Our analysts have been inundated with requests to perform school security assessments, keynote presentations, staff training and other services since the tragic shooting in Newtown, Conn. last December. Some school districts are spending tens of millions of dollars in response to the incident. Numerous individuals and organizations are making major changes in school security and emergency preparedness.
For example large numbers of students and staff are being trained in what are still theoretical concepts that include attacking active shooters. Though these concepts have still not been validated by independent reliability testing, one trainer claims to have trained more than two million students and staff to attack an active shooter as a last resort.
In fact, the results of more than 3,000 one on one school crisis simulations have shown that these types of concepts can be misapplied by people under even the moderate stress of a simulation. When tested under controlled conditions, school employees have often responded by indicating that they would attack armed subjects who are not actively attacking anyone, even when it would clearly be more dangerous to do so. For example, test subjects have sometimes indicated that they would “attack the gunman” when posed with scenarios of a student threatening to kill himself with a handgun pressed to their temple, or when posed with a scenario of an apparently intoxicated man walking with a gun seventy five yards from a school.
One point that is being missed by many people is that we still do not have a very clear picture of what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The Connecticut State Police report on the incident will not be released until at least this summer. Until that report has been released, we will not know many of the most critical facts of the case.
Having worked seven mass casualty school shooting incidents, I have been deeply impressed with the fact that much of the speculation relating to particulars of the incident normally does not match the facts of the actual case file. This means that people making major changes based on the Sandy Hook tragedy are in effect making changes based on a situation when they do not even know what happened.
School officials should wait until we have better information from this terrible tragedy before making massive changes based on the Sandy Hook incident. They should also remember that this incident, like every other mass casualty shooting in a school is somewhat unique. Decisions should be made based on the overall body of knowledge we have gained studying numerous incidents rather than any one situation.
Mike Dorn is the executive director of Safe Havens International, a global, non-profit school safety center for kindergarten through 12th grade. He is a former school district police chief for Bibb County, Ga., a former school safety specialist for the Georgia Emergency Management Agency and a former anti-terrorism planner and lead program manager at the Georgia Office of Homeland Security.
