How to Keep a College Campus Safe
And how not to.
By James Alan Fox
Last February, a man carrying what appeared to be an assault weapon burst into an American foreign-policy class at Elizabeth City State University, in North Carolina. The seven unsuspecting students and a stunned professor, who later said he felt “prepared to die at that moment,” were held hostage for ten dreadful minutes. The gunman announced he would kill at least one of them.
As it turned out, the weapon was a fake, and the gunman was a volunteer, part of an “active shooter” exercise that tested Elizabeth City State’s system for responding to a possible campus attack. Although the university had alerted students and faculty about the exercise with e-mail and text messages, not everyone had received or read them. Fortunately, no one was hurt in the simulation—not physically, at least.
College administrators are struggling to find ways to prevent campus violence, efforts intensified by the deadly shooting at Virginia Tech in April 2007 and the Valentine’s Day 2008 massacre at Northern Illinois University, a school that, coincidentally, shares Northeastern’s mascot and colors, as well as the first syllable of its name. In October, two more students were shot and killed on the University of Central Arkansas campus.
A fall 2007 Newsweek “College Guide” article advised families on how to tell whether a university is safe. In 2008, Reader’s Digest graded 135 U.S. colleges on their safety precautions—notification systems, campus-lockdown plans, armed security, and so on. Northeastern fared very well in the ranking, landing in second place on the list, just behind top-ranked Johns Hopkins.
The vast majority of the institutions in the Reader’s Digest list have instituted security measures that not long ago would have been considered unnecessary, if not absurd. All but seven of the schools surveyed have installed mass-notification systems. More than half have lockdown plans in place. More than 40 percent have authorized their campus police officers to carry firearms.
But, as Elizabeth City State discovered, not all safety plans are good plans. Sometimes officials respond to a perceived threat in ways that may not be helpful. California State University–Dominguez Hills quickly shut down its entire campus in February 2008 when an ROTC student with a drill rifle was mistaken for an assailant toting an automatic weapon.
In other cases, notification messages suffer from a critical lack of clarity. In March 2008, for example, University of Iowa students frantically ran for cover after a text alert informed them of an active shooter in Iowa City. The gunman was actually miles away on the opposite side of town, posing very little threat to the campus. In September 2007, when public-safety officials at New York’s St. John’s University notified its students and staff of a possible gunman on campus, they failed to say which of its three campus locations—Queens, Staten Island, or Manhattan—was believed to be at risk.
The truth is that campuswide notification systems, which range from low-tech sirens to text-message alerts on cell phones, can’t always communicate with perfect clarity. An emergency siren may signal anything from a fire to gunfire. Text alerts won’t reach students in packed lecture halls if instructors require all cell phones to be turned off during class.
Many anxious parents support the idea of emergency lockdowns, sealing buildings off manually or electronically to prevent a gunman from moving place to place. Yet lockdowns may do little to prevent casualties. Almost all college shootings have taken place in just one building, if not one classroom. And lockdowns introduce dangers of their own. The same lock that bars a gunman from entering a building may also bar potential victims from finding safe refuge indoors.
Perhaps the most helpful change universities have made in response to recent episodes of violence is a renewed emphasis on providing high-quality mental-health services. During the twelve months that followed the Virginia Tech shooting, one-third of campus counseling centers nationwide added staff members, including psychiatrists, and 15 percent of counseling centers received expanded budgets. These improvements will benefit countless students, not just those who pose risks to others. This is important, because for every homicide on campus there are a hundred suicides.
Yet, as experts know, counseling will identify and stop very few potential gunmen. Campus shooters seldom move through observable stages of disappointment and frustration before they erupt into violent rage.
In the aftermath of a shooting, people inevitably search for clues that might have indicated the assailant was bent on revenge. After the Virginia Tech shooting, observers noted the gunman had harassed women students on campus. Others pointed out that he had written essays about Columbine. Even with these warning signs, however, his background looked not very different from those of many college students.
Predicting an event as rare as a campus shooting is virtually impossible. The rate of false positives—those who are identified as fitting a behavioral profile yet never act out—is exceedingly high. Although thousands of college students exhibit warning signs, the yellow flags turn red only after the blood spills. And over-aggressively coercing a troubled, belligerent student into treatment could intensify feelings of persecution and may actually precipitate a violent act.
So, given all these complications, how can colleges prevent and effectively respond to campus shootings?
First, every university should have a well-trained, sufficiently large campus police or security force, like Northeastern’s. Mass-notification systems can be a genuine lifesaver, provided there are no implementation problems. Faculty and staff members can be trained to handle volatile students and situations. And though practice drills should never involve students or be staged while classes are in session, these strategic exercises, done right, can help campus officials prepare for an emergency.
But college administrators should also take care not to overreact to the rare incidents of campus violence. If they do, they might institute security measures that don’t work and are counterproductive. They might undermine the carefree atmosphere of campus life, making students feel like walking targets and intensifying their levels of anxiety. They might even increase the chances of a campus copycat by inadvertently inspiring the few unhappy souls who would welcome a shooting, provided they’re on the back end of the gun.
No matter how diligent and responsible we are in devising violence-prevention and security measures on campuses, there can be no absolute guarantee a tragedy like Virginia Tech will not recur. If prospective students and their families require a 100 percent assurance of safety, their only recourse might be an online degree.
James Alan Fox is Northeastern’s Lipman Family Professor of Criminal Justice and Professor of Law, Policy, and Society. He recently coauthored a new report, Campus Violence Prevention and Response: Best Practices for Massachusetts Higher Education. He is also working on a forthcoming book, Violence and Safety on Campus: From Pre-School to Post-Grad.
Faculty Research Briefs
Seeing, but not believing
An April 2008 issue of Parade magazine included a photo of actor Patrick Dempsey, wearing a red T-shirt, lounging on a motorcycle, smiling broadly. Although a few streaks of gray showed in his hair, he still looked his usual handsome self.
After he saw the photo in the magazine, Dempsey insisted that Parade had doctored it. He said the magazine had changed the color of his shirt. And added the gray streaks to his hair.
Magazine editors later admitted they’d changed the T-shirt’s color from charcoal to red but swore they didn’t make Dempsey’s hair any grayer.
No big deal, right? Maybe not in this case. But Cynthia Baron, MBA’93, an associate academic specialist in the College of Professional Studies and an expert in the manipulation of photos—AKA fauxtography—says it can have serious ramifications.
That’s because many photo manipulators have an agenda far more insidious than making Patrick Dempsey look a tad more “mature.”
Doctoring has been around since photography was introduced in the 1800s, says Baron, associate director of digital media programs and multimedia studies, and author of the 2007 book Adobe Photoshop Forensics: Sleuths, Truths, and Fauxtography.
Many Civil War photos were “staged”—photographers would shift dead bodies around to make them fit better in the frame or make the photos more dramatic. These motives weren’t necessarily bad, says Baron. In fact, no one at the time thought such doctoring posed any sort of problem.
Another form of manipulation took place as nineteenth-century photographers experimented with double images. Enterprising picture-takers created a cottage industry called “spirit photography,” which featured see-through images the photographers tried to pass off as ghosts.
Even without deliberate manipulation, Baron argues, no photo can show how things really are. That’s because, simply in framing a photo, photographers choose what to show and what not to show. Says Baron, “It’s editorial any way you look at it.”
It’s often not clear what motivates photo manipulation. During the presidential primaries last spring, a Hillary Clinton ad pictured Barack Obama’s skin shade as slightly darker than usual and his face broader, thus accentuating classic African American features. Some in the Obama camp accused Clinton of playing the race card. Clinton’s people denied it.
Baron says it’s impossible to tell what was really going on. The Clinton camp might have been trying to highlight Obama’s race. Or the ad designer might have simply “stretched” the photo to try to fit it into a particular shape. As for the skin shade, Baron notes that political ads often desaturate or darken photos of their campaign rivals to make them look less appealing.
There are plenty of other examples. In the 2004 presidential race, a photo of John Kerry onstage with Jane Fonda at an antiwar event, reportedly taken in the early 1970s, circulated widely on the Web. The photo was a forgery; they had never appeared at a podium together.
When Martha Stewart got out of prison in 2005, Newsweek ran her photo on the cover. But Newsweek created the photo by placing Stewart’s head on another woman’s body.
The advent of Photoshop has made it all too easy to fake photographs. Baron hopes to make people more aware that they shouldn’t always believe what they see. She says she is always skeptical of news photographs because she knows how easily they can be manipulated. And she’s glad that computer scientists are developing software that can help identify fake photos.
How can the average consumer tell if a photo is fake? For one thing, do a little Internet searching, says Baron. You won’t be able to find a high-resolution version of the photo or a news article paired with it.
“You really have to judge for yourself,” she says. “Ask yourself if you trust the source. You also have to ask yourself, ‘How badly do I want this to be true?’” Risky business
Risky Business
Experts already know that extracurricular activities can help protect teenagers from risky behaviors and delinquency. Now they’re discovering more specific information about how extracurriculars affect teens.
The new research has been conducted by assistant criminal-justice professor Sean Varano, along with Amy Farrell, PHD’01, assistant criminal-justice professor and associate director of the Institute on Race and Justice; and Jeb Booth, PHD’02, an assistant criminal-justice professor at Salem State College. Conclusions were drawn from self-reported data from 1,400 teens in an upper-middle-class suburban neighborhood.
Varano and his colleagues found that, in general, extracurricular activities protect young people from certain forms of delinquency, such as fighting or using a weapon, and risky behavior, such as drinking, smoking, or drunk driving.
They also found that boys and girls actually benefit from involvement in activities that run counter to gender stereotypes. Boys gain more when they get involved in church and community activities as well as sports. Girls active in sports in addition to other kinds of extracurriculars are less likely to engage in delinquent or risky behavior.
Further, teens who have mostly negative things to say about school are more likely to be involved in delinquent or risky behavior, the researchers discovered. Those who felt better about school are less likely to get into trouble.
On the other hand, there may be a tipping point at which too much involvement in extracurricular activities actually increases levels of risky behavior and delinquency, the researchers speculate. Young people who spend too much time with peers may not get enough time with parents and other caring adults.
Varano, who calls for more gender-specific research, says, “The data clearly show the need for balance in students’ lives to best protect them from serious delinquency and risky behaviors.”