MSU Billings
University Police, Emergency Notifications
Montana State University Billings defines three tiers of campus alerting on its Emergency Notifications page: Emergency Notifications for an ongoing threat such as an active shooter, earthquake, or evacuation; Timely Warnings for a serious or repeatable crime threat under the Clery Act; and Safety Alerts for situations that do not pose an immediate threat but warrant awareness, with students and employees automatically enrolled in notification emails and unable to opt out.
Read the official policyEmergency Notification System
In the policy’s own words
What the policy says
Emergency Notification definitionnot 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.
MSU Billings University Police, Emergency Notifications (reconstructed from search engine indexed text; host blocked automated fetching in this environment)Timely Warning definitionnot 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.
MSU Billings University Police, Emergency Notifications (reconstructed from search engine indexed text; host blocked automated fetching in this environment)Mandatory email enrollmentnot 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.
MSU Billings, Emergency Notification System (reconstructed from search engine indexed text; host blocked automated fetching in this environment)At a glance
How this policy works
- When it activates
- Emergency Notifications are issued for a potential ongoing threat, such as an active shooter, earthquake, or evacuation, that could cause immediate harm to health and safety. Timely Warnings are issued for a serious threat of a crime, or a crime occurring or that could be repeated. Safety Alerts are issued for situations that do not pose an immediate threat but may require awareness.
- Who decides
- Multiple individuals on MSU Billings' Crisis Management Team are trained to send emergency notifications via RAVE; a single named approving official was not confirmed in the sources reviewed.
- Timeliness standard
- Timely Warnings are described as issued so that campus community members can protect themselves from harm, in compliance with the federal Clery Act; a specific minutes based standard was not independently confirmed in the sources reviewed.
- Emergency notification vs. timely warning
- MSU Billings names three tiers rather than two: Emergency Notifications (ongoing life safety threats), Timely Warnings (explicitly tied to Clery Act compliance for crime threats), and Safety Alerts (non-immediate awareness situations), the last of which sits outside the two categories the Clery Act itself requires.
- Testing cadence
- Not specified in the sources reviewed.
- Scope & limits
- Students and employees are automatically enrolled in email notifications and cannot opt out; notifications may additionally be sent via carillon (PA system), campus phones, text message, and the university's Facebook and Twitter accounts.
ChannelsEmailSmsPhone CallPa SystemFacebookTwitter X
Analysis
Reading the policy
MSU Billings' University Police organizes its alerting duties into three distinct tiers rather than the more common two-tier Clery structure. Emergency Notifications are issued when a potential ongoing threat, the page names active shooter, earthquake, and evacuation as examples, could cause immediate harm to the health and safety of students, faculty, and staff. Timely Warnings are issued when there is a serious threat of a crime, or a crime occurring or that could be repeated, so that campus community members can protect themselves from harm, in compliance with the federal Clery Act, tracking the statutory language closely. A third tier, Safety Alerts, is issued to notify students, faculty, and staff of situations that do not pose an immediate threat to life safety but may require awareness to reduce the risk of being victimized, a category some peer institutions fold into timely warnings but MSU Billings names separately.
For security reasons and Clery compliance, the university states that students and employees are automatically enrolled in email notifications and cannot opt out of receiving emergency notification emails, a mandatory enrollment model stronger than the more common automatic-but-adjustable registration used elsewhere. Multiple individuals on the university's Crisis Management Team, MSU Billings' name for its incident command structure, are trained to send alerts via RAVE, the university's emergency notification software, and emergency notifications may be sent via carillon, described as the campus public address system, campus phones, email, text message, and the university's Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Because msubillings.edu returned blocked connections to automated fetching in this environment, the excerpts below are reconstructed from search engine indexed extracts of the official page rather than a firsthand character by character read, and no excerpt is treated as a confirmed exact quotation; this record is scored at medium confidence on that basis.
Takeaways
Key findings
MSU Billings names three alert tiers: Emergency Notifications (ongoing life safety threats), Timely Warnings (Clery Act crime threats), and Safety Alerts (non-immediate awareness situations).
Students and employees are automatically enrolled in email notifications and cannot opt out, justified on security and Clery compliance grounds.
The university's Crisis Management Team sends alerts via RAVE across email, text, campus phones, the carillon PA system, and social media.
Msubillings.edu could not be directly loaded in this environment, so this record is scored at medium confidence and no excerpt is treated as a confirmed exact quotation.
Policy, meet practice
When this system actually fired
4 documented times MSU Billings’s alert system was used, from the case archive.
Provenance
Sources
- Official
- Official
- Official
Tags
policyemergency-notificationtimely-warningsafety-alertclery-actravepublic-mastersmontana
Added 2026-09-27Updated 2026-09-27Via ingestion