more than the silence they get.