COLLEGE STATION, Texas — While the manhunt was underway Sunday afternoon, police issued a shelter in place, wanting people in the neighborhood to stay inside.
College Station Police issued this order for the neighborhood in south Bryan while law enforcement was looking for the suspect in a child assault case.
“Shelter in place can mean different things depending on the type of emergency situations occurring, so generally speaking it means to go inside, and then to do what other action messages are attached to the shelter in place order,” said College Station Police PIO Tristen Lopez.
Police say different kinds of shelter in place orders are issued under varying circumstances.
“For weather type incidents, like tornadoes, hurricanes, high winds, significant thunderstorms… or in yesterday’s case there’s a suspect in that aggravated assault that occurred earlier in the day and that man just ran from SWAT officers and so we’re searching residential neighborhoods for a man, we don’t know if he’s armed or unarmed, but there’s a man that’s wanted as a suspect in connection with an aggravated assault,” said Lopez.
The police call an emergency notification system a reverse 911. This is when the emergency operation center sends out an automated recording to the phone numbers in the area. Surrounding residencies will receive this emergency call.
For the Brazos Valley, you need to register your own phone number if you don’t have a home phone provided by CenturyLink or Frontier.
“If you have a home phone provided through a different service, you’ll need to register through an online system, or you can also have your cellphone and you’d like to get that registered, then you can take those phone numbers and register it through the county’s online system, which is again, through our Community Emergency Operation Centers CEOC,” said Lopez.
You can choose between what kind of alerts you want to receive.
“I think you can choose between emergency alerts, general community alerts, and weather alerts. So you can choose which or all a combination of those you want to receive and then you’ll get an automated phone call from a phone number and there’s a different number associated with those different alert types, then you’ll hear the recording for what that alert is occurring and issued for,” said Lopez
College Station police say registering with your county’s emergency notification system will usually be the quickest way to know if you are in an area impacted by an emergency.
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