In an effort to keep our community more informed about emergency incidents in their vicinity, the UW-Madison Police Department offers Off-Campus Emergency Alerts. These alerts are a supplement to WiscAlerts, which are emergency notifications about dangerous incidents actively happening on the UW-Madison campus. The key difference is that Off-Campus Emergency Alerts (OCEAs) will alert our community about significant threats in certain areas OFF the UW-Madison campus – in areas where a large number of our students live or frequently visit.
Because OCEAs deal with incidents outside of UWPD’s jurisdiction, we can only issue an alert when we become aware of the actively occurring incident and have verified the information. Therefore, Off-Campus Emergency Alerts are only activated when the UW-Madison Police Department receives information from the City of Madison Police Department about the active emergency situation.
Unlike WiscAlerts, Off-Campus Emergency Alerts are only sent via our BadgerSAFE app. Anyone can download the app from their phone’s app store — once you launch the app, be sure to enable push notifications so you receive each alert.
See the map below for the Off-Campus Emergency Alert area:
