The archive that keeps the original words

A research tool. Each case documents the complete alert sequence for a single incident at a single institution: the initial alert, every subsequent update, and the all-clear message. Every alert is annotated with analytical observations about language choices, timing, channel selection, and compliance with the Clery Act's requirements for timely warnings and emergency notifications.

What it is not: a news site, a vigilante crime database, a ranking, or an institutional report card. It is a primary-source archive intended for researchers, journalists, emergency-management practitioners, and the public-safety officers who write these messages.

Created and maintained by Kevin Pisciella, Emergency Preparedness Specialist in the Office of Environmental Health and Safety (Emergency Management) at Princeton University, working with AI. This archive is a personal project: personally funded rather than specifically commissioned by a grant or by the University. It has grown with the encouragement and feedback of Princeton University Emergency Management, but the content is not fully reviewed, verified, or confirmed by Princeton University. Data contained within this project represents AI tools’ best efforts, and content is not formally validated by Princeton University human reviewers before publishing. New cases are researched, written, and validated through an AI ingestion pipeline that web-searches official archives, cross-references multiple sources, and assembles each case as a structured JSON file, all gated by a strict validator before anything is published. Every case is sourced; every source is linked. As of July 2026, growing that pipeline (adding new cases, adding new alert-and-warning policies, and reviewing OpenAI Codex’s contributed batches before they merge) is owned by Claude Sonnet 5, and the site itself (its design direction, information architecture, analytics, and platform engineering) is directed by Claude Fable 5, with the maintainer setting the standard and reviewing the results (see the colophon).

Kevin Pisciella: Princeton Emergency Management · Environmental Health & Safety · LinkedIn

In plain terms, this is a project the maintainer pays for and enjoys. If that ever changes, this page will say so.

This started as a way to learn to use AI well. Not to read about it, but to actually practice the harder skill: directing AI tools to pour large, sustained amounts of compute into building and steadily improving a single focused project over time. The archive is the thing being built, and the real exercise is learning how to make that building process reliable, systematic, and self-improving.

Campus emergency alerts turned out to be an ideal subject. The work is open-ended and verifiable: there is always another real incident to document, every claim can be checked against primary sources, and quality is enforced by an automated validator rather than by vibes. That makes it a project that compounds, where each new session of AI effort leaves the archive measurably larger and better than before.

The wider point is the method, not the subject. What this demonstrates is that AI can now carry sustained, mission-driven work where the limiting variable is the amount of compute you choose to spend, not the hours one person can give. Spend more compute and more verified value is created for everyone who uses it; the approach is repeatable, gets faster and sharper with each iteration, and could run across several projects at once. In effect, it turns compute directly into public value, and it is a skill worth being fluent in well before it is urgently needed.

That last part matters most in emergencies. In a prolonged crisis the bottleneck is rarely ideas, it is sustained human hours, and there are never enough of them. This archive is a working proof that compute can absorb a large share of that load, so a very small team can do many times the careful, verifiable work, exactly when it counts most.

The Clery Act (20 U.S.C. § 1092(f)) and its implementing regulations (34 CFR § 668.46) require all Title IV institutions to issue two distinct kinds of alerts: timely warnings for Clery Act crimes that pose a continuing threat, and emergency notifications for any significant emergency or dangerous situation on campus. The distinction matters: timely warnings must reach the entire campus community, while emergency notifications can be targeted to affected segments, categories that are sometimes conflated in practice. This archive documents the reality of how those legal obligations translate into the actual words that hit students' lock screens.

When a typo survives into a mass notification reaching tens of thousands of people, it isn't an error to fix in hindsight; it's evidence of how people communicate under extreme urgency. So every typo, dropped article, and all-caps sentence is preserved exactly as sent. How we handle verbatim fidelity →

Each case carries an honest confidence rating: HIGH (verbatim from an official source), MEDIUM (reliable secondary reporting), or LOW (partially reconstructed). Reconstructed alerts are flagged and rendered in italics with a dashed left border, so the distinction is visible at a glance. See the full rating definitions →

The archive aims for coverage across every institution type, from large research universities to community colleges, HBCUs, tribal colleges, and institutions in US territories. All cases are treated and weighted equally. Some institution types are underrepresented in public archives because of archival practice, not crime rate, so if your institution's alerts are missing, that's a gap in the public record, not an indicator of safety.

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