.jpg)
One day after the 11-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech shooting, the tragedy is seen by many as the defining moment for when universities started thinking about how they could mitigate the risk of active shooter events.
“Since then, the entire emergency preparedness profession, especially in higher education, has grown,” said David Bujak, emergency preparedness manager at the University of Rochester and UR Medicine. Before the massacre, emergency measures at colleges and universities were limited to preparing for earthquakes on the west coast, but the event influenced institutions to take a step back and determine how they could be best prepared for future shootings.
Recent tragedies at schools in the US have likewise highlighted the need to be ready when an event like this occurs, but the debate around how best to do that is ongoing in the higher education sector.
“It’s always a balance and it’s always a challenge between not just money and how much it costs to do all that, but just in terms of what kind of atmosphere do you want to have at your school, at your hospital, at your shopping mall,” explained Bujak. “And I think we’re just getting driven more and more by the perception that we need to get a little stricter and a little tougher.”
The emergency preparedness manager has firsthand experience with shootings. He was working at Florida State University when an alumnus entered the campus library in 2014 and, deterred by turnstiles, walked back outside and began firing at students.
In this case, the presence of a physical barricade stopped the assailant for a few moments, but many institutions are wary of going too far and turning their campuses into something akin to US army posts.
“When it comes to higher education or even K-12, no-one really wants to become Fort Knox. You could put up fences, you could put up doors and security guards and metal detectors, but is that really the direction we want to go? One, it’s cost-prohibitive, and two, it’s not an environment that’s conducive to students and learning,” said Bujak, though he added that some targeted physical measures could work.
“Everyone’s looking at locks and cameras and security guards and yes, even the turnstiles would take a bit of money and certainly you wouldn’t do that in every building on a college or K-12 campus, but you could at least identify your highest population concentration, such as libraries and cafeterias. That can help mitigate the risk a little bit.”
Some schools are also easier to lockdown than others. Campuses in the southern US might have 10 buildings spread out over several blocks while a northern campus could house most of its administrative and academic services in a couple of buildings with only a few points of entry.
As demand for active shooter policies grows and organizations become more attuned to the risk, Bujak’s advice to universities hoping to make their campuses safer is to also look at customer service.
“If you’re a large campus with a public university, that’s just physically impossible to accomplish, and that’s where we have to start looking towards other – I call them service initiatives or cultural initiatives – to get the entire campus community away from ‘what can we do to lock this place down’ and more in terms of ‘what can you do to help identify these situations?’”
He recommends that frontline staff be trained to make eye contact with anyone entering a building, and interacting with them through a simple greeting. If someone gives them the cold shoulder or acts in a way that’s a cause for concern, that staff member can raise an alert.
“Everybody walking through the door can’t be suspicious,” said Bujak.
