Last Tuesday, a 17-year-old was shot in the Wood Street T Station, which Google Maps identifies as 0.3 miles away from Point Park’s campus.

Students, however, did not hear about the violent crime from a Point Park resource, unlike past robberies that students have been notified about via the PointALERT text messaging  system.

Point Park Chief of Police Jeffrey Besong told the Globe that he didn’t send out a PointALERT to preserve the urgency of the system for immediate threats.

While we acknowledge that PointALERT should be used for immediate and imminent threats, the question then becomes why was this incident not deemed something urgent enough to warrant notification? If we’re not using PointALERT to notify students of a violent crime blocks away from campus, how else are we to be notified?

Public Safety did not even send an email to students.

Students and staff don’t expect PointALERT to broadcast every crime committed Downtown. However when a shooting occurs blocks from campus, near off campus housing, we feel we should have been notified.

PointALERT has been incredibly successful in the past at alerting students of danger nearby, which is why we are scratching our heads as to why it wasn’t used last Tuesday.

Point Park Police aren’t responsible for preventing violent crime that takes place off-campus Downtown. But hearing about those crimes right away via PointALERT would be more reassuring than seeing a “Shooting in Downtown Pittsburgh” headline on Twitter.

Students who live or work on the North Shore use the T nearly every day.

Other students live in the Cultural District, close to the Wood Street T Station. Some students who live on campus might also have been near the scene hunting Pokemon.

Information about a violent crime committed within walking distance would have been useful and timely for any of these students, and the PointALERT system is quicker than news outlets. It’s a potentially vitally useful tool.

We came to Point Park as students to expand our horizons. Expanding the horizons of our PointALERT system, too, doesn’t seem unreasonable.