Active Shooter Incidents are Preventable

As a former violent crime detective and crime prevention expert for 30 years, I am exhausted watching people needlessly die in this country at the hands of an active shooter. This is a battle I have waged since I was a rookie police officer in Nashville, TN in 1992.

Violence is almost always predictable. The U.S. Secret Service released a report, “Protecting America’s Schools:  A U.S. Secret Service Analysis of Targeted School Violence” in 2019 and Director James M. Murray states in his opening message that this new research “supports past Secret Service research findings that indicate targeted school violence is preventable.”

Whatever happens at home usually finds its way into our workplaces, schools, and places of worship.

If we look at the mass shooting that left 17 dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida in 2018, there were years of red flags regarding the shooter. He experienced the death of both parents, was homeless and then hopped from one friend’s home to another, had social media postings threatening harm to others, talked about past mass shootings  which lead strangers and a close family friend to notify the FBI! He also should not have had access to a gun! The FBI has since admitted that they made big mistakes with the information they were given, including never sharing it with their Miami field office.

We have fractured systems. Systems that do not speak to each other. Bureaucratic agencies that operate in silos where each stakeholder holding valuable information does not pass it along to other stakeholders.

Silos get people killed. And this is not a theory for me. I have witnessed how silos lead to death, and I have also witnessed how creating inter-agency agreements with all stakeholders, focusing on early intervention, allowing law enforcement, mental health, social services, and advocacy programs to work together as a 360 model to prevent fatalities does indeed work!

And yes, we need sensible gun laws. As a member of law enforcement, coming from a family of law enforcement (including my wife), we can all attest to the fact that not everyone is qualified nor should have access to a gun in this country. However, the arguments around guns on the far left (no one should have a gun) and on the far right (everyone should have a gun) has gotten us nowhere and are not based on reality. We need to stop looking to the extremes and work together on this issue.

I helped develop and implement the largest law enforcement domestic violence prevention program in 1994. We had more than 25 women lose their life annually in Nashville, TN. And we quickly realized that there were many red flags; these homicides did not happen in the heat of the moment without warning. In fact, there were several warning signs. We realized that sometimes the police had information, sometimes the healthcare community did, and other times it was advocacy or social services that had information. So we focused on making two  important priorities in Nashville:  1.  Early intervention; and 2.  Sharing information with ALL stakeholders. By doing this, we were able to now function as a team when the  first red flag appeared. The result was a 50% reduction in domestic violence murders.

It’s vital for each community and state to stop working in isolation and start working together to stop crime before it happens.

Sadly, our approach to a solution for mass shootings is a single-solution model. We don’t eradicate cancer with a single-solution approach, so how do we think we are going to solve a complex problem like mass shootings with a single change. There are no one-size-shoe fits all. That would be too easy. It requires meaningful legislation to keep firearms from those who have demonstrated they are a danger to others or themselves (i.e. red flag laws; background checks); it requires understanding behaviors that escalate to lethal violence; it requires collaborating with stakeholders; it requires Memorandums of Understanding (MOU’s) and/or legislation to share information across mental health organizations and threat teams.

We must work together and prioritize preventing these horrible incidents from happening, rather than just reacting to them.

Let’s agree that what we have been doing is not working and that we must make a change. The time is now.