‘We Have Dead Kids’
“We have dead kids. Where are the dead cops?”
That question was asked in the aftermath of the Columbine shooting, which was the worst school shooting spree until that last month at Virginia Tech.
Suzanne Mencer, a former FBI agent and now a policy analyst, lived near the high school and was a speaker today at the National Campus Security Summit at the University of Central Oklahoma.
She said the mistakes of Columbine have changed the way law enforcement responds to such events.
SWAT teams no longer wait to enter buildings with a shooter inside. A three-hour delay getting to one Columbine victim led him to bleed to death.
Police now are told to enter the building as soon as possible, risking their own lives to take down a killer.
That didn’t stop the tragedy at Virginia Tech. That shooter locked the doors from the inside, giving him enough time to kill 32 people before police gained entrance and he committed suicide.
Other speakers said a campus can never be 100 percent safe. Public universities are open and easily accessed.
But police do need extensive training — military-style, rifle-toting training, said one expert.
What do you think? Some campus departments are little more than unarmed security guards.
Will the massacre at Virginia Tech be the push needed to put more money into such departments, in the form of more training and more officers?
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