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The Shooting
Rampage at
Columbine High School, Virginia Tech and
Northern Illinois University,
What Have We Learned?
Research has determined that
from the Moment of Commitment (the point when a student pulls
their weapon) to the Moment of Completion (when the last round
is fired) is only 5 seconds. If it is the intent of a school
district, colleges, universities and community colleges to react
to this violence (Crisis Management), they will do so over the
wounded and/or slain bodies of students, teachers/faculty,
administrators/staff and counselors.
Educational institutions
clearly want safe and secure schools. Administrators (K-12) and
student affairs staff are perennially queried by parents about
the safety of their campuses. The commonplace answers, intended
to reassure anxious parents, focus on the school resource
officers/campus police and emergency procedures. While useful,
these less than adequate efforts do not begin to provide a
definitive answer to preventing campus violence, nor do they
make a school safe and secure.
Traditionally school districts and higher education institutions
have relied upon the mental health community or local police to
keep campuses safe, yet one of the key shortcomings has been the
lack of a
Risk Management System
that involves faculty, administrators/staff,
counselors, parents and students in the identification and
communication process. Recently, colleges, universities and
community colleges are forming Behavioral Intervention Teams
with representatives from all these constituencies. Higher
Education has changed their safety/security policies,
procedures, or surveillance systems, yet K-12 have yet to
incorporate Behavioral Intervention Teams. K-12 schools and
colleges, universities and community colleges continue spending
excessive amounts of money to put in place many of the physical
security options. Sadly, they are reactionary only and do little
to prevent aggression because they are designed exclusively to
react to existing conflict, threat and violence. These campuses
reflect a national blindspot, which prefers hardening
targets through enhanced security versus preventing violence
with efforts directed at aggressors. Security gets all the
focus and money, but this only makes us feel safe, rather
than to actually make us safer.
Too often we hear about
individuals like the graduate student, Haiyang Zhu, at Virginia
Tech, who calmly decapitated his victim in a local restaurant
and Virginia Tech’s response was to proclaim their Notification
System a success! You may ask yourself, where is the outrage
that there was no method in place for “prevention,” especially
knowing their history.
Some law
enforcement agencies use profiling as a means to identify an
aggressor. According to the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S.
Department of Education’s report on Targeted Violence in
Schools, there is a significant difference between “profiling”
and identifying and measuring emerging aggression; “The
use of profiles is not effective either for identifying students
who may pose a risk for targeted violence at school or – once a
student has been identified – for assessing the risk that a
particular student may pose for school-based targeted violence.”
It continues; “An inquiry should focus instead on a student’s
behaviors and communications to determine if the student appears
to be planning or preparing for an attack.” We can and must
assess objective, culturally neutral, identifiable criteria of
emerging aggression.
For a
comprehensive look (white paper) at the problem and its
solution,
http://www.aggressionmanagement.com/White_Paper_K-12/
http://www.aggressionmanagement.com/Higher_Education/
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