MAISIE STRADER
Special to The Leader
Photo by Daniel Reche | Provided by Pexels
School shootings have had a major impact not only nationally but globally.
So, what does this mean for small town Fredonia? What precautions are in place to protect college students from these events?
After the threat last semester involving students in Thompson Hall, campus safety has been on many members of the campus communities minds.
Luckily, there was no violent physical action taken during the incident by the individual who proposed the threat. However, the individual’s threats caused fear across campus. As a result, there have been speculations on what the police would have done if there was a real threat.
Freshman student Julia Klement said, “We have no plan in case of an active shooter [situation], like what happens if someone walks into our buildings? All we can do is lock our doors and hope for the best.”
University Police Chief Brent Isaacson was happy to meet and discuss the measures his team takes to ensure the safety of the campus community.
“I think a good way to think about it is first the physical safety of the students. Our priority is making sure that everybody is physically safe. Certainly close to that [and in relation is] are we providing students with a feeling of safety and security?” Isaacson said. “When you are here, it’s your home.”
When asked what he’s most worried about concerning crime on campus, Isaacson said, “the violent crime problem on this campus is like what we see across the country, and that tends to be sexual violence and dating violence [from partners or someone the victim knows] — that would qualify as a violent crime. We don’t see physical assaults or stranger sexual assaults or a stranger unknown to the victim is, for example, coming onto the campus and physically sexually assaulting students.”
So, what safety measures do University Police have in place? How can they know what’s going on, what to expect and how to stop it?
“We have an incredible suite of security cameras in every single lobby in every single residence hall,” Isaacson said. “We have security cameras that come right into our dispatch center here. They may not be monitored full-time, but they are recorded full-time. So, if we get a call that something has happened, one of the first things we do here at UPD is pull the video footage that covers the timeframe in question.”
Isaacson continued to explain how useful security camera footage can be to a campus crime.
“We’ve had incredible success with identifying people that have either broken student conduct rules or broken criminal laws — both inside and outside the dorms. With that security camera system, it’s very robust,” Isaacson said. “The residence halls themselves, there’s a live human being there making sure that people that are coming in there belong — that they are either residents or they are the guests of residents.”
Kimberly Wilk, a freshman Chautauqua Hall resident said, “I would say I’m most worried about what would happen if an absolute stranger got into the building, and if it was a dangerous situation.”
Regarding the information on Fredonia’s safety information located on the school’s website, there are tons of safety resources, such as police on site, the blue light system, text alerts, a well-lit campus, many cameras, an under two minute average UPD response time and even two patrol officers on call 24/7.
In addition to these safety resources the campus community can utilize, Isaacson also said that UPD officers participate in training.
“I’ll use the term of art in law enforcement tactical training,” Isaacson said. “We frequently train our officers on how to respond to an armed intruder call [or] an active shooting call … Since I’ve been here, I’ve been really leveraging my past work as an FBI agent, as a SWAT agent, teaching them tactical skills that I learned as an FBI agent, but then also bringing in my colleagues in [from] the FBI to teach what we call close quarter battle tactics.”
In addition to using FBI strategies, Isaacson also said that he uses a tabletop exercise, in which his team outlines an event and they act as if it is real.
Isaacson spoke about how the campus community can take safety into their own hands. Isaacson offered advice as to what warning signs community members should look for in someone who is likely to go on to offend.
“I did a lot of work in threat assessments and what we call threat mitigation,” Isaacson said. “In my seminar, you would’ve learned that people who offend behave [prior] in [identifiable] ways that are concerning to people around them.”
Isaacson encourages students to call, text or email the local school support system if you notice a person or friend is acting out of the ordinary. He spoke about common characteristics and themes he sees in violent offenders.
“From a psychological standpoint, [offenders] are what we call grievance collectors,” Isaaacson said. “They’re very easily grieved. We all have those bumps in the road where, you know we got embarrassed or we got bullied or teased, a romantic partner dumped us, got a bad grade, got yelled at or whatever it is. Those kinds of [experiences] for most people, they can make you mad. But we have, most people have the ability to self-soothe.”
Isaacson added, “You might be mad for an hour or a day [about something], but are not going to be mad for a month or a year. Well, what the research has shown is that people who carry out these attacks, they hold on to grievances and they incubate them. They go back and revisit them. They can tell you with precision exactly what happened. We almost always find witnesses and bystanders who saw concerning behaviors and didn’t report them.”
Even with all these safety precautions and protections for students, there isn’t any way for officials to know when a violent offender will strike. Both Chief Isaacson and Jack Croxton, chair of Fredonia’s Psychology Department, believe that students can help identify possible warning signs by utilizing social media.
When asked about the psychological mindset in someone who might go on to perpetrate, Croxton said, “I mean obviously there’s been a lot of debate over what has happened in schools and what could have been done to stop it. And sometimes, I think that people are rationalizing, maybe there were warning signs that somebody was about to do something. I guess my feeling is when in doubt, say something. [Especially] if somebody is doing something that seems a little bit weird or somebody puts something out on social media.”
One question remains, what is the root cause of violent offenders’ aggressive feelings?
“I don’t think people are born to go [on to offend]. I think something went wrong in their lives. It just seems to me that people aren’t just born with that kind of a tendency,” Croxton said. “On the other hand, this is where it’s tough because I think sometimes people will often say what was wrong with their parents, for them to end up that way. And I think sometimes it’s not all on the parents. Sometimes kids just get involved with the wrong group or the parents don’t realize what the kids are doing on social media.”
Croxton added, “If they had known what was going on, maybe they would’ve done something. So I think there’s always a tendency to want to blame somebody. I think sometimes the parents are an easy target. On the other hand, I think certainly there are some parents that aren’t very good caregivers or don’t set good examples for their kids. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s complicated. It could be home life, it could be peers, it could be mental illness. Clearly, there’s so many reasons that I think can precipitate that kind of behavior.”
Although there has been an increase in shootings nationally, Isaacson wants to assure the campus community that UPD is here to protect them.
“It is extremely rare for anybody to get murdered on a school campus,” Isaacson said. “Statistically you could pick any campus around the United States and if you had a big ball or a big jar of marbles with the name of each school in the country you could pull one of those and say I just happened to pull out SUNY Fredonia. You would [probably] have to wait on that campus for 6,000 years before any murder happened of any kind, let alone an active shooting.”