Emory
Emergency Notification and Response (Annual Security Report policy statement)
Emory University's Emergency Notification and Response policy statement commits the university to without-delay notification upon confirmation of an immediate threat, while its separately published Timely Warning Protocol routes Clery-crime warnings, branded Public Safety Notices, through a compliance-and-counsel review chain rather than the police desk.
Read the official policy~16,511 studentsEmory Emergency Notification
In the policy’s own words
What the policy says
Emergency notification standardverbatim
Upon confirmation of an emergency or dangerous situation involving an immediate threat to the health or safety of students or employees occurring on the campus, Emory will, without delay, determine the appropriate message for distribution and initiate the emergency notification process.
- The without-delay commitment sits in the same sentence as message determination, so content decisions cannot lawfully queue the alert.
Public Safety Notices definednot 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.
Emory University Clery Act Compliance, Timely Warnings protocol page; captured via search-engine-indexed extract, host blocks automated fetchCompliance-and-counsel decision chainnot 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.
Emory University Clery Act Compliance, Timely Warnings protocol page; captured via search-engine-indexed extract, host blocks automated fetchAt a glance
How this policy works
- When it activates
- Emergency notifications issue upon confirmation of an emergency or dangerous situation involving an immediate threat to the health or safety of students or employees on campus; Public Safety Notices issue for reported Clery crimes judged to represent a serious or continuing threat after a case-by-case review.
- Who decides
- Emergency notifications run through CEPAR, the Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response, with Emory Police and Public Safety using the Rave system; Public Safety Notices are decided by the Director of Clery Act Compliance in consultation with the Associate Vice President and Chief Compliance Officer and the Office of General Counsel.
- Timeliness standard
- Upon confirmation of an immediate threat Emory will, without delay, determine the appropriate message for distribution and initiate the emergency notification process; timely warnings follow the Clery timeliness standard while withholding victim names.
- Emergency notification vs. timely warning
- Two sharply separated tracks: a CEPAR-run emergency notification system for confirmed immediate threats, and compliance-office-issued Public Safety Notices (Emory's brand for timely warnings) for Clery crimes with a serious or continuing threat.
- Testing cadence
- CEPAR tests the emergency notification systems monthly; the outdoor sirens are tested on the first Wednesday of each month at noon, alongside text, mass email, the Emory Safe app, X, and web and cable banners.
- Scope & limits
- Covers the Atlanta campus and Oxford College within Emory's Clery geography; the Rave text system serves both Emory University and Emory Healthcare, and issuance factors include whether the incident occurred within Clery reportable geography.
ChannelsSmsEmailSirenPush NotificationTwitter XWebsite
Analysis
Reading the policy
Emory publishes its Clery alerting rules as standing web pages of its dedicated Clery compliance site rather than only inside the annual PDF, and the two tracks are governed by conspicuously different machinery. The emergency-notification track, described on the Emergency Notification and Response page, follows the federal template: upon confirmation of an emergency or dangerous situation involving an immediate threat to health or safety, Emory will without delay determine the appropriate message and initiate the notification process. Operationally the system belongs to CEPAR, Emory's Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response, with the Rave alert service as the primary text channel serving both the university and Emory Healthcare, layered with outdoor warning sirens, mass email, the Emory Safe app, X, and web and cable banners.
The timely-warning track runs through lawyers and compliance officers instead. Emory brands its timely warnings as Public Safety Notices, and the Timely Warnings protocol page assigns the issuance decision to the Director of Clery Act Compliance, deciding case by case in consultation with the Associate Vice President and Chief Compliance Officer and the Office of General Counsel, weighing the nature of the crime, its Clery geography, the time elapsed since the report, any relationship between the parties, and whether a serious or continuing threat remains. That is one of the more centralized, review-heavy timely-warning chains in this archive, in sharp contrast to the immediate-threat emergency side, and both tracks appear in Emory's alert history as this archive documents it: the August 2025 CDC shooting response ran on the emergency side, while robbery notices have come through the Public Safety Notice route.
Testing discipline is public and specific: CEPAR tests the notification systems monthly, with the sirens sounded the first Wednesday of each month at noon, and the tested stack enumerated down to cable banners. Emory also discloses that it retains the full stack for both campuses (Atlanta and Oxford College). Because emory.edu hosts are not reachable from this research environment (automated fetches return errors), the passages quoted below come from search-engine-indexed extracts of the cited pages rather than a firsthand line-by-line read, so every excerpt is marked isVerbatimConfirmed: false and confidence is held at medium.
Takeaways
Key findings
Emory splits authority by track: CEPAR runs the emergency notification system while the Director of Clery Act Compliance, the chief compliance officer, and the general counsel's office decide Public Safety Notices case by case.
The emergency-notification statement adopts the federal without-delay standard verbatim in structure, tying message determination and initiation together.
Timely warnings carry a house brand, Public Safety Notices, with victim confidentiality built into the definition.
The Rave text system serves Emory University and Emory Healthcare together, layered with sirens, mass email, the Emory Safe app, X, and web and cable banners.
Sirens are tested the first Wednesday of each month at noon as part of a monthly all-systems test run by CEPAR.
Policy, meet practice
When this system actually fired
5 documented times Emory’s alert system was used, from the case archive.
Provenance
Sources
- Clery ASR
- Official
- Official
- Official
- Clery ASR
Tags
policyclery-asremergency-notificationtimely-warningpublic-safety-noticescompliance-reviewgeneral-counselceparravegeorgiaprivate-r1siren-testing
Added 2026-08-31Updated 2026-09-20Via ingestion