Preventing the next campus shooting.

AT 7:15 A.M. ON APRIL 16, Virginia Tech Police received an emergency call alerting them to go to a dorm room in West Ambler Johnston Residence Hall. Once there, officers found two bodies in a fourth floor dorm room; they turned out to be students Ryan Clark and Emily Hilscher, both of whom had been killed by multiple gunshots.

That shooting was labeled "an isolated incident, domestic in nature."

Two hours and 11 minutes later an e-mail was sent by university police to faculty, staff, and students. It said simply that a "shooting incident occurred at West Amber Johnston [Residence Hall] earlier this morning. Police are on scene and are investigating. The university community is urged to be cautious and are asked to contact Virginia Tech Police if you observe anything suspicious or with information on the case."

That was 9:26 a.m. At 9:45 a.m., police received another emergency call to respond to Norris Hall, an engineering building north of the crime scene. Police arrived to find the front doors chained shut. By the time it was over, student Cho Seung-Hui had murdered 30 more people and ended his own life in what became the worst school massacre in U.S. history.

Shootings on U.S. campuses are rare. Among the 2,618 accredited four-year colleges and universities in the United States, there have been only six shooter incidents since 2000. But even that low number is too many. The question now before university and security professionals is: What policies and procedures can reduce the threat of such an incident and how can institutions best prepare to respond if one does occur?

The massacre at Virginia Tech has once again brought campus security under intense scrutiny. Though it is still early to draw specific lessons from how VT handled the incident, it is useful to look generally at policies and procedures in place at other universities as well as at advances in technology that facilitate emergency communications.

Threat Reduction

The most important preventive measure universities can implement is to identify potentially violent students as early as possible by establishing a behavioral threat assessment program, says Chief Steven Healy, director of public safety for Princeton University, president of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators (IACLEA), and a member of ASIS International's Educational Institutions Council.

Institutions should endeavor to implement programs that can assess threatening behavior, but they should be aware of two problems. One, standards do not exist. Two, privacy issues can hinder what can be done with the information, which, perhaps, was a factor in the VT case.

Standards. Unfortunately, there are no national standards governing threat assessment teams or protocols, but both the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service have reports outlining behavioral threat assessment methodologies distilled from previous school shooter incidents. The FBI, for example, suggests that the likelihood of a student carrying out a threat can be evaluated using four prongs: personality traits and behavior, family dynamics, school dynamics and the student's role in those dynamics, and social dynamics. Institutions that wish to establish such programs can look to the findings from both agencies for guidance.

They can also learn from institutions that have already developed programs, such as the University of Maryland.

Maryland developed its behavioral threat assessment program ten years ago after a student threatened to kill a teacher. In the Maryland program, once a threat or threatening behavior comes to the attention of the police, an officer questions the person who made the complaint or witnessed the threatening behavior. The threatening student isn't questioned at this stage, but police will check whether the subject has a criminal history or whether the office had any previous encounters with this person, says Major Cathy Atwell of the University of Maryland's Department of Public Safety.

Special officers trained in behavioral threat assessment techniques will contact relevant university departments, such as resident life and student conduct, for more information on the student.

The information obtained is then entered into a software program, which tabulates risk and helps officers determine whether they should intervene.

Officers also consult the relevant administrators to discuss their options. This becomes an ad hoc behavioral threat assessment team. For instance, if a complaint were generated out of resident life, the police officer would meet with the department director of resident life, the vice president of student affairs, and the director of the residence hall where the complaint started. It all depends on where the case comes from, says Atwell.

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After consulting, the team decides if a student has broken the code of conduct. If so, the case goes to the campus judicial board, which will take the requisite disciplinary action. It has the power to suspend or expel the student and can even restrict a student's access to particular places, such as a residence hall.

If the student is not in violation of the code, a course of action is laid out. If the team is worried a student is suffering psychologically, they may have the counseling center call the student in. "We transport at least ten, sometimes 20, students a semester for emergency evaluation," says Atwell.

Most of the time, students get a warning, either by the police or a relevant university administrator, such as the dean. Atwell described a few examples where the person that was threatened, or felt threatened, was allowed to confront the threatening student as a police officer stood by.

The university also has a Behavioral Evaluation and Threat Assessment Resource Group (BETA) team at the university level that meets monthly, but it can convene when needed to discuss both individual cases and big picture trends.

Established in 2005, the team is composed of five members representing the counseling center, the mental health service, the office of student conduct, and the head of the police's behavioral threat assessment team. It provides a forum for information sharing and makes recommendations to those who bring cases or concerns before it.

Its recommendations are not binding, however. It is a consultative body, says Dr. Jonathan Kandell, assistant director of counseling center and chair of the BETA team. It helps provide guidance and best options, but it's up to the official who brings the problem before them to decide what to do next.

The BETA team was created when the university realized that some problem students were sliding through the cracks. The team allows people in the campus community to bring attention to students exhibiting threatening or erratic behavior. It also allows members to discuss problem students and consult with colleagues on whether they have received similar complaints about a particular student. For example, if the team is hearing complaints about a student from the residence halls and student discipline hears that same student is acting out in class while the police have arrested the student for public drunkenness, the team can connect the dots and make a more informed recommendation about next steps.

The BETA team also watches trends. Not surprisingly, the trend since the incident at VT has been a dramatic increase in incident reports of students acting unusually. It's a result of heightened awareness and concern.

Kandell has already given a talk to one of the university's colleges about recognizing and evaluating threats, and he expects the BETA team to support educational activities universitywide that will raise awareness of threatening behavior, while promoting tolerance of other's idiosyncrasies to avoid excessive reporting.

Behavioral assessments are also discussed at freshman orientation, where undergraduate advisors act out skits that incorporate safety and security issues. "Virginia Tech is going to change how we all talk about things," says Gerry Strumpf, director of the orientation department and an orientation course instructor.

In addition to the basic en masse orientation, the university offers freshmen additional orientation courses, which students take in small groups of about 20. Strumpf says that this not only gives time to impart more information, but it also gives the instructors a chance to get a reading on the incoming students.

The orientation class, she believes, provides a great place to identify troubled students. "You know you pick up on troubled students. I have walked many a student down to psychological services, and I'm not the only one doing it."

Faculty members and teacher's assistants who run the orientation course are getting additional training in the wake of the Virginia Tech incident to help them spot troubled students and instruct them on what to do to assist their classmates.

Awareness on the part of students can be a powerful tool. Often shooters tell someone their plans ahead of time, "even if only 20 minutes before," says Charles Burdick, a security consultant at iXP who was incident commander at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, at the time of the 1999 shooting.

For example, tragedy was averted at a high school in upstate New York in 2001 when students tipped off teachers that senior Jeremy Getman was carrying weapons. When Getman was searched, police found an arsenal in his gym bag consisting of "14 pipe bombs, three smaller bombs, a propane tank, a sawed-off shotgun, a .22-caliber pistol, and a book bag full of ammunition." Getman had threatened a girl earlier that day.

Privacy. As the Virginia Tech incident shows, even when a student is identified as a threat, privacy laws erect legal barriers to accessing and sharing personal information that can be pivotal in making the correct behavioral threat assessment. During a congressional hearing a week after the Virginia Tech massacre, witnesses discussed two laws that preclude notification of disturbed behavior to relevant parties.