Three years after VT massacre, FBI reports on violent attacks on campuses

By Leischen Stelter, Security Director News

On the third anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre that left 32 people dead, the government has issued a report on the prevalence and growth of violent attacks on the campuses of the nation’s institutions of higher education.

The report, Campus Attacks: Targeted Violence Affecting Institutions Of Higher Education, evaluated attacks on college campuses from 1900-2008 and was released by the FBI, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Secret Service. While violent attacks, specifically murder and non-negligent homicide, made up only .1 percent of the total crimes occurring on college campuses, nearly 60 percent of these crimes occurred in the last 20 years.

The report found that of the 174 murders and non-negligent manslaughters that occurred from 2005-2008, 80 occurred on campus (13 of which took place in residence halls), 82 occurred on public property immediately adjacent to campuses, and 12 occurred at non-campus facilities.

Protecting students, on- and off-campus, has proven to be a major challenge for campus security officials. “There are definitely problems with trying to police our communities when many of the incidents aren’t happening on our properties,” said Gene Ferrara, director of public safety and police chief for the University of Cincinnati. While the university has approximately 4,000 students living on campus, it has more than 6,000 students living within a five-to-six block radius in the surrounding urban community, he said.

The university has developed a strong working relationship with the Cincinnati Police Department, with a memorandum of understanding that expands the jurisdiction of the university police. “We can rely on them and they, on the other hand, can rely on our officers because we often have a better understanding and relationship with our students off campus,” he said. The MoU also provided university officers the ability to police the areas surrounding the campus and increase visibility of police presence.

Many universities are turning to sophisticated video surveillance systems “extending the eyes and ears beyond their environment,” said James Black, a senior security consultant with TRC, who designed the video patrol system at the University of Southern California.

One of the most difficult challenges is that college campuses were designed to be open, welcoming spaces. “We’re a public institution and therefore we’re open access and we invite people here,” said Ferrara. Attempting to lock down campus would be like “locking down a small city and it’s not a viable option,” he said.

Therefore in order to prevent violent attacks from occurring on or off campus, the University of Cincinnati has adopted a “prevention through intervention” program designed to identify students, faculty and staff who exhibit troublesome behavior and provide resources before a situation escalates.

“We’ve found in most of these cases of targeted violence there has been some pre-event indicator, either behavior, comments or action on the part of people that, in retrospect, was an indicator that something was going on that might have born more investigation,” he said. The Virginia Tech incident spurred Ferrara and his team to review the system they had in place and found that while they had all the components necessary, from counseling to security, they didn’t have a comprehensive program. For example, if staff recognized a student was showing signs of academic instability, there was not necessarily a clear path to notify school officials of such behavior.

As a result, his team developed a three-tiered prevention program. “We put together members of various faculty, staff and students and designed a comprehensive program to focus on the prevention side,” he said.

The first tier was designed to inform students and employees about what offices they should contact if they witness uncharacteristic behavior. If that behavior is deemed to be concerning, the university forms a committee made up of various departments to assess the behavior and determine whether it needs to be brought to the final tier, the threat assessment team.

Ferrara emphasized that the program isn’t limited to identifying troubled students. Workplace violence is also high on the list of concerns at the university. “We have 15,000 employees so we have to consider workplace violence in addition to educational concerns,” he said.

But despite all the efforts and lessons learned from incidents like Virginia Tech and similar violent attacks on campuses, it is unlikely that the problem will ever go away. “Campuses mirror society,” said Black of TRC. “You cannot insulate or shield college campuses from the realities of the world.”