Early reports indicate that the Cleveland shooter, identified as 14-year-old Asa Coon, had a history of mental health problems. He spent time in juvenile detention centers and last year attempted suicide while in a mental health facility. Two days before the shooting he had been suspended from school for fighting, and students reported that he’d recently made numerous threats of violence. Should administrators have seen it coming? Have schools learned the lessons of Virginia Tech? Do schools need to further alter the balance between security and civil liberties on campus to make the bloodshed stop? NEWSWEEK talked with Roger Depue, retired FBI chief of behavioral sciences and former head of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. Depue recently served on the eight-member panel tasked with studying the Virginia Tech shootings. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: Has there been a measurable increase in school shootings? Or do they just seem more commonplace because of media coverage? Roger Depue: In the last couple of years there has been an increase of violent crime, the best indicator of which is the homicide rate. But for two decades prior to that, when violent crime was on the decline, multiple-victim shootings were increasing across the board.
What do you see as the primary cause of that? In my opinion it’s due to an increase in violent fantasies among young people and a lack of perceived justice in the family life. There are many young people suffering from a variety of kinds of abuse who lack any system of reinforcement or justice to keep them from acting them out. You can draw that back to broken homes and the disintegration of the extended and nuclear family.
Have schools had to fill that role now? In a way they have, when it comes to being the principal source of values in the lives of young people. Their responsibility has become more in loco parentis. But there’s not a lot of character development in schools. And if the family is not passing on those kinds of values, then those kids are getting them from places like the media and entertainment [outlets], which have become increasingly violent.
Is there any way to effectively prevent school shootings short of installing metal detectors? I understand the importance of physical security systems. But in my opinion the majority of these events can be handled and prevented by behavioral awareness. I’ve looked at 60 incidences of either workplace or school shootings over the last 10 years, and in each one of them there have been clear warning signs that could have been acted on but weren’t.
So how do we bridge that gap and intervene before someone comes to school with a gun? You begin with setting up a threat assessment team. These have been effective in the workplace, but they’re not as prevalent in schools. A team would consist of school resource officers and administrative members of the school, working with a lawyer, a nurse and perhaps a clinical psychologist. This basically gives people the opportunity to see a warning sign and report it and have a broad enough perspective to include all areas to determine an appropriate response.
Doesn’t that involve a breaking down of some areas of privacy law? Yes, some privacy laws need to come down. The Virginia Tech review panel found a clear necessity to do that. But I’m not sure I would frame it exclusively as privacy laws needing to be limited. Certainly changes can be made so people in positions of responsibility are not prohibited from accessing information when a warning sign may justify it.
This then gets to the difficulty of striking a balance between security and civil liberties. Are you saying we should err on the side of security? Well, the era of security over civil liberties is already here. It started, it seems to me, with the crackdown in the late ’60s and early ’70s in response to some of the riots taking place, where public places were starting to have a higher level of police presence and security. And now since 9/11 and terrorism, it’s gone even further. But the education sector, especially the world of universities, has been the last bastion of this kind of freedom and the most resistant to undergoing change, and for good reason: because you need a free environment for the exchange of ideas. But, as evidenced particularly by the Virginia Tech shooting, universities aren’t immune. In fact, they’re more vulnerable.
How is the legal situation shaking out with school shootings? Are schools getting sued and being held liable? Yes they are. I think we can see from Columbine that’s so. Schools are going to have to start acting like the business world and adopt best-practices guidelines in order to defend themselves in a civil suit. It’s a difficult way to learn, through an experience like this. And we’ve learned a great deal over the years. After Columbine we learned that schools have to take action on the elementary, middle and high school levels. But, as evidenced by Virginia Tech, much of that was lost on the universities.
Do you expect a civil suit to be filed against Virginia Tech? I would surprised if one isn’t, because that’s basically the environment we live in.
