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BU students reminded: If you're in a burning building, call 911 before your parents

BU Today reports on this morning's fire on Linden Street, in a house occupied by BU students:

BU Police Chief Thomas Robbins says his department received a call from a parent of one of the students in the apartment, whose first response was to call home. Robbins says he hopes that students learn to make their first and immediate call to 911 or to the BUPD at 617-353-2121. "We've got to get our number on the students' radar," he says. "It's great that this person called a parent, but people in danger should call us first, then call a parent."

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Comments

...that kids today aren't ready for the real world, I haven't read it. Seriously, your house is on fire, and your first call isn't to somebody who has direct contact with firefighters? Are you slow?

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BUPD's advice is equally stupid, and they're supposedly professional adults.

"Robbins says he hopes that students learn to make their first and immediate call to 911 or to the BUPD at 617-353-2121."

Why the hell would you call a university POLICE department about an off-campus FIRE?

Call 911, or if you're in Boston, for the quickest response, save 617-343-4911 to your phone and call that to avoid State Police 911 dispatchers and having to repeat yourself a second time to Boston dispatchers.

All BUPD are going to do is cause added delay, fuck up details like the address, and get in between you and the 911 dispatchers who will want additional details trying to figure out how bad the fire is, how many people are in the building, are they trapped, etc.

What is it with local "authorities" (campus police, corporate security, even HR departments, I've seen!) trying to shoehorn themselves between emergencies and first-responders?

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Easy. The sooner the university hack jobs know about a crisis, the sooner they can start to spin it.

As for the asshat who called fucking home first, well, that is predictable. There is a whole generaton of kids in college now who can't wipe their ass without coaching and encouragement from their overprotective helicopter parents. Why in the world would anyone think they'd be capable of independent thought in the face of an emergency?

Cripes.

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BU likely does this so they can be in place to "spin" the story if it reflects poorly on them or their students.

Which is truly ironic, because if BU students act out off-campus in most other ways, BU doesn't involve themselves - they tell you to call 911!

Besides, if you were a student and were involved in some off-campus incident, why would you ever call the University? Push come to shove, they'll throw you under the bus to protect themselves.

Just call 911 and get out of the damned house.

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Why the hell would you call a university POLICE department about an off-campus FIRE?

Now, where exactly did he say to do that specifically? 911 is more appropriate for some things (like fires), campus police for others (like a street preacher in a classroom.)

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Robbins says he hopes that students learn to make their first and immediate call to 911 or to the BUPD at 617-353-2121.

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What could go wrong? These private police forces are in the news quite frequently ... pepper spraying peaceful protestors at UC Davis, withholding urgent information for PR purposes while a campus shooter is on a rampage at VA Tech and putting football before the lives of young children at Penn State. As a parent, these private police forces make me feel my child is much LESS secure and I wonder what portion of my tuition dollars is funding these shadowy operations that have put students in jeopardy in the past.

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You're dumb. The police forces on many large campuses, Penn State included, are full fledged police forces under state law. They're not private.

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that kids today children of wealthy helicopter parents aren't ready for the real world

There have been a number of incidents where my sons' friends have displayed a bit more sense at a much younger age (one who was home alone at 13 when there was a spectacular crash outside their home; a gas grill fire that ended up being pretty minor, etc.).

Then again, "automatically call 911" was still likely a new thing when their parents were raised, but people in their 40s grew up with it everywhere for most of our lives.

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Couldn't been worse. They might have posted this on Facebook, or sent out a Tweet.

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But to me it sounds like people fled and then the one of the students first responses was to call home.

Do we actually know if Tweedledumb called home while the building was burning around them?

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This was my reading too. It's possible that someone else HAD called 911 (or was in the process of doing so). It's counterproductive for all 7 residents to call 911 simultaneously, no? In which case, if you're already out and there's nothing you can safely do to remedy the situation, why not call your parents? I'm guessing that the parents then called BUPD for some reason.

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My guess is that was a convenient hook that reinforces the OMFG snowflake / old man yell at clouds disapproval of the articles intended audience, so they threw it in there and got the pretty predictable yell at cloud responses above.

Technically it's not wrong, and technically it did happen. But if Sue is calling home to mom and dad who then don't see it on the news right away and call the school for more info, while Johnny was on the phone with 911 the whole time... whats the big deal?

Could be wrong, but they did say 7 people were living there. I'm sure 911 got the first call and everyone was outside before parents were involved (and probably overreacted)

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and they become Yuppies, then they will report the fire to Citizen Connects.

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