The Violence Project

by Jillian Peterson

  P3 Campus is used by the Sandy Hook Promise crisis center, which launched in 2018. Based in Florida, the center handles tips from over a thousand school buildings across the country. It is staffed 24/7, 365 days a year, by ten counselors, all of whom are trained in crisis intervention and suicide prevention. On a daily basis, the center intervenes in dozens of threats of suicide and school violence that are reported through the app. The director of the center, Kenji Okuma, tells us, “The rate is alarming. The public really needs to see the frequency of which these calls are coming in.”

  Okuma put us in contact with his colleague Alexis, and we spoke on the one-year anniversary of her working as a counselor at the crisis center. Like Okuma, Alexis had previously worked in law enforcement, first as a beat cop and then as a crisis negotiator for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. When we met, she had just recently defended her PhD dissertation, a study of the inadequacy of trauma training in counseling master’s degree programs.

  Alexis walks us through how the center operates. First, Sandy Hook Promise, a national nonprofit founded and led by several family members whose loved ones were killed during the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, trains all students, teachers, and staff in a school to use the P3 app. Then, if someone has a concern about a student, that person can pull the app up on their smartphone or go directly to the website to enter a “tip.” Each tip includes basic information—who, what, where—and the school or district in question; the school is notified every time the app is used. Users also check a box to indicate if the concern is suicidal ideation, threat of violence, weapons, or mental health. Once the tip is sent, a crisis counselor is notified and has one minute to respond using the app’s chat function. Typical starter questions are: Where are you right now? Are you safe? Is this incident happening now or later, or did it already happen? The goal is to gather enough information to assess how immediate the threat is.

  Alexis stresses that she’s not working a counseling line: “The goal is resolution of one form or another. Does this incident need law enforcement? Does the school need to be notified? Is there someone at school the student is comfortable talking to? Or a family member? We aren’t going to let it go. We are going to make a plan for the next step.”

  The counselors work in three shifts: 7:30 A.M.–4:30 P.M.; 4 P.M.–1 A.M.; and midnight–8 A.M. The day shift is busiest, especially over the lunch hour or right after school. A couple of counselors work the evening shift because “as our boss says, teenagers get existential at night,” Alexis laughs. The midnight shift is quietest, but calls that come in then can be more serious. Everyone works together as a team—one counselor may call the school in question while another keeps chatting with the student in crisis. Counselors are trained to handle four to five tips at one time, which Alexis says is stressful. But typically they are working with only one to three tips at once.

  It is not a perfect system. There are hoax calls and times when the app is used to bully someone. A bunch of students will report a kid all at once, targeting them as a school shooter when they are not. It’s awful for the targeted student, but rare, and the counselor can usually figure out the truth pretty quickly. The pros of teaching people to “say something” and safely report any warning signs and potential threats still outweigh the cons, Alexis says.

  The test of the crisis center’s efficiency is the absence of something, a nonevent, which really is the paradox of prevention. As a researcher herself, Alexis is mindful of this, but when she looks back on her first year on the job, she is satisfied with the results: “There have been times where we’ve intervened to avert a shooting. Or times when a student reports that someone has a gun in their backpack, and we are able to tell someone at the school, who goes and finds it. There is a lot of success with suicidal kids, where law enforcement is able to transport a kid to the hospital before anything happens.”

  “What’s the hardest part of the job?” James asks.

  She answers quickly: “It’s not always knowing the outcome. You chat with these kids, and you always want to know; you’d like to hear that they got help. We don’t always know how much we’re averting. That’s impossible to measure.”

  Anonymous reporting in schools has been shown to increase students’ willingness to report weapons in school settings.2 With anonymity, students feel insulated from possible retaliation or social consequences. Okuma says that, ideally, any crisis center would send potential threats to crisis response teams to handle, but most communities don’t have such teams in place. Instead, they often end up relying on local law enforcement, especially if there are weapons involved. “We try to make sure we leverage all of the resources responsibly and effectively,” he tells us. “We don’t want to cause additional harm by traumatizing them.” Okuma, who became the director of the crisis center after a long career in law enforcement, reflects, “I think I’ve done more in the last two years of my career than I did in the first twenty-four.”

  —

  Whether the mechanism is an anonymous app, an online form, an email address, or even a jar with paper and pencils, reporting someone in crisis is only the beginning of the intervention process. The next step is to refer them to the right resources. To do this well, schools need in-house teams that can assess students’ risks and needs and provide necessary follow-up. A team approach is critical. And because no one person feels responsible for the ongoing well-being of a student in crisis—because that’s a heavy cross to bear—no student gets lost in the shuffle.

  The first step to building a crisis response team is deciding who should serve on it. The team can be dynamic, with individuals joining it on a case-by-case basis depending on the student under question. The core team will likely comprise the principal, a counselor or nurse, a teacher, a school resource officer or local law enforcement representative, a community mental health provider, and parents or peers who can advocate for the student under question. The team has to determine how often, when, and where they will meet and how they will communicate. Its members must also determine what level of behavior or crisis would initiate an immediate meeting beyond regularly scheduled check-ins. Specific threats of harm against self or others should be handled by the team immediately, for instance.

  The second step in initiating a crisis response team involves identifying what resources are available, both within the school and in the surrounding community, for students who are in crisis and in need of services. Resources should be identified in each of the following areas: mental health (school-based or community-based); substance abuse treatment; social services; housing; education, employment and training; community crisis response teams; peer support; parent and family resources; and local law enforcement. Any missing resources need to be identified. The team should establish contact with each resource, asking the necessary questions in order to connect each student in crisis:

  Who is the point of contact?

  Exactly what services are provided?

  Are you taking new clients/patients?

  Is there a wait list?

  Is there a fee associated with the service?

  Do you take insurance?

  How are referrals made?

  What is your location? Your hours?

  Do you have emergency appointments?

  A crisis will look different for each person. For some students, signs of a crisis may be loud and disruptive, while for others, signs of a crisis may look quiet and withdrawn. The third step for the crisis team is to define what types of behaviors or concerns need reporting to them. Over 90 percent of K–12 school mass shooters end up being current or former students of the school they shot up; therefore, it’s critical for schools to investigate any threats made while that child is under their care. However, any marked changes in behavior from baseline or “normal” should be treated just as seriously, because each crisis is a unique and fluid situation. Small signs of a crisis for one person may signal significant concern.

  What are thos
e signs? At the Violence Project, we focus on “the four Ds”:

  1. Disruptive behaviors: behaviors that interfere with the environment, such as unruly or abrasive behavior, a low tolerance for frustration, or being unusually argumentative;

  2. Distressed behaviors: behaviors that cause concern for the person’s well-being, such as marked changes in performance, appearance, or behavior; unusual or exaggerated emotional responses; or signs of hopelessness, despair, or suicidality;

  3. Dysregulated behaviors: behaviors that cause others to feel uncomfortable or scared, such as a withdrawn, isolated, or depressed mood; agitation; an inability to complete daily tasks; suspicious or paranoid thoughts; or writing or drawing with unusual or concerning themes; and

  4. Dangerous behaviors: behaviors that threaten safety or well-being, such as harassment, stalking, intimidation, procuring weapons, threats of harm to self or others, or planning or rehearsing violence.

  This is not a complete list of signs to look for, but it offers some initial guidance. In each area, concern would be related to a marked change—something noticeable that feels different—from a student’s usual behavior.

  Some behaviors obviously require immediate law enforcement action, but unless they are absolutely necessary, punitive measures that may contribute to or exacerbate the crisis, such as school exclusions or criminal charges, should be avoided. The 2018 Parkland shooter had been recently expelled for disciplinary reasons, proving that simply removing a student from school does not eliminate the threat of violence. Expulsions may in fact cause a student in crisis to escalate quickly. Step four in building a crisis response team thus is establishing criteria for times and situations when law enforcement will be asked to support or take over an assessment and, similarly, when community resources should be called in.

  The next step in the process is training all school community members (teachers, students, coaches, volunteers, etc.) to recognize the warning signs of a crisis and respond to them appropriately using crisis intervention, de-escalation, and suicide prevention techniques. Everyone needs to know what types of behaviors to report to the team and exactly how to report them, ideally through a central reporting mechanism. Tied to this, the team should create a communications plan and host information sessions explaining who they are and what they do to parents and other community stakeholders.

  When responding to a report of a student in crisis, the team should create an individualized action plan that is guided by answers to the following questions:

  Who has a previous relationship with the student?

  Who is in the best position to make an assessment?

  How will that person reach out?

  When and where will the assessment take place?

  Who else needs to be interviewed (e.g., parents, teachers, school staff, or peers)?

  Once someone connects with a student in crisis, ask them what they meant by their comment or action:

  What did they think would happen next?

  What resources do they need?

  How quickly do they need them?

  Are there others who should be contacted to support them?

  The action plan should identify what resources will be used, how the student will be connected to those resources, when follow-up conversations will take place and with whom, and whom the student can reach out to in case of an emergency.

  We spoke with Chris, the education director at a charter high school in the Midwest, who had attended our mass shooter prevention training the year before and embraced the crisis response team model. His high school is a drop-in recovery school for around 350 students who have lived through significant trauma. The school has crisis teams made up of advisors, teachers, social workers, therapists, and administrators. The teams meet frequently, at least twice a week and sometimes more, to discuss the well-being of their students and to exchange information.

  Chris is passionate about this system-wide approach, explaining, “If you are being mean and hostile in class, but I don’t know that your dad died last week, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now you are punished, you are excluded, it’s criminalized. We have to figure out what’s going on with students before we punish them.”

  The advisors are full-time staff, many recruited from the local community, and each is responsible for twenty to twenty-five students. Their goal is to get to know each student and their family and to be their advocate. Chris describes how advisors check in with each student daily by email, phone, or text: “It’s a daily reminder that ‘I see you and I value you. I acknowledge your existence.’ It’s critically important to do that daily wellness check.” A central focus of Chris’s school is wraparound services: “Showing care. Getting to know young people. That’s the path toward success. It’s about trust. And strong relationships.”

  Crisis response teams should be universally mandated in all districts and schools, and if they’re mandated, they should be funded. Money is available for school safety; it’s just a question of how we spend it. In 2019, Fruitport, Michigan—a town of just over a thousand people—announced that it was spending $48 million to redesign its high school campus to minimize casualties in the event of a mass shooting. The plan included curved hallways to shorten a shooter’s line of sight, hidden wing walls to give students more places to hide, and an alarm and lockdown system to isolate a threat at the touch of a button.

  Across the United States, a $3 billion school safety industry trades in Kevlar backpack inserts, bulletproof whiteboards, impact-resistant film for classroom windows, “ballistic attack–resistant” door shields, armored safe rooms, surveillance cameras, facial recognition systems, software to monitor potential threats, gunshot and “aggression-detector” microphones,3 and even smoke cannons to disrupt an active shooter in progress.

  There’s no evidence that any of this “hardening” works.4 The fact that school shooters are nearly always schoolchildren, well versed and practiced in how to access the school and move through any security upgrades, forces us to rethink this school security theater. Classical deterrence measures designed to keep the bad guys out are really just locking them in.

  We spoke with a retired FBI special agent who responded to practically every school shooting over a twenty-five-year career and who now consults on active shooter responses. He stresses caution in relying too heavily on hard security measures to stop a shooting. He says every shooting is “dynamic,” because mass shooters are always adapting, trying to circumvent the obstacles, learning from precedent. If the only thing that stands between a shooter and a shooting is a reinforced door or a pane of bulletproof glass, then we’ve missed a lot on the front end, he says.

  “[Shooters] are not averted from the security,” the special agent tells us. “They are averted from someone saying something, someone reacting to spillage from the perpetrator” when they leak their plans.

  School shooters are schoolchildren. In addition to preparing for a mass shooting, teachers, staff, and students are well placed to start preventing them. They do this by building warm and trusting environments that encourage reporting and by instituting crisis teams that can respond quickly and appropriately to a student at risk with care and compassion rather than punishment. This takes a shift in our thinking about what school violence prevention and public safety look like. It’s not metal detectors and bulletproof doors. It’s noticing when children and young people are struggling and then giving them what they need to thrive.

  —

  We meet Tim at a fancy café overlooking a pristine lake filled with yachts in a wealthy suburban neighborhood. He is sitting in the corner booth, drinking a cup of coffee. Tim is a scientist and manager at a medium-size Midwest company where Perpetrator D, a workplace shooter, worked as a machine operator for the past decade.

  “He was fairly talented at his job—but also difficult and introverted,” Tim tells us. “He was hard to communicate with and give feedback to. He had no friends. But he wasn’t obnoxious. He had strange eyes.”


  “What do you mean, strange eyes?” Jill probes.

  “Almost like he had no soul.”

  Perpetrator D had never missed a day of work . . . until he started arriving late almost every day—sometimes ten minutes, other times an entire hour. When his line manager confronted him about it, Perpetrator D just hung his head in silence and gave no response.

  “Afterward the media said he had schizophrenia, but we didn’t know that at the time,” says Tim. “I had no idea he was mentally ill.”

  While Tim was on a business trip in Europe, the owner and line manager made the decision to fire Perpetrator D. They had sent a formal letter to him a week earlier with a final warning, but his tardiness had continued. When Tim returned to the office, he was greeted by the human resources director, who told him that everything was prepped for Perpetrator D’s termination. Tim didn’t agree with the decision, “but I wasn’t going to argue,” he tells us. Then the HR director had to take Friday off for personal reasons, and she asked Tim if he’d fire Perpetrator D in her absence.

  The next day, Friday, Tim called Perpetrator D into his office late in the afternoon, along with his line manager. Word had already gotten out that Perpetrator D was being terminated. Tim had a large manila envelope with Perpetrator D’s name on it sitting on his desk. He told Perpetrator D that the company was letting him go. He handed him the envelope and went to open the door of his office. When he looked back over his shoulder, he saw that Perpetrator D was holding a gun.

  Without warning or speaking a word, Perpetrator D shot Tim twice in his right side. He then shot his line manager several times, including once in the head. He left Tim’s office and entered the owner’s office next door, where he fatally shot him. He then calmly walked past two secretaries outside their offices, one in the process of dialing 911, and down to the machine floor, where he shot two more employees and one of his supervisors. He then went down to the basement, sat on a chair, and shot himself in the head.

  Tim was lucky to work close to a level-one trauma center. The first responders and doctors saved his life. It’s taken many years, but he’s finally starting to feel okay physically again.