People are buzzing around the café, but Tim’s story has left the air heavy at our table. “How has it changed you?” Jill asks.
Tim’s response is flat, controlled: “I don’t laugh as much, I don’t tolerate as much, I trust people less.”
—
Like Tim, Jon Harris has experienced significant trauma in the workplace. About ten years ago, one of his colleagues, someone he knew was struggling in life, died by suicide in the office parking lot the morning after he was laid off. The man used one of ten rounds of ammunition on himself. Jon has always wondered whether the other nine rounds were meant for him and everyone else in the building.
James meets Jon at a local chapter meeting of the American Society for Industrial Security (ASIS), a professional organization for security professionals like him. Jon doesn’t scream “security professional” when you see him—he’s not an ex-military, ex-cop, take-no-prisoners type of guy—and it is clear from sidebar conversations between agenda items that he has a bigger story to share. Later, over coffee on a cold Minnesota morning, we talk over the specifics of creating a system of identifying and managing data that point to someone in crisis—something Jon has been working on for years.
After the shooting at his workplace, Jon helped train staff there in crisis intervention and de-escalation skills, following a model similar to what we outlined in the previous chapter. But more important, he encouraged them to take an active interest in the lives of their colleagues so that they could spot what he calls “yellow flags,” or early warning signs that someone is in distress, and refer them to management. These are not the “red flags” of imminent threat to life, Jon clarifies, but rather, often subtler, which is why they can go unnoticed: things like someone suddenly showing up late for work or appearing more tired and stressed than usual—changes from their baseline.
Management, in turn, tried to integrate themselves more and have a greater presence with staff. Management tends to see employees on their “best and worst days, when they’re hired and fired,” Jon says, but it’s everything in between that’s illustrative of what’s really going on in people’s lives. Human resources then sought to mitigate disgruntled employees by checking in with them early and often and offering support even for problems that originated outside the workplace, such as a messy breakup or a divorce.
Jon is now a workplace violence consultant, and he firmly believes that each and every member of a company (employers, managers, workers, and HR professionals) can help prevent violence, provided that the right structures and supports are in place. For example, a workplace could assemble or outsource a multidisciplinary, collaborative effort among its security team (which may be aware of some incident involving the person), the HR department (which may be privy to something in the person’s personnel file), and the legal department (which may know of an outside lawsuit or protective order) to identify, assess, and manage people in crisis.
Some places call these “threat assessment” or “threat management” teams, and they can include senior leaders, local law enforcement, personal advocates or labor unions, and other experts. Who sits on the team will be context specific, but in order for the team to be successful, it needs to establish when and where it will meet, how its members will communicate, and what types of behaviors will trigger a meeting outside its normal routine.
The idea of threat assessment was first developed by the U.S. Secret Service after several high-profile attacks on public officials and other public figures. Its “protective intelligence model” was later adapted for other sectors—workplaces, K–12 schools, and colleges and universities—in many cases following high-profile attacks at these locations. For example, it was in the wake of several post office shootings in the 1980s and early 1990s that the U.S. Postal Service implemented a workplace threat assessment program, using district-level threat assessment teams as part of its broader workplace violence prevention initiative.
Jon cautions that the “threat” concept could unduly narrow the scope of the team if the term is taken literally and if someone’s behavior is concerning but not inherently threatening. “You don’t help troubled people just to prevent a mass shooting. You help troubled people because they need help,” Jon notes. He advises broadening the definition of threat or adopting a name that avoids the term entirely. He liked our idea of “crisis response teams” in schools and felt that this would apply in workplaces, too.
Much like in schools, crisis response teams in the workplace are the first step toward establishing more than a zero-tolerance policy for workplace misconduct. Part of their role is to educate employees on warning signs that could potentially lead to violence if left unchecked, such as a marked change in behavior, sudden withdrawal, depression, or disgruntlement. Employees don’t need to memorize long lists of warning signs or flags; “that’s what the team is for,” Jon says. They simply need to speak up if they see any behavior that makes them worry about their own or someone else’s safety.
Workplace teams have a lot in common with school teams. They are part of creating an open and transparent work culture and keeping an eye out for people in crisis, but not in a way that erodes trust among coworkers or fosters a hostile, fearful environment. There may be times when employers react with termination, suspension, or some sort of law enforcement intervention after learning about a threat or incident, but that shouldn’t be the default reaction, because employees will be less likely to speak up if they fear the company will overreact or punish the person they’re reporting. If an organization’s response is always punitive, Jon explained, then people will feel they can report only if they’re 100 percent certain their concerns are valid, for fear they, too, will be thrown under the bus for wasting someone’s time. But if the response is not punitive—if it’s thoughtful and measured and helpful—then it doesn’t matter if someone overreacted when reporting to the team. After all, this is not a whistleblowing exercise. “You’re not trying to get your coworker or an outsider in trouble, but rather, [to] ensure the safety of all involved,” Jon says.
The team must show compassion rather than fear or recrimination. Treating a person in crisis disrespectfully or adding humiliation by failing to keep matters confidential could increase their risk for violence. Instead, establish mental health support and policies and be open about them. Adopt a beneficent response aimed at helping the person, not hurting them. This might involve referring them to an employee assistance program, arranging for them to receive mental health care, transitioning them to a role that better suits them, facilitating additional training, or mediating a dispute. Even if the employee needs to be terminated, consider benevolent severance or outplacement assistance.
In the end, the team is responsible for identifying resources available for people under their duty of care and making connections for appropriate intervention.
CHAPTER 6
PROOF
Perpetrator B was persistent. He had spent months trying to convince his mom to take this vacation, and finally she had caved, hoping it might “just cure his obsession.” From the second they arrived at the hotel, Perpetrator B’s excitement was palpable. He used his new camcorder to capture every moment, every detail, so that the memories would last a lifetime. He filmed the parking lot, the queen-size beds, the bathroom; he even filmed his acne-ridden face in the mirror.
It had been a long travel day already, and his mom was tired, but Perpetrator B was impatient to hit all the attractions. So they quickly unpacked, then immediately got back in the car to drive some more. Perpetrator B kept the camera rolling from the passenger seat, admiring the open mountains against the vivid blue sky. The sun was shining brightly, and to him the scene was like something out of a movie. Awed by so much natural beauty, Perpetrator B gave a running commentary of his emotions while his mom kept her eyes on the road ahead, smiling because her son was finally happy.
Perpetrator B was a planner, and he had a list of things he wanted to see and do that day: visit the pizza shop.
Buy a jacket. Tour a couple of neighborhoods. Visit the school. This may not sound like much, but for Perpetrator B, it was everything. For him, this was the vacation of a lifetime. Perpetrator B was in Littleton, Colorado, making his pilgrimage to Columbine High School.
—
On April 20, 1999, two high school seniors dressed in trench coats murdered twelve students and one teacher before killing themselves in what, at the time, was the worst high school shooting in U.S. history. Local news stations and CNN began broadcasting the scene live to viewers around the country about forty minutes into the attack. The coverage continued unbroken for hours. This was the heyday of twenty-four-hour cable news, but also “the year of the Net.”1 Google was founded in September 1998, one month after the release of the iMac, a sleek all-in-one desktop designed primarily “to get on the internet, simply and fast.”2 Columbine was the first mass shooting of the internet age and is now widely considered a defining moment for the Millennial generation, like the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was for the Baby Boomers.
Columbine frightened everyone, and at times the conversation about it bordered on hysteria. It was not only the scale of the slaughter that terrorized Americans but also the fact that the perpetrators were themselves children. THE MONSTERS NEXT DOOR: WHAT MADE THEM DO IT? was the headline when the shooters graced the cover of Time. The boys became household names. They were misfits, loners, targets of bullying by more popular students, we were told, part of a “trench coat mafia,” goths obsessed with Satanism and Nazism. Once these untruths were out there and spread across the globe, they were impossible to reel back in.
After the shootings at Columbine, a fandom for the shooters emerged on a fledgling internet, and it has only grown in the decades since. This subculture of “Columbiners” dresses like the shooters for Halloween or cosplay and creates memes, fan art, and fan fiction about their crime.3 Many divulge Columbine fantasies online in Tumblr blog posts, but never carry them out.
However, some do. Columbine has been the blueprint for no fewer than twenty school shooters in the last twenty years, not to mention all the people who compiled hit lists, phoned in threats, or brought guns to school but never went through with the shooting.4 Each was fascinated with Columbine and researched the massacre before their own. This includes a fourteen-year-old who aspired to be “the youngest mass murderer” and a fifteen-year-old who shot at his teacher after she refused to praise Marilyn Manson, the rock singer who was erroneously blamed for inspiring the Columbine killers.5
Past school shooters have talked of how they were going to “pull a Columbine.” Others discussed Columbine with classmates, even joked about it. The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter, who shot and killed twenty first-graders and six adult staff members in 2012, idolized the Columbine killers and curated a Tumblr account paying homage to them, alongside a graphic collage of their victims. The sixteen-year-old student who killed nine inside a high school on the Red Lake Nation Native American reservation in northern Minnesota in 2005 scoured the internet for information on the Columbine killers. After he was kicked out of school and placed on homebound services, he spent more and more time online watching their homemade movies and reading their writings. He also studied the 2003 movie Elephant, by Gus Van Sant, which chronicles the events surrounding a school shooting, based in part on Columbine.
Multiple shooters, including one fifteen-year-old in Oregon and another in Washington State, were similarly inspired by a 2004 documentary about Columbine, Zero Hour, which included detailed re-creations of what happened. A Wisconsin teenager held his classroom hostage after reading a book about Columbine. An October 2018 shooting at Kerch Polytechnic College, in Crimea, and a March 2019 copycat shooting in Brazil that killed eight show that the shooting’s influence is global.
It’s ironic that Columbine became a euphemism for school shooting, and so readily copied, because it was never intended to be a shooting and because it, too, was a copycat crime. On April 19, 1995, two years to the day after law enforcement officials raided a compound near Waco, Texas, precipitating a lengthy standoff and eighty-six fatalities, a truck packed with explosives was detonated outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in protest of Waco, killing 168 people and leaving hundreds more injured. The Columbine attackers, who felt that Timothy McVeigh never fully reached his potential for destruction, intended to emulate the Oklahoma City Bombing with a more spectacular and deadly explosion, one that would level the entire school building; they picked April 19 for their deed—postponed by an unknown reason to April 20, Adolf Hitler’s birthday, which only adds to the conspiracy around the incident. Only after the attackers’ crude improvised explosives failed to detonate did they resort to plan B: a shooting.
This chain of copycat crimes explains why the most common date of a month for a school shooting is the twentieth and why mass shooting anniversaries give us pause. Just three days ahead of the twentieth anniversary of the Columbine shooting in 2019, authorities closed schools across Colorado owing to a credible threat from a teenage girl armed with a shotgun who was “infatuated with Columbine” and who was an active contributor to related online chat rooms. The eighteen-year-old Floridian flew from Miami to Colorado, bought a pump-action shotgun and ammunition upon arrival, and then disappeared, prompting a massive manhunt. The FBI later found her dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Less than three weeks later, on May 7, 2019, there was a fatal shooting at the STEM School Highlands Ranch, just seven miles from Columbine High School. Two students went into the school carrying handguns and other weapons hidden in guitar cases. They killed one student and injured eight others.
—
This trend is not new. The idea that imitation can play a role in the genesis of crime goes back to the work of Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, published in French in 1890. Tarde argued that the media were the primary source of all crime ideas. “Epidemics of crime follow the line of the telegraph,” he quipped.6 Tarde assumed a natural tendency to imitate, but there is psychology behind why criminals (and non-criminals, for that matter) copy one another, something called “social proof.”
Social proof, a term coined by Robert Cialdini in his 1984 book Influence, is like “safety in numbers” or “the wisdom of crowds.”7 When we don’t know what to do, we look to others for social cues that validate our own actions. So, for example, if a colleague is working late, then we may feel we should also work late. Or if we see that a restaurant is full of people, then we may be more likely to eat at that restaurant. To quote Cialdini: “The principle of social proof states that one important means that people use to decide what to believe, or how to act in a situation, is to look at what other people are believing or doing there.” As they say, when in Rome, do as the Romans do.
Perpetrator B never visited Rome, but he did travel to Columbine. So, we asked him, “How did you feel when you made this visit?”
In a written reply, he said:
I admit that I was very excited and happy to see the high school and the town that I had read about for almost a year. It was overwhelming. I was amazed at the town.
When and how did you first hear about the Columbine shooting?
When it occurred on April 20, 1999. I was 11 and I remember that my parents were talking about it. I also saw the Time magazine cover that showed the two shooters in the cafeteria and I believe I read the article.
What initially piqued your interest in the shooting?
When I was 17 I watched the documentary Bowling for Columbine by Michael Moore. I remembered about the event when I was 11 and wanted to learn more because it was a historical event, though a tragedy. Also because of the firearms and the high school.
What other massacres did you study?
Columbine massacre, Jonesboro massacre, Thurston High School shooting, Red Lake High School massacre.
What interested you about these other shootings?
I heard about some of these shooters
either in movies or news articles and I wanted to know what they had done. . . . I was curious. After researching the Columbine massacre, I found a link to other school shootings and decided to read on them. A few I had already heard about when they happened. And I wanted to be better informed. I related a lot to [the Columbine shooter] and [the Thurston High School shooter]. [The Columbine shooter] was about my age and suffered from depression like I was [sic]. He committed suicide and I also longed for suicide at times.
Perpetrator B was struggling to find himself, and mass shooters were the only people he saw that he recognized himself in. Many people experience social and psychological strain. How they deal with that strain is often contingent on how others just like them have chosen to deal with it. Who is more similar to an angry young man in crisis than another angry young man in crisis? Eventual mass shooters may have already wanted to kill people, but seeing someone else do it provides them with an incentive. When people are isolated and uncertain how to act, social proof binds them to models of behavior. It resolves uncertainty, reduces the cost of trial and error, and speeds up learning.
We came to realize this after an averted school shooter, Jacob, reached out to us to tell us his story. He’d read about our research and contacted us because he felt a study that focused only on completed mass shootings was incomplete. Jacob could offer a different “useful perspective,” and after years of silence he was finally ready to offer it.
Jacob had been abandoned by his parents as a child, raised by his grandparents, and violently assaulted whenever his drug-addicted father came back to visit. “If you ever tell anyone what I do to you again, I’m going to kill you,” his father once said after a school counselor suspected child abuse and called a meeting. “I can kill you because you belong to me,” he clarified.
The Violence Project Page 11