Swarthmore
Timely Warning Notices and Emergency Notification (Department of Public Safety)
Swarthmore College, a small private liberal-arts college near Philadelphia, issues Clery Timely Warning Notices and emergency notifications through its Department of Public Safety, using a multi-tool system — the SwatSafe safety app, an InformaCast/Cisco IP-phone and campus-voicemail blast, email, and an externally hosted emergency website — and reserves Timely Warning Notices for Clery-reportable crimes judged to represent a continuing threat to the campus community.
Read the official policy~1,700 studentsSwarthmore College Public Safety emergency notification system (SwatSafe app + InformaCast/Cisco IP-phone and voicemail/email blast)
In the policy’s own words
What the policy says
Timely warning standard — continuing threatverbatim
The Federal Clery Act requires colleges to report to the campus community crimes that fall into certain categories and that are considered by the institution to represent a continuing threat to the campus community.
- States the Clery timely-warning trigger as the 'continuing threat' standard. Identical wording appeared across multiple retrievals of the official Public Safety Timely Warning Notices page.
Timely warnings not issued for every Clery crimeverbatim
Not every instance of a Clery crime represents a continuing threat to the community and therefore Timely Warning Notifications are not issued in every instance of a Clery crime on or near the campus.
- The judgment-based limit that distinguishes a timely warning from a crime-log entry: a continuing threat is required, not merely a reportable crime. Corroborated across multiple official-page retrievals.
SwatSafe official safety appnot yet verified against the source
The policy addresses this topic; its exact wording has not yet been verified against the source, so no text is quoted here. Open the official policy to read it.
Swarthmore College — Public Safety (host reachable only via search index)Phone-system emergency notification toolsnot yet verified against the source
The policy addresses this topic; its exact wording has not yet been verified against the source, so no text is quoted here. Open the official policy to read it.
Swarthmore College — Public Safety, Emergency Response Guide (host reachable only via search index)Externally hosted emergency websitenot yet verified against the source
The policy addresses this topic; its exact wording has not yet been verified against the source, so no text is quoted here. Open the official policy to read it.
Swarthmore College — Public Safety, Emergency Response Guide (host reachable only via search index)At a glance
How this policy works
- When it activates
- Timely Warning Notices are issued for Clery-reportable crimes that the institution considers to represent a continuing threat to the campus community; they are explicitly NOT issued for every Clery crime. Emergency notifications are issued for immediate dangers to the community. Both functions are issued through the Department of Public Safety.
- Who decides
- The Department of Public Safety issues both Emergency Notifications and Timely Warning Notices and decides on the proper method and timing of notification. A Clery Act Compliance Committee (students, faculty, staff) oversees reporting, policy and procedure development. The specific named individual/title authorized to trigger an emergency notification was not confirmable verbatim in this review and is described generically.
- Timeliness standard
- Swarthmore frames timely warnings around the Clery 'continuing threat' standard and states warnings are issued when appropriate; emergency notifications go out when DPS becomes aware of an immediate danger. A specific numeric or 'without delay' timing phrase from an official Swarthmore source was not corroborated verbatim in this review, so the timing standard is described qualitatively.
- Emergency notification vs. timely warning
- Swarthmore separates the two Clery functions and states the standard verbatim: Timely Warning Notices cover Clery-category crimes representing a continuing threat, and are not issued for every Clery crime. A Clery Act Compliance Committee oversees the College's compliance and updates the Annual Fire Safety and Security Report.
- Testing cadence
- The College's published materials describe the notification tools but did not, in the indexed snippets available to this review, state a specific periodic test cadence; that field is left unstated rather than reconstructed.
- Scope & limits
- The emergency-notification toolset is phone-system-centric: the campus voicemail/Cisco IP-phone and InformaCast channels reach community members on campus phones, while email, the SwatSafe app and the externally hosted emergency website extend reach off the phone system. Full mobile/SMS reach depends on community members installing SwatSafe and keeping contact information current. The current platform is described by the College as SwatSafe + InformaCast/Cisco rather than a single externally branded SMS product.
ChannelsPhone CallEmailSmsPush NotificationWebsiteDesktop Popup
Analysis
Reading the policy
Swarthmore College is a roughly 1,700-student private liberal-arts college in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia. Its Clery alert-and-warning functions are run by the Department of Public Safety (DPS), which publishes a public Timely Warning Notices page and maintains an Emergency Response Guide describing how emergency notifications are delivered.
On the timely-warning side, Swarthmore tracks the Clery standard precisely. DPS states that the federal Clery Act requires the College to report to the campus community crimes that fall into certain categories and that are 'considered by the institution to represent a continuing threat to the campus community,' and is careful to add that 'not every instance of a Clery crime represents a continuing threat to the community and therefore Timely Warning Notifications are not issued in every instance of a Clery crime on or near the campus.' That judgment-based framing — issue only on a continuing threat — is the heart of the timely-warning regime, and Swarthmore states it explicitly. Both Emergency Notifications and Timely Warning Notices are issued through the Public Safety Department.
The emergency-notification toolset is unusually phone-system-centric for a small college. Per the College's Emergency Response Guide, the voicemail system can send a single voicemail to all students, all faculty and staff, or the full community and will activate the message light on all campus Cisco phones; email is used to send alerts; text messages preceded by an alert tone can be pushed to and displayed on IP phone screens; and the InformaCast system can rapidly push notifications (e.g., severe-weather information) through the Cisco IP-phone system. The College also runs an externally hosted emergency.swarthmore.edu site that is always live and updatable during an incident, plus the SwatSafe mobile app, described as the official safety app and the only app that integrates with the College's safety and security systems, which both pushes safety alerts and lets users report concerns to DPS. Historically, vendor-endorsement materials associate the e2Campus/Omnilert keyword-SMS product with this generation of campus systems, but this review could not corroborate from an official Swarthmore source that a discrete brand called 'Swarthmore Alert' or a live Omnilert/e2Campus deployment is the current system; the College's own pages describe the InformaCast/Cisco-and-SwatSafe toolset instead. That brand question is flagged honestly rather than asserted. The exact named decision authority and a specific periodic test cadence were not confirmable verbatim (swarthmore.edu pages were reachable only via the search index, not a byte-for-byte fetch); the continuing-threat timely-warning language was corroborated across multiple official-page retrievals and is marked verbatim-confirmed.
Takeaways
Key findings
Swarthmore's Clery alert-and-warning functions are run by the Department of Public Safety, which publishes a public Timely Warning Notices page.
DPS states the Clery standard verbatim: Timely Warning Notices cover crimes representing a continuing threat and are NOT issued for every Clery crime.
The emergency-notification toolset is phone-system-centric — campus voicemail/Cisco IP-phone blast, alert-tone IP-phone text, InformaCast, email — plus the SwatSafe app and an externally hosted always-live emergency website.
A discrete current brand called 'Swarthmore Alert' or a live Omnilert/e2Campus deployment could NOT be corroborated from an official Swarthmore source; the College describes the SwatSafe + InformaCast/Cisco toolset instead, so the brand is flagged rather than asserted.
The named emergency-notification decision authority and a specific test cadence were not confirmable verbatim (swarthmore.edu reachable only via search index); the continuing-threat timely-warning language was confirmed verbatim across multiple official-page retrievals.
Policy, meet practice
When this system actually fired
1 documented time Swarthmore’s alert system was used, from the case archive.
Provenance
Sources
- Official
- Official
- Official
- Official
- Official
Tags
policytimely-warningemergency-notificationprivate-liberal-artspennsylvaniaswatsafeinformacastdepartment-of-public-safety
Added 2026-06-21Updated 2026-09-13Via ingestion