Hardening Vulnerable Targets, fewer fatalities will occur when our cultural security mindset changes?
The attached article posted on USAToday.com, in brief, explains the basics of how to target harden our schools. I am not a proponent of the authors personal, professional, or political beliefs but he does well to point out vulnerabilities and possible solutions. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/05/24/santa-fe-parkland-school-shootings-terrorism-gun-control-ken-paxton-column/637216002/
I have spent over 12 years in the private sector and the challenge or the gap is always trying to do less with more. The private sector is sadly a commoditized market. Lowest bidder wins. The company that wins usually can not up-staff as needed, budget additional technologies, upgrades, or repairs, and has little authority to execute change as a contract service.
Failure equals replacement but clients rarely provide the resources or support to enhance, train, and compensate for the protective agents their internal customers, employees, and in this articles case, students deserve. Clearly, there is no one person responsible for budget management, and the above comment is a gross generalization. Changes in how many companies and institutions prioritize expenditures may be a major paradigm shift and wouldn't occur overnight.
We oft look to the Israelis for guidance and the author did just that. I hope that I am not off the mark on my statements but I have attended seminars with Israeli Security Professionals that said a Private/ Commercial Building in Israel will commit 10-25% of their annual budgets to security (training, equipment, technology, fortifications, etc). This is compared to the 1-5% companies are willing to spend in the US.
In Israel security is red teamed continuously and the government provides oversite. If a location fails a "performance review," than the government can essentially revoke their license to perform security. I do not advocate government control but a mandatory minimum of excellence is hard to argue with.
The answer to mitigate school violence from threat is simple. Change the culture, spend the money, and prepare to fail in order to reach the caliber of performance necessary to detect, deter, and prevent threat before the first shot is fired, fire is started, knife is swung, or vehicle is steered.
We in the United States often equate seeing Security or Law Enforcement as "too overt" or "too corrections." Protective agents should be the expectation not exception. The profession should be revered and not reviled or mocked. With a combination of thoughtful environmental design, secured structures with proper access control, a community that buys off and supports the security mission, and security and law enforcement agents that live to be tested, and challenged we can create a situation where the "opportunity" to strike a vulnerable school target is non existent for the offender.
Returning to the article, the highlights are as follows;
?Districts should post trained and capable armed guards outside as well as inside schools.
?They should also consider reducing the number of entrances to the building, so these guards can monitor traffic.
?Where feasible, schools could install metal detectors to ensure that nobody can sneak a weapon onto campus.
?Classroom doors must be made more secure against an attack. Classrooms should be equipped with the means to barricade these doors.
Lastly, the article does not touch on what I feel is the most important piece to mitigate school-centric acts of violence, intelligence sharing and predictive intervention. I am not a child psychologist nor am I qualified to act as any expert in Workplace Violence, which school shootings are another manifestation of in my opinion. The more teachers, aids, families, friends, school employees, social workers, and law enforcement can share real time intelligence and potentially offer interventions to aid the pre-operational offender the less mass casualty events I predict would occur.
We have to consider that mental illness, social dysfunction, familial issues, and other factors have alienated and harmed the offenders before they were triggered to act out violently and we can and have to do more to support and re-direct them before they act out in violence.