BOULDER — The University of Colorado is unveiling a new mobile safety application for students and employees as the campus continues to phase out its “blue light” emergency phones.
Since November, crews have removed 10 of the 80 existing emergency phones, which were installed in the mid-1990s all over the Boulder campus so that passersby could report crimes in progress, suspicious persons, medical emergencies or other concerns.
The phones are out-of-date, in need of repair and mostly used for prank calls, so CU Student Government leaders began looking for a modern way to replace them.
They settled on an app called LifeLine Response, which typically requires users to pay a subscription fee, but CU Student Government and the campus administration each chipped in $5,000 to make the service free for students and employees for one year.
“The blue lights are relatively expensive as far as maintenance since a lot of them go out of service very rapidly, and the other thing is that people will press them when there’s not necessarily an emergency,” said Will Fattor, director of health and safety for CU Student Government. “We needed a way to provide that sort of service for students that was more accessible and didn’t cost as much.”
CU police received more than 2,700 emergency calls from mobile phones over the past two years, compared with 235 calls from the emergency “blue light” phones, 91 percent of which were pranks or hang-ups.
Most of the legitimate calls from the emergency phones were for minor crimes, liquor law violations, maintenance or help opening doors, according to police.
In 2011, the city of Boulder removed five blue emergency phones from University Hill after receiving 351 calls — all false — from those phones in two years.
Fattor said the mobile app is intended to provide an additional layer of safety for students going on late-night jogs or walking to their off-campus houses from the library. Most students already use their cellphones regularly, he said.
