Co-founder talks safety app, experience at Virginia Tech
April 23, 2015
By Anne Halliwell
Kristina Anderson, a co-founder of the LiveSafe application recently adopted on campus, detailed the product’s potential for early reporting of crimes in her campus talk Wednesday night.
Anderson took the stage in Memorial Hall at 8 p.m. and detailed her experience as a survivor of the Virginia Tech shooting in April of 2007, linking it and other school shootings to the need for freer access to police.
The current number of LiveSafe downloads, Anderson said, equals about 10 percent of campus. However, the app’s team does not monitor the number of users who subsequently delete the app after downloading it.
Anderson said that UKPD currently receives two to three tips a week through LiveSafe.
“They’ve gotten everything from sexual assault to a broken-down tree,” Anderson said. “I think a lot of the information that they get, they wouldn’t receive otherwise.”
UK police have responded to 15 tips from the app since its launch in February, UK police chief Joe Monroe said.
Anderson spoke at length about her experience during the Virginia Tech shooting, wherein she and her classmates were trapped. Some were injured and many were killed by the shooter over the course of nine to twelve minutes.
“I don’t have a lot of visual memories from that day,” Anderson said. “What stays with you is the sound (of fire and coughing) and the smell (of gunpowder).”
Anderson survived, but was shot twice in the back and once in her foot. Of the 18 people in her class, 12 were killed. In reaction, years later, Anderson became involved with the LiveSafe startup back when it was conceived as “CrimeQuestion,” a crime-reporting app.
Anderson referenced a bystander study about prior knowledge of school-based violence conducted by the U.S. Secret Service and the Department of Education in 2008.
The study stated that in 93 percent of cases, the attacker exhibited “concerning behavior” before the attacks.
“Second, and more significant, at least one other person had some type of knowledge of the attacker’s plan in 81 percent of the incidents and more than one person had such knowledge in 59 percent of the incidents,” the report read. “Of those individuals who had prior knowledge, 93 percent were peers of the perpetrators – friends, schoolmates, or siblings.”
Anderson said that while campus security has improved since 2007, the goal of the app was to give students another tool to access police and plan a response in case of emergency.
