To view this site you need Adobe Flash Player and your browser must allow javaScripts. Go here to get the latest Flash Player. By P H I L I P L E G G I E R E AFTER THE VIRGINIA TECH AND NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY SHOOTINGS IN 2007 AND 2008, POLITICIANS, THE MEDIA AND COLLEGE ADMINISTRATORS REACTED WITH A FRENZY OF IDEAS. SOME, SUCH AS ARMED GUARDS,VIDEO SURVEILLANCE AND MANDATORY CRIMINAL BACKGROUND CHECKS, WERE DESIGNED TO SHIELD CAMPUSES FROM OUTSIDE DANGERS. OTHER SOLUTIONS, INCLUDING ALERT NOTIFICATIONS, SIRENS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS PROTOCOLS, ARE DESIGNED TO BETTER PREPARE CAMPUS COMMUNITIES TO MOBILIZE DURING, OR IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING, AN ATTACK. A still small but increasingly influential contingent, including law enforcement, mental health professionals, student counselors and emergency managers, however, are urging that colleges adopt a different tack, shifting a greater share of their attention and resources to strategies designed to prevent campus violence. “In the months after Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University, the public reflexively called for doing something, anything, so we could feel more in control,” Brett Sokolow, a specialist in campus safety and president of the Malvern, Pa.based National Center for Higher Education Risk Management (NCHERM), a national risk management consulting firm, told Homeland Security Today. “But that something has mostly been purely reactive, hardening potential targets and speeding response to what’s already occurred.” New approaches to proactively preventing campus violence favored by Sokolow and others in what is being called the “Behavioral Intervention” movement are focused on developing threat assessment models to better identify disturbed individuals who may become a danger to themselves and others. The models are based, according to advocates, on government research, particularly a celebrated collaborative study undertaken by the US Secret Service and US Department of Education following the 1999 attack at Columbine High School showing that most school shootings are neither spur-of-the moment events nor without advance clues and signals. The study, called the Safe School Initiative (www.ustreas.gov/usss/ntac/ssi_final_report.pdf), examined 37 incidents of targeted school shootings and school attacks that occurred in the United States between 1974 and 2000. It found that incidents of targeted violence at schools were On the second anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre, students with the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets stand a watch at a memorial candle in front of Burruss Hall, where the shooting took place. IN THE WAKE OF PAST CAMPUS TRAGEDIES, ADMINISTRATORS ARE SEEKING NEW WAYS TO RECOGNIZE AND HEAD OFF TROUBLE BEFORE IT STARTS. AP PHOTO/RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH, P. KEVIN MORLEY Register online today for exclusive online content and eNewsletters Homeland Security Today Magazine | May 2009 37