An initial disclaimer: I have no special knowledge of Virginia Tech, its campus or its policies.
There has been a lot of speculation about why there wasn’t better communication about the first shooting on Va Tech’s campus yesterday. And while I will admit that I have some serious questions as to what happened at the dorm after the first shooting in terms of why the police thought that there was no further threat, I also think that it is unfair to assume, in hindsight, that the police should have known that the initial shooting was the prelude to mass murder. As has been noted many times in the press, this was the worst mass shooting in the history of the United States–as such, it is rather ridiculous to assume that anyone should have had a clue as to what was about to happen (unless there was some indication of such at the scene of the first crime, and that seems unlikely).
The specific observations I would like to make are in regards to my own personal experience as a student and a professor (and as one who visited a lot of campuses in my life). I was an undergraduate student at the University of California at Irvine, a graduate student at the University of Texas, and have taught at: Concordia Lutheran College (in Austin), the University of the Andes (in Bogota, Colombia) and at various campuses within Austin Community College. Currently I am an associate professor at Troy University in Alabama. UCI was about the same size as Va Tech in terms of students (or so I guestimate). UT was over twice as big. Troy is a much smaller campus with something like 5k-6k on campus.
Having had extensive experience at these places, I have to say that at none of them was there a system in place that would allow for instantaneous (or even fast) communication to all faculty, students and staff. Indeed, apart from using local media and e-mail, there is no blanket method for communicating at Troy. Phone calls could be made to Deans and then to Departments, but that is no guarantee that the information would be disseminated to students and faculty. College campuses are, by their very nature, decentralized places. The behavior of students and faculty are quite independent of the behaviors of others on campus. The notion that there was some easy way for Va Tech administration to inform the population of the school of the initial events is simply not the case. Further, if the authorities thought that they had a specific crime on their hands, there would have been no reason to assume that everyone needed to know immediately.
In terms of student body size, the school that I attended that would be closest to Va Tech’s 25,000+ would be UCI. I cannot imagine any way to easily and quickly disseminate information on that campus. Indeed, when I was there in the late 1980s there was no e-mail, so I have no idea how they would have been able to get the word out on such an event in a way that was even as quick as was done at Va Tech yesterday.
I will also point out that campus police are mostly focused on things like parking, securing buildings and occasionally issues like assault, rape, drugs and the like. On balance, however, one would assume that a job on a campus would be considered a relatively low impact one–as opposed, say, working a normal city beat. As such, I hardly would expect campus police to be well prepared to deal with a situation like this.
I say none of this to say that I think everything was done correctly yesterday. Indeed, I have insufficient data to make such an assessment one way or another. What I am saying, however, is that based on my experiences on college campuses that it seems as if some critics and speculators in the press and online wish to ascribe superhuman powers to college law enforcement and administrators. Such assumptions are unreasonable.
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True enough. While my first thought was that there had been at least a degree of incompetence, it is true that securing a university of that size would have been a very difficult task - even if there were sufficient manpower to police all entrances and exits. Also, it seems that the killer remained on campus, so even that strategy might have been fruitless.
I’ve been at univs in England and France (one year) and am now attending law classes in Portugal. Only the uni in England would be comparable in size to Virginia Tech, somewhat larger than the uni in France, though probably far easier to secure: I reckon that within an hour 90% of students would have been fully warned regarding a similar crisis. I suppose it depends greatly on the actual site layout.
However, I don’t know how common shootings are in univs over there - the only killings that are memorable and hit the news in a big way are the rampages. Are they so commonplace that the police would think the first shooting was nothing special? I know that never did I hear of any murder at any of my univs. But in Europe weapons are not so readily available to citizens…
Regards.
Comment by james — Tuesday, April 17, 2024 @ 10:38 am
It isn’t that shootings are common on US universities. I am just saying that usually murders tend not to escalate into mass killings. As such, it wasn’t unreasonable to assume that what appeared to be (and likely was) a domestic issue at the dorm was limited to that location.
People kill their girlfriends/wives/husbands/etc. yest don’t then typically go kill 30 others.
My only point is that given that this is such a rare type of event, that it isn’t reasonable to assume that the police should have known what was coming next.
Still, until we know exactly what they knew and when they knew it, it is hard to know what should have been done or, at least, what was reason to expect to have been done.
Comment by Dr. Steven Taylor — Tuesday, April 17, 2024 @ 11:05 am
It’s almost an impossible task. Even if we assume that all 26,000 VT students check their email before going to class, my recent experience as a student says that mass email doesn’t necessarily work that fast. When I was at my (only 5,000 students) alma matter, it was a common experience for my roommate with a last name 10 letters before mine in the alphabet to receive a campus-wide email as much as half an hour before I did.
Comment by dom — Tuesday, April 17, 2024 @ 3:32 pm
It is true that no one would have suspected that he would kill 30 more people after the shooting at the dorm. However, the idea that he might shoot someone else should have been a real consideration. A fleeing gunman is dangerous, if for no other reason than he has a gun that he has already used and he will undoubtedly feel threatened by others he comes into contact with for fear of being apprehended. That is obviously not what happened in this case, but it would have been a reasonable scenario for the police to try to defend against.
I really don’t know what they should or should not have done. I agree that getting the word out on campus is a tricky issue. As I said on my blog earlier today, I’m really surprised that the news didn’t travel by word of mouth (via the ever-present student cellphone) more so than it did, but then again, I have no experience with a university that size.
Comment by Jan — Tuesday, April 17, 2024 @ 3:41 pm
I concur with the “fleeing gunman” issue. The question becomes what did they think was the case at the time? I simply don’t know and so reserver judgment on whether something different could or should have been done.
And even on a campus the size of Troy’s–most students aren’t in class until 9, so how far the murder news would have made it across out campus is questionable.
And on larger campuses the isolation of students and faculty from other departments is truly remarkable. Even as it stands, there are numerous building on our campus that I have never entered and Departments about which I know very little.
Comment by Dr. Steven Taylor — Tuesday, April 17, 2024 @ 4:21 pm
When I first saw the story yesterday, around 8:30 CDT or so, maybe, they were referring to him as a fleeing gunman loose on campus and suggesting that students and faculty lock down and people not go to the campus. At that point they were just reporting one person killed, at least in the story I read.
It really is hard to know what was really going on and when. As one report I read said that a student was quoted as saying they had heard about the security warning, but thought it had been lifted by the time of the second shootings, while other reports say that no warning was issued until around the time of the second attack two hours later. As you say, it is difficult to judge.
Comment by Jan — Tuesday, April 17, 2024 @ 9:26 pm