Last week, there was a potential gunman in the University of Central Florida library. But it wasn’t the pontential danger that set off the students, it was the emergency alert they received from the university, according to the Huffington Post.
The alert didn’t include the gunperson’s gender, but did include their alleged ethnicity: Middle Eastern. More surprisingly, even the newspaper and other university accounts used the same language. The campus police Twitter handle, however, did not.
Students were upset by the lack of discretion of UCF, firing off Tweets wondering how emergency dispatchers were able to figure out the person’s race without being able to tell what gender they were.
I honestly don’t fucking get it, y’all don’t know if its a man/woman but, y’all know that they’re Middle Eastern. How is that possible? #UCF
— Saba Basit (@SabaBasit97) April 26, 2016
According to The Huffington Post, the police received an unconfirmed report through social media of a potential gunwoman and cleared the library immediately. By 5:15 p.m., fifteen minutes after they received the report, they gave the all clear via Twitter.
Later, the Huffington Post received 911 call recordings and a Facebook message that showed the emergency alert came from a couple of students who saw a Muslim woman in the library who they found suspicious. This woman apparently looked shaky and had an object the students thought was a gun. Once this rumor was out there, other students started calling 911 to report that they had heard about a shooting in the library. According to the New York Daily News, others saw the same woman and reported that she was praying while holding the Koran.
“It’s just really disappointing the fact that something as peaceful as praying in the library can be misunderstood as an active shooter,” Mohamed Mohamed, the president of UCF’s Muslim Student Association, told the New York Daily News.