Another news conference recently concluded at Virginia Tech. I didn't catch all of it, but I did see the part where a speaker (didn't get his name) said firmly that the response to the shootings and the decisions made by the university administration and police were correct and proper based on the information they had at the time.
This might be true. But it's way too soon to know that. In only 24 hours there's no way to review dispassionately the record of events, discussions and decisions. And it offends the objective mind that the same people who made the decisions have now definitively pronounced that their decisions are beyond criticism. An independent board of inquiry is more than justified here.
From the beginning, the public utterances of university President Charles Steger's and Police Chief Wendell Flinchum have been sorry spectacles. They have distanced themselves from the events, describing the day as if it had little to do with them personally. It's one thing to demonstrate command of facts, but they have displayed all the personal connection with the mass murders as if describing a close loss of a football game. Certainly, I have seen no evidence that they have even done much soul searching about their decisions and response plans. Frankly, ISTM that they hardly even care much.
I know that sounds harsh, even cruel. I cannot believe that yesterday's horrors have affected them any way but deeply. I would even guess they cried in their beds last night. But their public appearances and utterances seem to have been coordinated with a staff attorney first, whose advice must have been: "Say nothing to indicate that you personally or the university bear any responsibility for this tragedy. Speak in the third person. Make sure you say repeatedly that everything you did was correct and proper."
But hundreds of millions of dollars in lawsuits are sure to follow, anyway. Already, parents are calling for Steger and Finchum to get the boot. Myself, I hope they will have the decency to resign as a matter of principle. No matter how much legal and emotional distance the two men try to put between the killings and themselves, the deeds happened on their watch.
Everyone is, of course, talking about "healing" at the university. The departure of Steger and Finchum would be a big part of it.
Nothin' like rushing to judgment, huh?
The Clery Act requires colleges to provide "timely warning" to the campus of serious crime in order to prevent similar crimes. This Department of Education Handbook summarizes the requirements at Chapter Five (pdf)
The facts will come out in time. Demonstrably a lot went wrong yesterday, but there are also stories of heroics starting to come out- a professor who tried to hold the door while he urged his students to jump from the windows. He was shot in the head and killed. Initially it seems that professors were disproportionately victims, i'm guessing there are more stories of teachers trying to protect their students and paying the ultimate price. The university should find some measure of solace in that. Honor and duty are not dead on our campuses.
Dear PD Shaw
Well that clears it up. From the Clery Act:
By now you are probably asking, “What do you mean by
‘timely’?” and “How do you expect me to alert everyone?” Neither
the Clery Act nor ED define “timely.” The warning should be issued
as soon as the pertinent information is available because the intent of
a timely warning is to alert the campus community of continuing threats especially concerning safety, thereby enabling community
members to protect themselves.
Again, the issue is ... How many people were already dead by the time the administration found out? I suspect that most of the damage happened in the first several minutes, and that it took at least that long before a witness survived the encounter that had any first person knowledge of events (I mean other than hearing shots fired).
This will all come out in time, but for now I think it's least to let the authorities take this thing apart and put it back together again.
BTW: Legally, I'm sure school lawyers have already told the administration exactly what they could say. There will be a court battle, and if the school shows any inclination towards fault, they will lose millions, regardless of whether they were actually to blame.
How is anybody supposed to even guess that a shooting of this magnitude would follow? Ask any cop.
alchemist #5,
Consistent news reports have been that at least two hours elapsed between the killings in the dorm, reported to police immeidately, and the shootings in the classrooms. Two. Hours.
Cobb, #6,
Ask a cop exactly what? Ask a cop why the police stood around and did NOTHING while Cho shot 58 people in Norris Hall? Ask a cop why the V. Tech police on scene didn't immediately "ride to the sound of the guns" rather than wait until dozens of police arrived as reinforcements?
You're darn right there's a lot to ask a cop, starting with Finchum, which simply reinforces my assertion that all the claims about how every decision and action by police and administration were exactly correct is both offensive and butt covering.
I wrote last October about why present police procedures simply guarantee more dead victims:
http://www.donaldsensing.com/index.php/2006/10/11/hide-behind-the-teachers-desk-and-wait-to-be-shot/
So you're saying that anytime there is a shooting in a city of ~30,000 people spread over about 1 square mile, every single building should be locked down? This is not VT's fault. There are several hundred buildings on the campus, all of varying ages and technological capabilities (PA, remote locks, etc). VT did the right thing.
Jeffrey: The Act also requires the University to produce policies that would be used to answer some of your questions. I haven't been able to track down the policies on line yet. I have found past violations.
I also note that the Dept. of Education handbook talks about timely warnings being given as soon as information becomes available that a crime is ongoing or may be repeated. Members of the law enforcement community might opine that an armed homicide with a missing/escaping gunman constitutes a significant threat of further crimes, even if a mass shooting is not anticipated.
I certainly don't have enough information to judge what happened, but I do think this is the background issue which informs the school's statements.
Ask a detective who actually arrives on a scene after a murder of a girlfriend and lover how often that same person goes on a killing spree. This is unusual even for gang shootings.
Consistent news reports have been that at least two hours elapsed between the killings in the dorm, reported to police immeidately, and the shootings in the classrooms. Two. Hours.
Again, was not there, it's difficult to know exactly what happened. It does sound as if these were dramatically different areas on campus, and while they were gathering information about scene A and (I assume)and trying to find the individual, scene B broke out. I agree, there probably should have been some kind of bulletin released on the campus in those two hours. The smaller campuses I have worked at have been flawless in this, the larger schools always have a tougher time communicating from building to building, and it usually happens over the next 4-24 hours. Still, this is a eye-opening experience, and college campuses will have to rethink their strategies.
I have no non-tv cop experience, but do cops normally announce it to the public immediately after a shooting? My experience from watching 'cops' (albeit bad experience) is that they make a report, and put out an APB among officers for the suspect. Again, there's often less than 30 cops on a campus of 30,000 people. Most large campuses have no PA system, you would literally have to have secretarys walking down the hallways, going door to door announcing a shooting, and then that would only notify the people that were in that class. That probably would have been better, but no guarantee that it would prevent the problem. (Does anyone know if this happened?)
I guess it really come down to how much they actually knew in the first two hours. Did anyone see the shooter? Was there any indication that this person had left the campus? How much information was released beforehand?
This will all come out eventually.
I agree with that. There's just no good answers here. Something this horrific happens and it is human instinct to look for what went wrong, but sometimes its just a terrible tragedy that would have been almost impossible to avert without the advantage of hindsight. I mean, the guy could have walked down to a highschool or a bank or a restaurant just as easily. You cant really issue a nuclear 'amber alert' on steroids every time there is a shooting and lock down an entire region- its just not plausible.
"Virginia Tech University Prof. Liviu Librescu, described as a family man who once did research for NASA, sacrificed his life to save his students in the shooting rampage yesterday."
"When he heard the gunfire, he blocked the entrance and got shot through the door," his daughter-in-law Ayala Schmulevich said.
"He realized he had to save the students," she said. "That was the kind of man he was."
...
"Alec Calhoun, 20, said the last thing he saw before he jumped from the window was Librescu, blocking the door against the madman in the hallway.
He died trying to protect the students.
Librescu taught aerospace and ocean engineering but focused much of his time on research.
He leaves a wife and two sons. His family is planning to bury him in Israel."
New York Daily News
Never again.
Apparently the first incident happened at 7am, the second at 9:00. This sounds like an excuse, it isn't exactly, but it's an explanation of how large schools work. which is basically that they don't work before 9am. These are goverment jobs, there are no secretary's available until 9, the cops probably notified someone, who started notifying others, but depending on where people were and when, they may have had trouble making an executive decision such as cancelling classes before 9 o'clock.
1-Apparently cops did beleive that he had left the campus.
2-Apparently an e-mail about the intial incident wasn't sent before 9:24am. This is a bad sign, but not suprising. Colleges of this size are massive beurocratic nightmares. Again, you would hope something was done sooner, but apparently not.
The issue boils down to what is a reasonable response to the events that occurred at 7:15am. For what appeared to be a "crime of passion" in a dorm room, with a suspect at large should the College administration have locked down the entire campus/evacuated classrooms? I'm not sure if thats the standard course of action for a college campus of 26,000. We don't evacuate or lockdown towns when there is a murder, or even neighborhoods when there is a murder in the immediate area. The police locked down the dorm where the initial crime occurred which in my view is all they should have done. There was no possible way (given the evidence that has been made public thus far) that police or the campus officials could have known that this person would go on a shooting rampage. Those calling for firings have the full benefit of 20/20 hindsight.
There may be some merit to not alerting the campus sooner that the murder had occurred, but you have to ask yourself would it have mattered? Would students skipped class or went back to their rooms because of it? Would they have been on guard when a calm asian student looked into their classroom? Would you?
But hundreds of millions of dollars in lawsuits are sure to follow, anyway. Already, parents are calling for Steger and Finchum to get the boot. Myself, I hope they will have the decency to resign as a matter of principle. No matter how much legal and emotional distance the two men try to put between the killings and themselves, the deeds happened on their watch.
"Following the courageous example of George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice who received a briefing entitled Bin Laden determined to strike in US on August 6, 2001, did nothing, and subsequently resigned on 9/12/2001..."
What about having taser stations similar to a fire extinquisher / alarm behind glass at key locations? That is, 'break glass in case of emergency'.
That way, you don't have to arm huge numbers of individuals, but an unarmed crowd has another recourse beyond cowering behind desks or blocking doors available. It has the additional advantage of being nonlethal and unlikely to cause blue on blue fatalities.
The supporting legal argument is that if you want to override your states CCW laws for your campus / hospital / government office, then you are legally responsible to provide a means of non-lethal resistance to the population that makes themselves vulnerable in your domain. Either that, or you are responsible to have visible security personnel in all such venues (that show up PDQ).
You could also have significant penalties to deter pranksters who might try to play with the tasers.
Aside - Another link (Chicago Tribune story; reg. req'd.) about the teacher who blocked a door with his body paid the price. Other door blockers were luckier and not shot.
[Link fixed per Demosophist's suggestion (#41). Please read "To add a live URL" under "POST A COMMENT." If you just can't, then use Tiny URL. -- M.F.]
I agree with a lot of the above - it's too soon to say with confidence and fairness if the administrators acted correctly or incorrectly. But faster than you can say "Duke Rape Case", Steger and Flinchum have been tried and convicted in the minds of many. It may turn out, in the end, that they could have done more and chose not to for bad reasons, but I'm witholding judgement until some independent review is done.
In my own personal experience running a "real time" operation (not police or military but oil & gas), two hours is actually a pretty short amount of time when dealing with an unforseen event of critical importance. You're faced with two issues - what went wrong, and how do I now proceed? Those two questions are closely related. Gathering the information you need to make a decision is tough, especially when the clock is ticking. You run into a myriad of obstructions - you can't reach the people you need to talk to, eye-witness accounts conflict, early reports are in error or omit critical details, etc. Two hours can flash by before you can say "Mike Nifong".
And that's why you have plans and procedures. Because a murder on campus is not really an "unforseen event". A murder on campus is a quite realistic scenario (mass murder being a good bit further afield but not impossible), and it's one you can think through in advance to figure out how you really want to handle it with respect to public safety and information sharing. Did VT have an emergency action plan covering what to do in the event of a murder on campus? I'm curious if they had a plan, what it covered, if it was put into effect, and when. The only way a bureacracy acts quickly is if it is executing an approved plan.
After all, VT administration was adamant about it's "no guns on campus" policy for everyone but the campus cops. In light of that, what was their plan for this kind of theoretical event, and how did they respond when it actually happened?
Rev. Sensing: I'm not yet ready to ride up the backs of either the university president or the campus police chief. This disaster was unprecedented in several ways, most importantly in that there has never been a situation where a killer left the scene of his first crimes then took them up again, two hours and half a mile later.
The police took appropriate action at Scene One as best they understood the situation. It appeared to them to be a matter of 'scorned lover kills beloved' + 'RA steps in and gets accidentally killed'. They assumed--erroneously, as it turned out, but not illogically and not negligently as far as I can see--that since the perp was not on the scene, he had left the area.
Well, he did leave the immediate area, but not the general area. Police again incorrectly assumed (but not illogically) that the perp would have put as much distance between Scene One and himself because that's what usually happens in such instances. At least one news report cites police as saying they thought he may have left the state.
In the course of their investigation of the first two killings, if the police version is to be believed, they had identified a 'person of interest' and were interviewing that person, off campus, when Scene Two evolved.
Until now, it has been reasonable and rational to not expect a single gunman flipping out over a broken relationship in one location, taking his retribution on those around, then moseying across a campus to wreak greater destruction. There are simply no prior instances of this precise behavior.
As we all know, it's hard to plan for the unforeseeable.
In their assessment of Scene One, the police properly shut down the dorm. They had no reason to expect that in this instance, shutting down the entire campus was the appropriate response. The next time there's a shooting on any campus, administrators and police will think more broadly. Hindsight works that way.
All universities are going to have to review how they deal with violence: there's a new paradigm. But I don't think it right to condemn those who were operating on the older one yesterday.
Yes, the school's notification process was proved inadequate. This is something schools will have to fix in the future. Perhaps they can develop an all-student cell phone alert. Such a system doesn't exist yet. E-mail notification was never going to be adequate, but perhaps it can play a role. Campus-wide sirens telling all to hit the dirt might be useful, but no such system exists. There are lots of things that might help prevent a repeat, but no one, anywhere, is currently implementing such things.
Public spaces are vulnerable; open university campuses are vulnerable. There is simply no way anyone can guarantee the safety, 100%, of anyone on this earth. Risks can be minimized sometimes, but not always.
I think there's more utility in learning from this disaster than seeking to apportion blame for the havoc wrought by a deranged individual.
I for one extrapolate no grand policy proposals from a statistical outlier. I simply think some of the official conduct has seemed odd and can be explained by CYA.
Mark B is right to point out that there were heroes too.
Gabriel, I don't disagree with many of your questions, but I do think colleges have extra obligations to their students. They attract a number of people who have never been out of their homes before, they tend to be situated in above-average crime areas and they've been known to spend as much time hiding criminal problems as protecting against them.
jdwill, if Virginia Tech allowed concealed carry and the same student legally brought a concealed weapon to the classroom and then killed the same number of students, would the school be liable then? My view is that the students and the parents knew the policy when they enrolled; if it was so clearly dangerous, they could enroll elsewhere.
PD Shaw,
My point is about supplying non-lethal means of resistance to the school population. If the student in your scenario was within the law, then I think the school would not be liable. But, my idea is to evade that possibility in the first place.
I expect
Hospital organizations
like this one will be working to ensure any CCW laws get overriden for their turf. Ditto for the schools.
So, my prediction is that as CCW continues to make headway, certain organizations will resist as much as possible. I am suggesting there may be a third way.
more on vulnerable
An interview of a VTI grad student
......
I think that more and more people will come away with this logic. Those who call for control (no sharp objects) will eventually lose the argument as people, thinking for themselves, realize that the system doesn't protect them.
Not in the particular case as individuals because the police can't be everywhere, and often not in the general case, when laws are not enforced, generating an advantage to the law breakers.
jdwill, if Virginia Tech allowed concealed carry and the same student legally brought a concealed weapon to the classroom and then killed the same number of students, would the school be liable then? My view is that the students and the parents knew the policy when they enrolled; if it was so clearly dangerous, they could enroll elsewhere.
I bet you the lawyers that Virginia Tech employs would disagree with that logic.
VT should be accountable:
Last year an escaped convict killed a man in his escape and killed a Sheriff's Deputy on a trail right outside Campus. Plus there were bomb threats last two weeks. VT Admin had plenty of time prior to the incident to prepare a response to shootings.
Columbine and most notably, Pearl MS (shooter killed his mother, went to slaughter people at the school) should have been wake-up calls for VT and all other Universities on how to respond to shootings on campus.
Police sweeping through dorms, classrooms, libraries etc. is disruptive and costs lots of manpower.
However in assuming ALL responsibility for the students safety as VT publicly did in opposing any CCW on campus, that's what's required.
But hundreds of millions of dollars in lawsuits are sure to follow, anyway. Already, parents are calling for Steger and Finchum to get the boot. Myself, I hope they will have the decency to resign as a matter of principle. No matter how much legal and emotional distance the two men try to put between the killings and themselves, the deeds happened on their watch.
"Following the courageous example of George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice who received a briefing entitled Bin Laden determined to strike in US on August 6, 2001, did nothing, and subsequently resigned on 9/12/2001..."
So, you agree that Bush and Rice should have resigned, right?
Mullah Sensing demonstrates he has no shame. Sarah is right; Mullah Sensing often champions the ill-made decisions, resulting in the needless loss of thousands of US lives, of Bush and his handlers, but we never see a demand for their resignations.
Why?
Because he isn't interested in strawman arguments and rhetorical games.
There's an important difference between making the right decision and getting the right outcome.
Suppose you are a doctor in the ER. A patient shows up requiring immediate treatment. Based on the available evidence, you realize that there are two possibilities:
- there's a 90% chance of problem 1, requiring treatment A;
- there's a 10% chance of problem 2, requiring treatment B.
The two are incompatible, and there's not enough time to gather more information before treatment is required. Obviously, you give treatment A.
But sometimes (on average, 10% of the time) the autopsy shows you should have picked treatment B.
When that happens, and you are confronted by the grieving relatives, what do you do?
- Do you say, from now on, in this situation, I'll give treatment B instead?
- Do you say, I'll wait next time, until I'm sure? (Losing more patients.)
- Do you say, I'll resign, because making life-and-death decisions as a doctor is too hard?
- Or do you say, I made the best decision I could, with the information I had. I am heartbroken about the way it turned out.
Before you jump to judge those officials at VT, let's hear your answers to this doctor. Furthermore, as I am certain you know, precisely the same considerations apply to commanders in combat.
IIRC, the medical dictum for that sort of situation is that, when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.
My understanding is that the prevailing wisdom (slowly changing) in the practice of medicine is never to admit fault or mistake.
Sorry, Beard #29, but a better analogy would be this:
As an emergency room doctor, you are confronted with diagnosing two patients brought in at the same time. They are both critically near death. You immediately discern that both have an illness that is aerosol infectious, potentially but not certainly endangering everyone else in the emergency room. But you wait 2 1/2 hours before advising the rest of the staff and other patients.
Please offer your explanation of the delay.
While you are working on these two patients, 58 others are brought in, dying and most already dead. You simply watch their asgony and do nothing to give them succor while you "assess the situation" and wait for other doctors to arrive.
Explain this inaction to the survivors and all the next of kin.
Oh, wait, you don't really try to explain anything at all. You simply call press conferences and insist that every decision you made was absolutely correct and should not be criticized.
Sorry Donald [#31], but that's not a better analogy.
Your analogy is a story designed to illustrate your point, in which you have already concluded what the decision-makers did, and why. Mine is designed to illustrate why one should not rush to judgment, based on the very real difficulty of making decisions under incomplete knowledge. Including the fact that sometimes the right decision still results in a bad outcome.
Perhaps when more information is available, we will discover that they did act negligently. But we have no grounds for concluding that now.
Do you have a source for the claim that they "insist that every decision ... was absolutely correct and should not be criticized"? I haven't listened to the press conference, but that seems vastly unlikely.
IIRC, there was a study conducted in the last few years (perhaps at a Veteran’s hospital?) that analyzed Beard’s conundrum. The result was that the doctors who chose option 4 (“I made the best decision I could, with the information I had. I am heartbroken about the way it turned out.”) faced a greater number of lawsuits, but each case was settled for far less than the doctors that minimized their responsibility and total litigation costs were less. I think the point was that once people decided you weren’t being candid with them, negative inferences were drawn from all of what might otherwise have been reasonable judgment calls.
Sarah, Jade, and Beard ignore the salient reporting about the events:
After the first shooting, the under-manned VT police (only 28 officers) and local police held MEETINGS.
Meetings. Instead of action.
Had at least SOMETHING been done instead of meetings I would not be critical. But instead legal concerns, desire not "scare" students and avoid/min publicity, and a healthy dose of CYA meant that nothing was done.
As always CYA.
There's an important difference between making the right decision and getting the right outcome.
This is true in almost almost all areas of human endeavor, from deciding when to go to war and how to wage it to picking a grocery store and driving there. Very few people appreciate it, and even then the usually only do so when it's convenient.
Beard #32, Yes that claim was explicitly made at this morning's press conference, which impelled me to write this post.
Jim [#34] thinks that in an unprecedented crisis, people should act, not think. And if they do think, do it alone, rather than with other experienced people who might also have sensible ideas. I thought some of you guys have military experience!
Meanwhile, the NYT reports that during those two hours, the police were pursuing a plausible suspect for the first killings, the girl victim's missing boyfriend, who was a known fan of shooting. Turns out he hadn't done it, of course, but it was a plausible lead.
The same article points out that the VT President looks stoic on TV (which is how many of us guys deal with stress), but he's torn up inside. If you're in charge of a huge institution full of kids, and one of them kills 32 others, you're going to be pretty broken up, too, whether you show it or not. So cut the guy some slack.
Do you have care of a congregation, Reverend Sensing? If so, you know what I'm talking about. In any case, show some Christian compassion.
Funny how after such carnage, the focus of blame shifts from
the dead gunman to living school administrators.
I went to a sister school of Virginia Tech, specifically
the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Like Blacksburg,
Charlottesville is a sleepy and idyllic college town.
At the time I was a student, the president of the University was a wonderful
genteel man, who loved his students, always had time to smile and say
hello, and would make time to remove himself from administrative
chores to teach one class a semester in the English department.
He wasn't Chuck Norris, Rudy Giuliani, or John Wayne. He was
a professor and academic who spent most of his time and training
focused on the process of education and building a wonderful
institution. If the Tech administrators are cut from the same cloth as my
school's president, than I am sure that they will carry deep
scars with them for the rest of their lives.
It's probably safe to say that before yesterday's tragedy,
Mr. Sensing had never heard of Steger and Finchum. So frankly
I don't think he, or anyone watching this from 50,000 feet are
in any position to assert that their resignation will help
"heal the community."
Yes, the lunatic right fringe is correct again!
Steger and Finchum should have, upon learning of the first shooting, rounded up all of the students on campus and sent them to the Gitmo for a little waterboarding, sodomy, sleep deprivation and dog attacks. They could have gathered valuable intel that would have prevented further deaths and probably gotten a confession out of the shooter who would have been caught up in the wide net.
At this point there is nothing left to do but nuke SoCo because obviously they are a terrorist sponsoring state and we haven't heard an appology from them for the actions of one their prodgeny. I am sure Iran had something to do with this as well, but then they've already made the list anyhow.
Really now, what were campus officials to have done? Send everyone where? Back to the dorms? How is that safer? The killer's identity was unknown. Any move under those circumstances could have made the situation worse; maybe even played into the killer's hand. Furthermore, as we all know, the best interpretation of the first shooting was that it was an isolated incident. Any seasoned law enforcement officer would have come to that conclusion.
Sometimes S**t happens and there is no one to blame. Life, maybe god, is capricious. This is one of those times.
As for all of this talk about conceal carry weapons, I think most reasonable people can envision more accidents and impulse shootings resulting than live saved. And I, myself, have a CCW, BTW. However, I have had extensive weapons/combat training. There is no such training involved as a requirement for CCW. Where some demonstration of proficiency and/or training is part of the the licensing requirement it is absolutely minimal and insufficient; a joke really (though not CCW, all those annual deer hunting accidents come to mind).
Again, as someone noted up thread, this event was a statistical outlier and there probably is not much that can ultimately be learned from it that will prevent some other similarly tragic event from occurring some day in the future.
Donald,
I was forwarded this bit from the Free Republic blog:
The problem I have with this mess is that the cops don't realize the lessons segments of the public, AKA Parents, are drawing from the videos of their staging outside while shots are going off inside the dorm.
They won't realize that message until they get shot by parents rushing past them to save their kids.
Could someone please embed jdwill's link in #17. It makes this post nearly impossible to read. And jd, would you please either learn to embed links, or start using http://tinyurl.com ? Sigh...
News reports this morning (Apr. 18) say that Va. Gov. Kaine is appointing an independent board to review the decisions and actions of the university administration and police department. This is good. Even better , the request to do so came from President Steger himself, which in my view serves to redeem his honor at significantly.
I have identified the state official whom I cited anonymously in my post. He is John Marshall, Virginia's director of public safety, quoted in part in this CNN piece profiling Chief Finchum, thus:
Although the CNN piece does not quote Marshall further, I watched the press conference and remember Marshall saying clearly that the focus - saying this to the media - needs to be on the criminal investigation itself.
There is also in the CNN article an embedded java link (which means it won't work to paste it here) of a video interview with one Aaron Cohen, a SWAT team instructor, who made exactly the same points I made in my post - when the shooting in Norris Hall began, the police on the scene, however many or few there were, should have immediately entered the building to accost the gunman. They did not do this.
The link is embedded in this sentence:
(Watch what SWAT instructor thinks officers should've done )
Sorry, will do so in future.
Donald, I'll disagree with you (and look for links to provide later). I read several accounts from students that suggested that the whole Norris Hall incident lasted ~10 minutes and ended with police breaking down the door the shooter was behind and him killing himself.
That suggests they were following a 'go to the active shooter' plan, and that - given realistic response times and rate of movement through a shooting site - they couldn't have acted much faster than they did.
Lots of things about this don't make sense yet, and personally I'd rather wait until we're not dealing with fragmentary accounts before we talk about anything substantive.
A.L.
AMac and jd:
Thanks. Much appreciated.
I tend to agree that the police ought to have entered the building immediately, once shooting had begun, but I'm not entirely sure that a university-wide lockdown after the first shooting would've been justified by what was known at the time. Of course, that assumes that there were some significant costs to an "abundance of caution". Disruption of classes for a few hours until more was known might not have been too great a cost to bear. But I'm not an administrator of a university with 30,000 students, many of whom were already in transit to and from campus. And the university is embedded in a larger community that includes Christiansburg and Radford University.
Incidentally, for those interested, the chair of the political science department at Radford, Matthew J. Frank, recently participated in an NRO Symposium on the VA Tech Massacre.
Donald,
There's a big difference between the claim that you made in your original post:
and what now appears to be the case, based on your citation:
First, it's not the decision-makers themselves declaring their own decisions to be "beyond critiism". The statement came from someone who is arguably in a position over them (even if not in their chain of command).
Second, nobody in this case has the power to "definitively pronounce" that their decisions are beyond criticism.
Third, it seems perfectly reasonable to ask the media to focus on the ongoing criminal investigation before diving into the procedural criticisms that profit from better information and more time for reflection. (Whether the media or anyone else will listen is another issue.)
Fourth, let me thank you for providing the explicit references that make it possible to check this sort of thing. This is what makes genuine communication and discourse possible, as distinct from various camps simply railing at each other.
Beard, I am grateful for your collegiality.
The day before John Marshall appeared, Mr. Steger did say to the media that his and Finchum's decisions were correct. I have no internet citation at the moment, but I did hear it with my own ears.
Further, my original claim still stands, IMO, that no one could possibly, credibly pronounce what Marshall pronounced yesterday, only 24 hours after the rampage. I still maintain that a lot of CYA-ing was going on and finally, just today, Steger and the school's Board of Visitors seem to recognize it.
I might also point out that I never wrote about "locking down" the campus, as some commenters unwarrantedly seem to tink I did. am well aware that Va. Tech. is a city in itself. Its student enrollment alone is about the size of the entire populaton of Franklin, tenn., where I live, and for sure there is no way that Franklin can be "locked down."
My post makes these two points and none other:
1. as of the posting date-time, the public utterances of Steger and Finchum were self-justifying and responsibility ducking. Speficially, declarations that all their decisions and actions were correct cannot be justified. The governor's appointment of the board of inquiry proves this.
2. that the university's extended population (students, faculty, alums, parents, etc.) can continue to place full faith and confidence is these two key individuals seems, to me, impossible. Of course, that's not my call at the end of the day (even though my nephew graduated from the school last year).
I'm moving on to other posts and issues now. Thanks to everyone for commenting.
The reason they fell for the "jilted boyfriend" idea was .... what, exactly?
The couple had been high school sweethearts. They were still known to be an item. Everyone on the floor must have known or seen the boy with her on numerous occasions. The roommate who mentioned to the police that the boyfriend owned guns knew -- with certainty -- that there was no trouble between them.
The police should have known instantly, when they informed him of his girlfriend's death, that he was probably not the shooter. But they were so wedded to their crackpot "jilted lover" theory -- perhaps prompted by the death of the black RA, who knows? -- that they failed to exercise even basic precautions, such as a campuswide alert.
From the beginning -- within the first hour or two -- the Administration was spinning this as a murder/suicide or a jilted lover story. Why?
Human nature and experience being a bad guide in this case. Most of us, police included, go through our entire lives rarely or never encountering a situation that is so completely insane and unprovoked. We look for answers. Human beings are problem solving animals, we look for patterns. Cops find a young girl and boy shot dead in a dorm room- the mind wants there to be some rational (even if evil) reason for it. Every fiber of us rebels at the idea that such a thing could be random and meaningless, it cheapens our own mortality.
Yes but most of the time it is, indeed, the jealour lover that commits such a crime as the original murders in this case. That is the overwhelming statistical reality. That is what is known to the science of criminal justice and police work.
AL,
We have cellphone video of the Virginia Tech cops taking cover and milling about for five minutes while people were being executed inside the class rooms.
Those five minutes would have saved a lot of lives.
Police agencies won't 'ride to the sound of the guns' until several hundred are killed in a similar situation some time in the future.
It took the wrongful death lawsuit for the teacher who bleed out at Columbine to keep that two hour charlie foxtrot of law enforcement turf wars from happening this time.
Allen: Because the boyfriend was known to shoot guns (which is a statistically rare thing among college students, even in Virginia). Secondly, because other students pointed out the boyfriend. 9 out of 10, (hell, probably 99 out of 100) that's the right lead (or at least in the right general direction). Most murders are commited by someone the victim knowns personally. Alot of this depends on the information cops were given at the scene. Again, this will come out eventually.
Hi -
The following blog http://lilarajiva.wordpress.com is discussing the above and all related issues with a view to informing public of negligence issues. Virginia laws need the suit to be pressed within 6 months.
If you are interested in commenting, contributing expertise on guns, police procedure or have other information, reports, videos of the shooting that would help, please post /visit http://lilarajiva.wordpress.com.
Thanks