In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings on Monday, colleges and universities across the country have been shocked into reevaluating their security policies and focusing on preventing, or if need be responding to outbreaks of violence.
At Tufts, public safety officers have scheduled a flurry of meetings with various campus, local and state officials, and the administration has pledged to take a look at the plans the university has in place to deal with emergencies.
On Tuesday, University President Lawrence Bacow sent an e-mail to the community promising that administrators will "review our own emergency management and response procedures at Tufts."
Specifically, Bacow pointed to the addition of a campus-wide siren system that could alert members of the community to dangerous situations as one possible way to improve campus security.
Director of Public and Environmental Safety John King, one of the administrators charged with looking into installation of a siren system, said that his department is currently in a research phase. "We're in the process of collecting information from vendors and we'll be looking at the schools that may use [sirens] already to see what their [experience] has been and how they utilize these systems," he told the Daily.
The other department tasked with exploring the project is Facilities. Director of Medford Facilities Ron Esposito said that it is necessary to coordinate any proposed installation with other Tufts campuses and between buildings on each campus. "So it's not a trivial thing to do," he told the Daily, but "it should be done and it will be done if [President Bacow] wants it done."
Most of the other future actions are being decided in a series of meetings. Earlier this week, King and representatives from other colleges in the region met with Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis.
Today, King will meet with representatives from the Medford and Somerville police departments to discuss policies and "reflect on what has occurred at Virginia Tech and ask ourselves how we might respond in a critical situation."
But even before the shootings, public safety officers on campus had been trained about how to respond to emergency situations, including shootings.
While Bacow has promised a review of protocols in the wake of the shootings, King said that such evaluations occur regularly. "We have a number of crisis management teams here at Tufts [that] from time to time ... review general procedures and policies that relate to emergency preparedness," he said.
In past years, Tufts has hosted a variety of seminars and meetings focused on preparing police officers and dispatchers on campus. Medford and Somerville officers have also been invited to some of the training sessions.
Some of these meetings consist of "tabletop exercises," during which an "all hazards approach" is often used, meaning that instead of focusing on specifics incidents, officers "look at some of the commonalities in emergency preparedness," King said.
But officers have also been trained to respond to specific incidents, including the presence of a gunman on campus.
During one prior training session, a model city was built. "The training is to actually set up a model city ... and then to go through sort of a real-time scenario ... and challenge the responding officers and dispatch personnel to manage the incident from the initial call to the final conclusion of the event," he said.
More recently, all uniformed officers were trained in "an active shooter program" this past summer and fall, he said.
If a gunman were to come to campus, Bacow and King pointed to several possible response mechanisms.
In his e-mail to the community, Bacow said that voicemail, e-mail, the Internet and campus-wide video monitors would be used to alert students.
King mentioned similar options, noting that "we would certainly do our best to get as much info out to the community [as] we can" in the event of an emergency.
Although police dispatchers do not have the ability to make a university-wide broadcast because many of these communications have to be cleared by the administration, he said that the methods currently in place are "quite timely."
Beyond this notification, he said that officers are also trained to neutralize the gunman. "Theoretically you bring the situation to a safe conclusion or the officers are trained to ... quickly try to identify where the shooter is and stop the threat," he said. If need be, this means shooting the gunman.
Despite this prior training, other new initiatives may be on the way. King will continue to discuss new policies, as will Bacow, who has been discussing protocols with presidents of other universities. "We seek to learn from the experience of others," he told the Daily in an e-mail. "To put it another way, we will not hesitate to adopt best practices wherever we can find them."
But Bacow, who said he is very confident in the ability of public safety officers on campus to respond to any emergency, drew a distinction between the efforts that can be taken to respond to emergencies and those that can prevent them. "Try as we might, we cannot prevent every emergency or tragedy from occurring. No one can," he said.
King agreed. "It's obvious that the police department in and of itself cannot control the behavior of others," he said.
Bridging the gap between response and prevention on campus is the Counseling and Mental Health Service office. While mental health professionals help people cope with tragedies (see sidebar), they can also work to prevent them.
Evidence has emerged following the Virginia Tech shootings that gunman Cho Seung-Hui had displayed signs of mental instability that caught the attention of his teachers well before the shootings.
At Tufts, if teachers are concerned about a student, that student may be called in to meet with a dean, Director of Mental Health Services Julie Ross said. These deans, as well as faculty members, are trained "how to recognize students in distress, how to respond to them [and] how to refer them to counseling," she said.
If a dean is concerned about a student after a meeting, then the student has to undergo an evaluation by Ross' office. Following the evaluation, if the student is deemed to pose a threat, hospitalization and forced medical leaves are both options.
Ross estimated that only a few times every year are students put on forced medical leave.
Although she has not been in contact with King's office since the Virginia Tech shootings, she said that the two offices have worked together in the past and that she expects that they will coordinate efforts surrounding emergency prevention and response in the near future.
But Ross agreed with King and Bacow that only so much can be done in the way of prevention. "There's a limit realistically as to what can be prevented in life," she said.
