Examining Washington school safety after shooting in Bend | #schoolsaftey #kids #parents #children

Police say a 16-year-old teenager shot his way into Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon, yesterday. He killed three students and an adult before he was shot and killed by a father of two students in the building.To learn more about how Washington schools defend against possible threats, KUOW’s Kim Malcolm spoke to UW Tacoma criminal justice professor Eric Madfis, director of the Violence Prevention Research Collaborative at the School of Social Work and Criminal Justice.This interview has been edited for clarity.
Kim Malcolm: What entered your mind when you first heard about the attack in Bend? Eric Madfis: Frustration. I study this for a living, and they just continue to happen without enough action, so it is perpetually frustrating, particularly when it’s at elementary schools.Information is still coming out about this attack, but what would you want to know in assessing what happened yesterday afternoon? I’d be interested to know more about the bystander situation. That’s pretty rare. We think of the idea of a good guy with a gun coming in and stopping things. That’s a rhetorical thing people say, but that actually doesn’t happen very often, so that’s quite interesting. More generally, I don’t know much about the perpetrator or if he went to the school. They typically do. It’s often a former student or a current student. I’d like to know about that.And it sounds like he got access to the firearm from his mother. That’s problematic, but also not atypical. In the majority of cases of school shootings, they do get their weapons from their parents. So that’s a prevention model, to make sure that kids, particularly troubled kids in some way, don’t have access to their parents’ weapons. And there’s policy around that we can do. Those are some of the initial questions. There’s still a lot that we don’t know.A lot of things went as well as they possibly could in this kind of situation, it seems to me. The police were on the scene within about three minutes after the initial calls came in. But what is the best way to prevent this from happening in the first place? So, I think that is why prevention has to be the focus as opposed to reacting in the moment. And it is true that the vast majority of school shootings, from start to finish, are very quick, 15 minutes or less. Police responded quickly, and that’s important. Police response time is important and helpful, but there’s only so much you can do once you already have someone there who wants to get even, and wants to make a name for themselves, and wants to do this kind of event. It’s quite difficult.
So, the focus really has to be about prevention, whether that’s about access to firearms for people who shouldn’t have it, whether that’s about increased mental health access for people, whether that’s about support services, whether that’s about being aware of threats through bystander intervention. And then, when you have awareness of a threat, responding in a helpful way through threat assessment. So there’s a lot of things that we can do. We can prevent these things.And how does Washington rank when it comes to funding those kinds of approaches? Washington State is better than many states across the country. That’s also true for Oregon and Virginia, and a few other places that have mandated threat assessments. We kind of are on the forefront of that. We’re definitely better than other states around the country in terms of mandating that, providing training and support for those kinds of processes. But, as is true of all things in education and K-12 schools, things are never fully funded. There’s never enough support, never enough funding for those kinds of things.But, I do think we spend entirely too much money on things that actually have no empirical support behind them, and that includes things like fancy security systems that don’t really have a track record of preventing these things, in contrast to the things we know do prevent these things, which are those kind of human interventions.For parents who are absorbing this news and trying to figure out how to talk to their children about this, what would you say to them? It’s hard. I have elementary school-aged children myself, and it’s hard not to be furious about this kind of stuff and the inaction that we take on a federal level, but I think there are certainly more opportunities on a state level too, where we can actually get things done.So, it’s very frustrating. I think you can speak to your kids about the rarities of these events. It is true, you’re still more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to be the victim of a school shooting. They are increasingly common, but they still are extremely rare events. So take some solace in that. But I think, yeah, it’s a stressful time to be a parent and a student, and other countries have dealt with this problem, and we should too.

Kim’s full conversation with Professor Eric Madfis.mp3

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