On Sept. 27, the university released their annual CLERY Security and Fire Safety report. Since then, the Branding Iron has published six articles reviewing students’ knowledge of the content within this report.
In this first part of this series, 45 students responded to a Google Poll on their comfortability and awareness surrounding fire safety and security services at the university.
71% of those students said they felt comfortable with knowing fire safety and 64% claimed comfortability in knowing security resources. However, when pushed to identify these resources, rates of comfortability and awareness dropped significantly for both.
Sophomore George Fellst was interviewed in that first article.
“I felt I knew a good amount, but I went home that night and actually read the report,” Fellst said. “Turns out I was lacking in quite a few areas.”
Senior Allen Kasiwhicz was interviewed for the second part of this article on security awareness.
“I still do think the university does what it can to make the stuff in this report well known,” Kasiwhicz said. “But I do think you don’t get the full scope without doing a deep dive into the report.”
Senior Tate Westerly, who spoke on the sexual misconduct section of the report for the third part of this series, said he felt his awareness of both security and fire safety has changed since his interview.
“I walked away from that interview wanting to know more,” Westerly said. “I read the report and the follow up stories that came after the one I was in. It’s helped me know what I can or need to do for fire and security.”
Though sophomore Hunter Wiles was not interviewed for any previous articles, Wiles said he read the newspaper whenever he walked by it, and latched onto the series.
“I appreciated the look into something most students would probably see in an email, but never really look into,” Wiles said. “I know I saw it in one of the announcement emails we get, but I never really figured it was too important for me.”
In order to get an understanding on how UW students’ awareness may have changed, a secondary Google Poll was sent out.
All 45 of the original respondents from the first poll received the follow up poll. All 45 students were willing to respond to the follow-up and did so.
The first question of the poll asked whether the student had read any of the articles published in the Branding Iron series. 43 out of the 45 (96%) responded that they had read at least two or more of the articles in this series.
The rest of the poll went exactly like the first, with students being asked to gauge their comfortability with fire safety and security policies followed by identifying three of those resources in each category.
Out of those who read articles of this series, 39 out of 43 (91%) felt confident about identifying fire safety resources and 36 out of 43 (84%) felt confident about identifying security resources.
In follow up questions, 21 out of 43 (49%) of students were able to identify three or more fire safety resources they could use with 29 out of 43 (67%) being able to identify three or more security resources.
These numbers are up significantly from the 9% fire safety and 38% security resource identification from before.
Senior Aaron Baysinger responded to both polls and showed improvement on both sets of identification questions.
“I feel good about knowing my apartment’s specific fire policies or what other services UW has other than just campus police,” Baysinger said. “I recommend reading the report and make sure to stay up to date and know everything we need to.
The numbers of this survey may be skewed due to the fact that 19 out of the 43 respondents also reported they read the report on their own after taking the poll before they read any articles.
“I think there could be a bit of a bias in the data, but I think even bringing awareness to this issue using the polls or the articles will at least get a few more people to know the rules of the university,” Baysinger said.
While the poll showed an increase in awareness and ability to identify resources, it is impossible to say for certain that this series has increased campus awareness of fire safety and security.
For anyone who wishes to familiarize themselves with the report or the previous articles of this series, both can be found online.
The 2021 Security and Fire Safety report can be found here: www.uwyo.edu/uwpd/_files/2021uwsecurityreport.pdf
All previous articles of this series can be found on the Branding Iron website as they become available here: www.uwbrandingiron.com
