Virginia Tech. Columbine. Northern Illinois University. Today, the names of these schools are recognized across the country for the wrong reasons. They are now headlines seared into the national conscience like the names of early battles in a war that academic board-members and senior administrators have never been trained to address. The harsh reality is that – in one form or another – targeted violence is now happening with rising frequency in our schools (as well as our workplaces, public locations and private residences) every single day.
What the vast majority of academic leaders, along with their executive counterparts, don’t yet realize is that there is an enormously powerful body of knowledge – key principles, best practices, and cost-effective counter-strategies – that can minimize the risks of such a devastating event. As a nation, we actually know how to counter this threat. The problem is that most academic institutions aren’t aware that this insight exists and consequently are not taking the crucial steps necessary to protect their students and staff as well as their facilities and reputations.
Most Universities Are Missing the Mark
It’s not that universities in every state aren’t taking action. They are. Academic leaders and administrators across the nation are trying hard to deal with this new challenge. Targeted violence is now increasingly a leading priority for academic boards they are revising budgets to address this risk. And administrators are trying to come up with acceptable answers to a host of new questions from parents of both current and prospective students.
But the bulk of university board and administration efforts are missing the mark. Why? Most are focused almost exclusively on making sure the right steps are taken after an event has occurred. They’re focused on managing a crisis – responding quickly and in force. They’re focused on containing the threat and on quickly communicating the danger to campus populations without the delays that more than tripled the carnage at Virginia Tech.
These are important steps. But they’re not enough. What academic institutions need to do is minimize the likelihood that these acts of targeted violence will ever occur in the first place. They need to shift from a strategy based purely on response to one based much more strongly on prevention.
Early Work On Targeted Violence: A Crucial Body of Knowledge
Let’s define what we’re talking about. Based on the concept first developed by the U.S. Secret Service, the term targeted violence refers to situations in which an identified (or identifiable) perpetrator “poses (or may pose) a threat of violence to a particular individual or group.” These targeted violence situations include school violence as well as other criminal behaviors such as stalking, domestic violence, workplace violence, bias-motivated hate crimes and the singling out of executives, celebrities, public officials or their families.
Much of what we know today about the thinking and behavior of potential attackers was pioneered by the U.S. Secret Service as a critical component of the agency’s mission to prevent assassination attempts on the President of the United States and other U.S. and foreign leaders. This early work–and over 100 years of experience, tradition and culture–have helped the Secret Service develop unique insight and perspective on targeted violence–well before incidents of workplace violence, school violence and other related crimes became as commonplace as they are today.
Some of the most actionable information on targeted violence, however, is quite new. Even as recently as 20 years ago, the Secret Service was still in the early stages of developing insight into the motivations and behaviors of people capable of unleashing this type of violence on others. In the late 1980’s, for example, there were a number of serious Secret Services cases that challenged the agency’s traditional beliefs about assassins and their behavior. These beliefs were based on assumptions that a person posing a threat (1) had a single direction of interest, (2) would make an explicit threat, (3) held hostility toward his or her target, and (4) would bring himself or herself to the attention of the Secret Service2. In each and every one of these serious cases, the Secret Service did not become aware of the subject until after he or she had appeared on site with a weapon. This realization was, in part, a key driver behind the Secret Service’s decision to launch a landmark inquiry into the mind of an attacker.
