Campus Safety Net

After more than a year of not writing, it's time again to pick up the laptop and start blogging away. I'll start from the latest Barry Farber column and work my way back.

Campus Safety.

Like Mr. Farber, I agree that there are some relatively simple, low tech ways to get the word out to instructors and students on university campuses. Even with a minimal security force, campus and local police can be deployed in groups of two or four to buildings and conduct sweeps. Loud speakers on police vehicles, megaphones, alarm systems, or simply runners...there were several ways last weeks tragedy could have been minimized after the first two deaths in the residence hall.

But I want to go beyond his argument and look at two underlying problems I see in this case.

First, directly after the two slayings in the residence hall, the investigators thought they were dealing with a murder / suicide. Unless I'm mistaken, there is usually a weapon close by the alleged murderer's body. In the absence of this, it is probably best to err on the side of caution and assume that a killer is on the loose. I realize at the time that the police were given some erroneous information about the person or persons involved with the first shooting. Regardless, at this moment SOMEONE should have suggested locking down the residence halls - all of them, not just the one where the murders took place. In theory, this could have been done by 8:15 AM...the residence director of AJ calls the RD's of neighboring dorms, and they, in turn , inform their staff and other dorms. Residence Life is trained to handle these crisis's. They can't get the job unless they've gone though rigorous vetting and show an aptitude for handling those social outliers.

Lock down phase #1 done. The academic buildings are another matter, and this could have been done with the suggestions listed above.

This brings me to my other problem with this horrific incident. And that is, where was the Resident Assistant / Adviser on Cho's floor? RA's are the first line of defense, and offense - as witnessed in the death of Ryan Clark. RA's are responsible for knowing the people on their floors, dealing with social and personality issues, as well as maintaining some sort of parental-like watch over their residents. You'd have to be blind not to notice that this guy was odd, and it's the sort of thing that would come up at a weekly, or monthly staff meeting IF everyone was doing their job correctly. If Cho's dorm would have gone into lock down, there is a chance that the staff in his dorm might have been able to alter the outcome of the day - but it probably would have come at the expense of their lives. Cho was bent on killing, and it was just a matter of how many.

Safety Net

My daughter is an RA at a large, metropolitan college. She has a student on her floor that she has expressed concern about in the past, far before Virginia Tech. She noticed that this person had no friends, which is very odd on her campus. She did the everything she's been trained to do - spoken in depth, one on one with this person, shared meals, suggested counseling, and has watched to see if this person has developed friendships throughout the year. When VT happened, this person is the first one she thought of, and she made sure to check up during the next few days. She reports that all is fine.

My sister-in-law is a middle school, creative writing teacher. A couple of months ago, one of her students wrote a graphic, violence filled story and submitted it to the student publication she directs. She told me that this story went beyond anything she ever read before, and the violence was directed at the child's authority figures and spoke of harm inflicted upon the child. The very next day, she marched into her superiors office and announced 'We have a problem.' Within short order, the child was interviewed, and placed in a facility that could better deal with his social and personality problems.

Our safety nets are often those who are outside the judicial and law enforcement realms. They are regular people - our extended family, our neighbors, our friends, our bosses, our co-workers, our teachers, and on and on. They are people who raise their hands and say, 'whoa' regardless of the consequences.

If more people had said 'whoa' in the last 100 years, how many lives would have been spared?