On Dec. 13, Caroline Grand was watching a movie in the Avon Theater on Thayer Street — just a 10-minute walk from Brown’s campus — when a shooter opened fire in Barus and Holley.
Once the movie ended around 6 p.m., theatergoers were informed that an active shooter was nearby, Grand said.
“Everyone in the theater started to panic a little bit,” she added. “People were pulling out their phones to see what was going on.” But Grand said that when she checked her phone, she had not received any alerts from the City of Providence.
Grand, who has lived in the city for seven years, was not the only resident who felt left in the dark by Providence’s emergency alert system.
In a press conference on Dec. 15, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley urged residents to sign up for Providence 311, or PVD311 — a platform typically used for non-emergency service requests and related communications — to receive emergency alerts about the shooting at Brown.
“311 notices have continued to go out throughout this entire incident,” he said. “Notifications are working fine.” But residents have said that officials did not provide clear or adequate communications.
Just over 6,000 Providence residents had created a PVD311 account as of Jan. 20 at 3 p.m., wrote Kristy dosReis, the Providence chief public information officer for public safety, in an email to The Herald. Providence is home to an estimated 195,000 residents.
Will Otto, who lives “right behind Hope High School,” was alerted of the shooting at 4:30 p.m. — about half an hour after shots were first fired — when a friend texted in a pickup basketball group chat.
The friend, who has a membership at the Olney-Margolies Athletic Center, had received the first alert sent by Brown at 4:22 p.m, Otto explained. Otto’s wife was not at home, so he warned her through text that “there’s something weird going on around Brown’s campus.”
“It was pretty unclear what was going on,” Otto said. Otto spent the next two hours “cobbling together an understanding” of the situation by turning to alternative sources like the Boston Globe, Brown’s website and the Providence subreddit. Those hours were filled with “lots of sirens, but not a lot of confirmed information,” he added.
According to dosReis, the city issued two PVD311 alerts on Dec. 13. The first, sent at 5:23 p.m., stated, “Heavy Police and Fire presence on Hope Street, near Brown University. Please avoid this area until further notice.”
The second, sent at 9:49 p.m., stated, “A Shelter in Place remains in effect in the greater Brown University area. Providence Police remain on scene.”
“The City of Providence communicated with residents using multiple channels, including CodeRED and PVD311 alerts, social media platforms and coordination with traditional media outlets,” dosReis wrote. CodeRED is the city’s emergency notification system.
PVD311, launched in 2016 as an app, was replaced by a new PVD311 website last March. During “development and design” of the website, “research indicated that a web-based application accessible from any device would be most effective,” dosReis added.
Otto believes that he signed up for PVD311 “in 2022 or 2023,” but said that he never received “any clear communication” of the platform’s shift from an app to a website. In the last year, he said he has not received any alerts. He attempted to sign back up on the afternoon of the shooting, but described the page’s information as “very unclear.”
“The system was recently upgraded following months of robust community engagement and incorporates best practices from non-emergency systems used by cities across the nation,” dosReis wrote. “PVD311 offers a texting option for residents who create an account and opt in.”
According to dosReis, at the beginning of the incident, the city also considered sending a Wireless Emergency Alert — which sends audible notifications to every cell phone not powered off within a designated area bound by select cell towers.
The system does not have the capacity to “issue an alert only to Providence residents or a small specific geographic subset of Providence residents,” dosReis explained.
Additionally, sounds from audible notifications posed “potential safety risks to individuals sheltering-in-place and to emergency responders involved in the incident response,” dosReis wrote in an email to The Herald. As a result, the city opted not to request a WEA activation from the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency.
Grand remembered receiving an audible notification when the Washington Bridge shut down in December 2023. “That was treated as a big alert and a big emergency,” she said. “It really blew my mind that there was no notification whatsoever” on Dec. 13.
“The fact of the matter is that they didn’t catch this guy … there were helicopters going back and forth over my apartment for days,” Grand said. “There was no notification to stay in the area or not stay in the area.”
Beth Moloney, who lives on Hope Street, said that her teenage daughter was about to walk to Thayer Street at the time of the shooting.
Minutes before Moloney’s daughter was set to leave the house, Moloney’s wife — who works at Brown — received the University’s first text alert at 4:22 p.m. warning of an active shooter. The couple quickly stopped their daughter from leaving.
Moloney said she has been registered for PVD311 since before Smiley’s mayoral term and often submits service requests on the platform. She alleged that before the shooting, PVD311’s landing page presented users with two fields to fill: one for a main phone number, the other for a mobile phone number — neither of which was marked as required.
Moloney had previously entered her cell phone number into the main number field, opted into text notifications and left the mobile number field blank.
“I was under the assumption that by putting my phone number in there, I was in the system,” she said. But she says she received no emails, texts or calls from the city regarding the attack.
After the shooting, Moloney said she added her phone number in the mobile number field of PVD311 and opted into receiving texts again. She soon began getting messages about trash pickups and school committee elections — alerts she described feeling like “spam” in the wake of the shooting.
In an after-action letter released last week, Mayor Smiley wrote that Providence would hire a third-party consultant to review the city’s response to the shooting. The city would “review internal and external notification to partners, public and the press,” he stated.
Any future changes to the city’s emergency notification systems “will be informed by the results of that review,” dosReis wrote.
Starting Jan. 14, Moloney reported that a “big yellow text box” now appears on her PVD311 landing page with instructions on how to sign up for alerts.
The City of Providence did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
“This was a scary, dangerous, awful thing that happened, and I hope it never happens again,” Otto said. “But if it were to happen again, I don't feel confident right now that the communication systems the city has are up to the task.”
“Whatever 311 was supposed to accomplish,” he added, “clearly it wasn't ready for an event of this magnitude.”
Michelle Bi is a sophomore and metro section editor at The Herald.
