Measures and procedures designed to prevent school shootings impeded police in Uvalde

The Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District has a 21-point security plan that ordered school doors locked at all times and required students to practice lockdown drills "on a regular basis," in the event of a mass shooting, reporter Insider.

But during the school shooting on May 24 that left 19 children and 2 teachers dead, many of the measures and procedures designed to prevent bloodshed may have hampered police's response as officers took over an hour to confront the shooter while students inside the classrooms begged for help.

Interviews given by the school's embattled police chief and a teacher who survived the massacre reveal how the precautions against mass shootings were turned against police.

Locked doors kept police from entering the classroom where the shooter was barricaded 

The gunman entered classrooms 111 and 112 and opened fire at about 11:33 a.m. He locked the doors to the adjoining rooms, leaving himself inside — alongside his victims — for over an hour before police eventually entered and shot him dead.

School district police chief Pete Arredondo — who has faced criticism amid accusations he delayed the tactical response to the shooting — told the Texas Tribune in an interview published on Thursday that UCISD officers don't carry master keys to school classrooms.

He said officers had to wait for school staff to provide multiple rings of keys to try to open the door.

"I was praying one of them was going to open up the door each time I tried a key," Arredondo told the Tribune.

It took more than an hour for Arredondo to receive a key that finally opened the door, the Tribune reported.

As they were waiting for keys for approximately 78 minutes, Arredondo said officers on the scene worked to evacuate over 500 other students and teachers from the building to lead them to safety. 

"It's not that someone said stand down," Arredondo's lawyer, George E. Hyde, told the Tribune. "It was 'Right now, we can't get in until we get the tools. So we're going to do what we can do to save lives.' And what was that? It was to evacuate the students and the parents and the teachers out of the rooms."

Reinforced classroom doors made it impossible for police officers to break in without a key 

Aside from locks, reinforcements on the doors also prevented police from getting through to the classrooms.

Arredondo told the Tribune that classroom doors at Robb Elementary are "reinforced with a hefty steel jamb, designed to keep an attacker on the outside from forcing their way in."

But that same measure made it impossible for Arredondo and other officers who entered the school to kick in the door and enter without a key, he said.  

Additionally, experts told the Tribune that breaking through windows to get into the classroom would have caused more casualties.

Turned-off lights kept cops from seeing into the classrooms

The Standard Response Protocol, a shooting safety guide used by the Uvalde school district, recommends teachers and students turn off classroom lights to prevent a shooter from seeing students and teachers hiding inside.

The Tribune reported that the lights were off in classrooms during the Robb Elementary shooting.

Arredondo told the Tribune that because the lights were off, cops had little visibility inside the classrooms, making it difficult to pinpoint the shooter's exact location. 

It also made it more difficult to assess whether the teachers and students inside were alive, the Tribune reported. 

One Robb Elementary teacher said active shooting training set his students up 'like ducks' for the shooter

Robb Elementary teacher Arnulfo Reyes, whose 11 fourth-grade students were all killed in the May 24 shooting, told "Good Morning America" that active shooting training protocol set the children up "like ducks" during the shooting.

Reyes said his students were watching a movie in class following an end-of-year celebration when they heard gunshots.

He told "Good Morning America" that he told the students to hide under a table and pretend to be asleep. The gunman then came into the classroom and opened fire, shooting Reyes twice and killing the students.

"We trained our kids to sit under the table, and that's what I thought at the time. But we set them up to be like ducks," he said, adding that he "tried his best" and tearfully apologized to the families of his students.

Gov. Abbott wants more active shooter training in schools

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has called to deploy "nationally recognized active shooter training to all Texas school districts, prioritizing school-based law enforcement," in the weeks since the shooting. He said training on these protocols should begin before the 2022-2023 school year. 

Abbott said that more training "will help law enforcement on school campuses better respond to these situations."

But the governor's office did not respond to multiple requests for comment asking if the training would be updated since police and Reyes have said the training contributed to making the shooting worse.

Reyes told "Good Morning America" that he believes training won't help.

"It all happened too fast. Training, no training, all kinds of training — nothing gets you ready for this," Reyes told "Good Morning America" in an interview that aired Tuesday. "You can give us all the training you want, but laws have to change."

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An evidence-based profile of mass killers is out there, why isn't anyone listening

Each time a high-profile mass shooting happens in America, a grieving and incredulous nation scrambles for answers. Who was this criminal and how could he (usually) have committed such a horrendous and inhumane act? A few details emerge about the individual’s troubled life and then everyone moves on.

Three years ago, Jillian Peterson, an associate professor of criminology at Hamline University, and James Densley, a professor of criminal justice at Metro State University, decided to take a different approach, according to POLITICO. In their view, the failure to gain a more meaningful and evidence-based understanding of why mass shooters do what they do seemed a lost opportunity to stop the next one from happening. Funded by the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Department of Justice, their research constructed a database of every mass shooter since 1966 who shot and killed four or more people in a public place, and every shooting incident at schools, workplaces and places of worship since 1999.

Peterson and Densley also compiled detailed life histories on 180 shooters, speaking to their spouses, parents, siblings, childhood friends, work colleagues and teachers. As for the gunmen themselves, most don’t survive their carnage, but five who did talked to Peterson and Densely from prison, where they were serving life sentences. The researchers also found several people who planned a mass shooting but changed their mind.

Their findings, also published in the 2021 book, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic, reveal striking commonalities among the perpetrators of mass shootings and suggest a data-backed, mental health-based approach could identify and address the next mass shooter before he pulls the trigger — if only politicians are willing to actually engage in finding and funding targeted solutions. POLITICO talked to Peterson and Densely from their offices in St. Paul, Minn., about how our national understanding about mass shooters has to evolve, why using terms like “monster” is counterproductive, and why political talking points about mental health need to be followed up with concrete action.

POLITICO: Since you both spend much of your time studying mass shootings, I wonder if you had the same stunned and horrified reaction as the rest of us to the Uvalde elementary school shooting. Or were you somehow expecting this?

Jillian Peterson: On some level, we were waiting because mass shootings are socially contagious and when one really big one happens and gets a lot of media attention, we tend to see others follow. But this one was particularly gutting. I have three elementary school kids, one of which is in 4th grade.

James Densley: I’m also a parent of two boys, a 5-year-old and a 12-year-old. My 12-year-old knows what I do for a living and he’s looking to me for reassurance and I didn’t have the words for him. How do I say, “This happened at a school, but now it’s OK for you to go to your school and live your life.” It’s heartbreaking.

POLITICO: Are you saying there’s a link between the Buffalo and Uvalde shootings?

Peterson: We don’t know for sure at this point, but our research would say that it’s likely. You had an 18-year-old commit a horrific mass shooting. His name is everywhere and we all spend days talking about “replacement theory.” That shooter was able to get our attention. So, if you have another 18-year-old who is on the edge and watching everything, that could be enough to embolden him to follow. We have seen this happen before.

Densley: Mass shooters study other mass shooters. They often find a way of relating to them, like, “There are other people out there who feel like me.”

POLITICO: Can you take us through the profile of mass shooters that emerged from your research?

Peterson: There’s this really consistent pathway. Early childhood trauma seems to be the foundation, whether violence in the home, sexual assault, parental suicides, extreme bullying. Then you see the build toward hopelessness, despair, isolation, self-loathing, oftentimes rejection from peers. That turns into a really identifiable crisis point where they’re acting differently. Sometimes they have previous suicide attempts.

What’s different from traditional suicide is that the self-hate turns against a group. They start asking themselves, “Whose fault is this?” Is it a racial group or women or a religious group, or is it my classmates? The hate turns outward. There’s also this quest for fame and notoriety.

POLITICO: You’ve written about how mass shootings are always acts of violent suicide. Do people realize this is what’s happening in mass shootings?

Peterson: I don’t think most people realize that these are suicides, in addition to homicides. Mass shooters design these to be their final acts. When you realize this, it completely flips the idea that someone with a gun on the scene is going to deter this. If anything, that’s an incentive for these individuals. They are going in to be killed.

It’s hard to focus on the suicide because these are horrific homicides. But it’s a critical piece because we know so much from the suicide prevention world that can translate here.

POLITICO: I’ve heard many references over the last few weeks to “monsters” and “pure evil.” You’ve said this kind of language actually makes things worse. Why? 

Densley: If we explain this problem as pure evil or other labels like terrorist attack or hate crime, we feel better because it makes it seem like we’ve found the motive and solved the puzzle. But we haven’t solved anything. We’ve just explained the problem away. What this really problematic terminology does is prevent us from recognizing that mass shooters are us. This is hard for people to relate to because these individuals have done horrific, monstrous things. But three days earlier, that school shooter was somebody’s son, grandson, neighbor, colleague or classmate. We have to recognize them as the troubled human being earlier if we want to intervene before they become the monster.

Peterson: The Buffalo shooter told his teacher that he was going to commit a murder-suicide after he graduated. People aren’t used to thinking that this kind of thing could be real because the people who do mass shootings are evil, psychopathic monsters and this is a kid in my class. There’s a disconnect.

POLITICO: Do you get criticism about being too sympathetic toward mass shooters?

Peterson: We’re not trying to create excuses or say they shouldn’t be held responsible. This is really about, what is the pathway to violence for these people, where does this come from? Only then can we start building data-driven solutions that work. If we’re unwilling to understand the pathway, we’re never going to solve this.

POLITICO: So, what are the solutions?

Densley: There are things we can do right now as individuals, like safe storage of firearms or something as simple as checking in with your kid.

Peterson: Then we really need resources at institutions like schools. We need to build teams to investigate when kids are in crisis and then link those kids to mental health services. The problem is that in a lot of places, those services are not there. There’s no community mental health and no school-based mental health. Schools are the ideal setting because it doesn’t require a parent to take you there. A lot of perpetrators are from families where the parents are not particularly proactive about mental health appointments.

POLITICO: In your book, you say that in an ideal world, 500,000 psychologists would be employed in schools around the country. If you assume a modest salary of $70,000 a year, that amounts to over $35 billion in funding. Are you seeing any national or state-level political momentum for even a sliver of these kind of mental health resources?

Densley: Every time these tragedies happen, you always ask yourself, “Is this the one that’s going to finally move the needle?” The Republican narrative is that we’re not going to touch guns because this is all about mental health. Well then, we need to ask the follow-up question of what’s the plan to fix that mental health problem. Nobody’s saying, “Let’s fund this, let’s do it, we’ll get the votes.” That’s the political piece that’s missing here.

POLITICO: Are Democrats talking about mental health?

Densley: Too often in politics it becomes an either-or proposition. Gun control or mental health. Our research says that none of these solutions is perfect on its own. We have to do multiple things at one time and put them together as a comprehensive package. People have to be comfortable with complexity and that’s not always easy.

Peterson: Post-Columbine there’s been this real focus on hardening schools — metal detectors, armed officers, teaching our kids to run and hide. The shift I’m starting to see, at least here in Minnesota, is that people are realizing hardening doesn’t work. Over 90 percent of the time, school shooters target their own school. These are insiders, not outsiders. We just had a bill in Minnesota that recognized public safety as training people in suicide prevention and funding counselors. I hope we keep moving in that direction.

Densley: In Uvalde, there was an army of good guys with guns in the parking lot. The hard approach doesn’t seem to be getting the job done.

POLITICO: Do you support red flag laws?

Peterson: Our research certainly supports them, because so many perpetrators are actively showing warning signs. They are talking about doing this and telling people they’re suicidal. But what Buffalo showed us is that just because you have a red flag law on the books doesn’t mean people are trained in how it works and how they should be implementing it.

POLITICO: What has to change to make the laws more effective?

Densley: There are two pieces. One is training and awareness. People need to know that the law exists, how it works and who has a duty to report an individual. The second piece is the practical component of law enforcement. What is the mechanism to safely remove those firearms? Especially if you have a small law enforcement presence, maybe one or two officers, and you’re asking them to go into somebody’s rural home and take care of their entire arsenal of weapons.

POLITICO: What should have happened in Buffalo, given that the state of New York has a red flag law?

Peterson: From what we know, it sounds like there should have been more education with the police, the mental health facility and the school. If any one of those three had initiated the red flag process, it should have prevented the shooter from making the purchase.

It really shows the limitations of our current systems. Law enforcement investigated, but the shooter had no guns at that moment, so it was not an immediate threat. The mental health facility concluded it was not an immediate crisis, so he goes back to school. If it’s not a red-hot situation in that moment, nobody can do anything. It was none of these people’s jobs to make sure that he got connected with somebody in the community who could help him long term.

Densley: Also, something happens to put people on the radar. Even if they’re not the next shooter, something’s not right. How can we help these individuals reintegrate in a way that’s going to try and turn their lives around? That gets lost if we fixate just on the word “threat.”

POLITICO: I was struck by a detail in your book about one of the perpetrators you investigated. Minutes before he opened fire, you report that he called a behavior health facility. Is there always some form of reaching out or communication of intent before it happens?

Peterson: You don’t see it as often with older shooters who often go into their workplaces. But for young shooters, it’s almost every case. We have to view this “leakage” as a cry for help. If you’re saying, “I want to shoot the school tomorrow,” you are also saying, “I don’t care if I live or die.” You’re also saying, “I’m completely hopeless,” and you’re putting it out there for people to see because part of you wants to be stopped.

We have to listen because pushing people out intensifies their grievance and makes them angrier. The Parkland shooter had just been expelled from school and then came back. This is not a problem we can punish our way out of.

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Schweit: The Officers in Uvalde Did Not Follow Their Training

Katherine Schweit, Former FBI special agent writes in The New York Times:

After watching the tragedy at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, unfold after so many other shootings in recent weeks, I’m wondering what I might have missed when I was asked to start the F.B.I.’s active shooter program 10 years ago. Did I have my team focus on the wrong problems? Did I spend my budget wisely to find ways to save lives?

Every shooting is evaluated in three parts: How could we have prevented the shooting? Did we respond effectively to save lives? How are we helping the community recover? Last Monday, the F.B.I. designated 61 shootings in 2021 as active shooter attacks, up from 40 in 2020 and 30 in 2019. We aren’t preventing the shootings, I realized. Perhaps, I thought, we were doing better in responding to the attacks as they unfolded.

But if the 78 minutes that the police in Uvalde waited before confronting the gunman at Robb Elementary are any indication, the answer is: We aren’t. Waiting so long, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety said Friday, “was the wrong decision. Period.”

So why did the police leadership make that call?

In the first few years after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, the F.B.I. spent more than $30 million to send agents to police departments around the country. The goal was to train local officers how to handle active shooters so they would know how to go after a shooter with confidence and neutralize the threat.

The day after the F.B.I. released its latest active shooter figures, Robb Elementary School was attacked. In the past two years, the Uvalde school district has hosted at least two active shooter trainings, according to reporting by The Times. One of them was two months ago. Current protocol and best practices say officers must persistently pursue efforts to neutralize a shooter when a shooting is underway. This is true even if only one officer is present. This is without question the right approach.

We need to understand why that protocol was not followed in Uvalde. I am still confident the F.B.I.’s focus on training to this standard was right, but I’m less confident in its execution. The officers who responded may have been unprepared for conflict, which can lead to fatal results. Law enforcement officers need to be mentally prepared before they arrive on the scene, so they can respond immediately.

Repetitive training builds practice and confidence. Big gatherings for training every few years are more expensive and less effective for muscle memory. Instead, departments should consider more virtual tabletop exercises they can run through in an afternoon. Have officers walk through schools and talk with one another about how they would respond. Require officers to check all their gear before they begin a shift.

Last year, active shooters killed 103 people and injured 140 others in 30 states. Five of those attacks were in Texas. Most of our more than 800,000 law enforcement officers in the United States are in small departments. This is not the first time a law enforcement agency has failed in the way it responded. At times, training can become routine and be taken less seriously in any environment, but agencies should be careful to avoid complacency. Are they undertaking the training to check a box? Police department leaders need to tell their officers today what is expected of them and to understand that Americans demand it.

We also need to re-evaluate how we advise students and teachers to react when an active shooter enters a school. After Sandy Hook the federal government adopted the run, hide, fight model, which instructs students and teachers to run first if they can, then hide if they must and, finally, fight to survive.

Today schools, at best, are giving lip service to the first part of that mantra, to run. Most schools that train for a shooting urge students, teachers and other staff members to lock out or hide from a shooter but almost never to run for their lives if they can. My friend Frank DeAngelis, a retired principal of Columbine High School in Colorado, told me he wished his students and faculty had been taught to flee. At Sandy Hook, nine first graders survived when they were able to flee their classroom, thanks to their brave teacher Victoria Leigh Soto, who was shot and killed when she stood in front of the killer.

I still have nightmares about details from school shootings in which survivors told me they huddled under their desks, hoping against logic that the shooter would not see them. It’s hard to shed the images of victims’ bodies found huddled under plastic tables, behind cloth partitions or together in a group against a wall.

I remember telling my children that if someone approached them in a car while they were walking, they should run as fast and as far as possible. Yet in many school settings we have mistakenly discouraged students from trying their best to simply stay alive.

Now my youngest child is a teacher whose middle school classroom is near the end of a hall with a side door to the outside. The classrooms are filled with desks. She knows that killers who strike schools will take advantage of opportunities to find more victims. I share my daughter’s experience not to invite criticism of the actions of educators responding to lethal situations but to underscore how vital proper training is to the survival of teachers and their students.

We’re told the best way to learn is from the mistakes we make. According to data from the F.B.I., in recent years the average number of casualties per active shooter attack has declined even as the number of attacks has increased. I think this reflects better policing and improved public awareness.

Still, police will not likely be there in the critical first minutes of an attack on a school. In the aftermath of the wrenching tragedy in Uvalde, it’s clear that, nearly 10 years after Sandy Hook, we must ask ourselves if the training designed to safeguard us against killers in our schools is the training that is working.

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GateHouse: Criminal justice reform big winner on election day

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

November 9, 2018

Setting aside the bluster of soon-to-be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Donald Trump, the big winner on election night was criminal justice reform. Ballot initiatives focused on softening the impact of crime and punishment were successful in blue states and red states.

In Florida, voters approved Amendment 4, a measure that restores voting rights for people who have completed their sentences after being convicted of a felony, excluding those convicted of murder or certain sex offenses.

According to Vox, the Sentencing Project, a non-profit advocacy group, estimated that nearly 1.5 million people in Florida could not vote in the midterm elections because of a conviction — about 9.2 percent of the state’s voting age population.

Could those potential voters have had an impact on the very competitive Governor and U.S. Senate races in Florida?

Marijuana advocates scored a number of substantial ballot victories including Michigan, which became the 10th state in the nation to approve recreational use of marijuana.

“Michigan will be the first state in the Midwest to end marijuana prohibition and replace it with a system in which marijuana is regulated for adult use,” Marijuana Policy Project deputy director Matthew Schweich, told the Washington Post.

With the addition of Michigan, nearly 80 million Americans — 25 percent of the total U.S. population — live in a state or jurisdiction that has legalized recreational marijuana. Medical marijuana was also approved by voters in Missouri and Utah.

Not all news was good for marijuana advocates. North Dakota voters overwhelmingly rejected an initiative that would have legalized marijuana without setting any possession limits or regulatory structure.

In Ohio, voters rejected an initiative that would have lessened the severity of some drug offenses.

Ohio prosecutors, judges, coroners and even Gov. John Kasich urged a “no” vote on the proposal, which would have reduced certain drug possession charges to misdemeanors. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, the measure failed by a margin of nearly two-to-one.

An initiative in Washington will make it less difficult for prosecutors to pursue police officers who unlawfully use deadly force. Approval of Initiative 940 means that prosecutors will no longer have to prove law enforcement officers acted with “evil intent” or “malice” when considering whether to file criminal charges such as manslaughter. According to the Seattle Times, Washington was the only state with such restrictive language.

Abraham Lincoln once said “The ballot is stronger than the bullet.” Colorado wasn’t on Lincoln’s mind when he said that, but on election day — more than 150 years after the ratification of the 13th Amendment — Colorado voters officially abolished slavery.

Colorado is one of more than a dozen states whose Constitutions allow involuntary servitude as a form of criminal punishment. Colorado will no longer permit prisoners to do slave labor, reported The Associated Press.

A constitutional amendment to end non-unanimous jury verdicts in Louisiana was approved by the state’s voters. Louisiana and Oregon were the only states that permitted a less than unanimous verdict in a criminal trial.

The less-than-unanimous verdict was rooted in the state’s ardent racism that intensified after the Civil War and during the Jim Crow era.

The amendment was pushed through the Louisiana Legislature with strong support from groups that rarely collaborate. On the right, supporters included the Christian conservative, Louisiana Family Forum, and the Koch Brother’s political organization, Americans for Prosperity. On the left, supporters included the American Civil Liberties Union and Innocence Project New Orleans.

Voters in Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Nevada, North Carolina and Oklahoma approved a ballot measure known as Marsy’s Law — the so-called crime victim’s bill of rights.

Marsy’s Law aims to ensure that victims and their family members are informed about all criminal proceedings, present and heard, and protected from the accused.

Finally, in the wake of the GOP’s election day loss of the House — a notable casualty surfaced in the criminal justice system — President Trump asked his embattled Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign. He agreed, and so begins a new chapter in the tumultuous investigation of Russia, the president, the White House and the president’s advisors.

— Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.

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Balko: Here is proof of racism in the criminal justice system

Radley Balko of the Washington Post writes:

Systemic racism means  . . .  we have systems and institutions that produce racially disparate outcomes, regardless of the intentions of the people who work within them. When you consider that much of the criminal-justice system was built, honed and firmly established during the Jim Crow era — an era almost everyone, conservatives included, will concede rife with racism — this is pretty intuitive. The modern criminal-justice system helped preserve racial order — it kept black people in their place. For much of the early 20th century, in some parts of the country, that was its primary function. That it might retain some of those proclivities today shouldn’t be all that surprising.

His column provides literally 100's of links to research that supports the premise that the criminal justice system is tainted with racism.
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Texas arms hundreds of teachers and staff

There are scores of other gun-toting teachers and school officials in Texas who are known as “guardians.” At least 227 school districts, more than 20 percent of the state’s 1,031 districts, had authorized the guardian program by mid-August, compared to 170 districts in February, according to the Stateline.

Training programs surged this summer after a gunman killed eight students and two teachers in May at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas. About two-dozen states have considered similar programs in the wake of the Santa Fe massacre and last February’s shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 students and staff members.

“There’s a need out there,” says Bessent of the Wylie Independent School District, who, unlike other marshals, has been publicly identified so he can promote the program. “A school marshal’s responsibility is to isolate, distract and neutralize the threat. If they’re shooting at the school marshal, they’re not shooting at the kids and teachers.”

Craig Bessent, assistant superintendent of the Wylie Independent School District in Abilene, Texas, became part of the Texas School Marshal program in its inaugural class in 2014. Bessent — who has logged more than 500 hours of training and also served a marshal instructor — is a fervent public ambassador for the effectiveness of the school protection program.The Pew Charitable Trusts

Some Texas districts have posted signs on school buildings designed to deter would-be intruders. In the North Texas town of Peaster, for example, signs warn that “the staff at Peaster ISD is armed and may use whatever force necessary to protect our students.”

But the “Don’t Mess with Texas” style of defense remains controversial. Of all the states mulling such legislation this year, only Florida approved it.

President Donald Trump endorsed the idea, but a well-organized coalition that included educators, law enforcement groups, parents and vocal Parkland students pushed back in a state-by-state counterattack.

“We just absolutely do not agree with gun lobbyists that turning janitors and librarians into sharpshooters is effective,” said Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a nationwide nonprofit that helped block bills in 16 of 17 states. Other bills are pending in at least a half-dozen other states.

After Alabama legislators rejected a bill that would have armed teachers and school administrators, Republican Gov. Kay Ivey created the “Alabama Sentry Program” to arm administrators on campuses. Democratic lawmakers denounced her action.

The issue also flared in California after several school districts began using an exemption in the state’s Gun-Free School Zone Act to authorize gun-licensed personnel to carry concealed firearms in schools. A bill signed by Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown in October closed the exemption and halted the practice.

The Florida law, while putting in place some gun control measures, created a $67 million marshal program that allows superintendents and sheriffs to arm designated school personnel, though not full-time classroom teachers.

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"Good guy with a guy' rare and at times not good

The FBI examined 160 shootings between 2000 and 2013 and found that most of the violence ended when the assailant stopped shooting, committed suicide or fled, reported the Washington Post. Unarmed citizens successfully restrained shooters in 21 of those incidents, according to the FBI. Two attacks stopped when off-duty officers shot and killed the attackers. Five ended in much the way the attack at Louie’s did — when armed civilians, mostly security guards, exchanged fire with the shooters.

In the prominent recent examples, civilians have, as in Oklahoma City, successfully intervened in mass shootings. In November, Stephen Willeford, a former NRA instructor, shot a gunman who killed more than two dozen people inside a Sutherland Springs, Tex., church, hitting the attacker twice. The shooter fled and later shot himself in the head while under chase. And in June, a pastor and volunteer firefighter who had been through active-shooter training killed a carjacker who opened fire inside a Walmart store in Tumwater, Wash. In Oklahoma City two men shot and killed an active shooter outside a restaurant. 

But interventions by “Good Samaritans” also have ended in tragedy.

In 2014, husband-and-wife attackers killed two Las Vegas police officersbefore going into a nearby Walmart and firing a shot in the air. Joseph Wilcox, 31, a civilian with a handgun and a concealed-carry permit, pulled his weapon to confront the male shooter, but the man’s wife shot Wilcox in the chest, killing him.

When Prince George’s County police detective Jacai Colson responded to a 2016 attack on a police station in his street clothes, another officer mistook him for a threat and shot him.

“The shot that struck and killed Detective Colson was deliberately aimed at him by another police officer,” the police chief said.

Ronal Serpas, former police chief in New Orleans and Nashville who lived near Tumwater when he was chief of the Washington State Patrol, said such situations raise life-or-death concerns for police officers.

“How is the officer going to discern who is the Good Samaritan and who is not?” Serpas said. “They don’t have placards on the front of their shirts that say ‘I’m the good guy’ or ‘I’m the bad guy.’ ”

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School district hires firm to gather intelligence about potential threats

After school shootings around the nation where officials missed warning signs, Orange County Schools has hired a firm to scan students' social media posts for danger signals, reported the Durham Herald Sun.

The district is paying a little over $10,000 a year to the Vermont-based Social Sentinel firm to use software to search for keywords pointing to threats of violence, suicide and other self-harm, and bullying 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The software searches Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Meetup, Periscope and other public sites. It does not look at private sites.

When it flags a word or phrase, it notifies Sherita Cobb, the school system's director of Student Support Services, to evaluate whether it is a true threat or a false alarm. Cobb told the school board Monday night she is working to have at least one Orange County sheriff’s deputy alerted as well.

Social Sentinel claims to search for thousands of keywords, including "kill,” “die” and “bomb."

Cobb said when she gets an alarm, she looks at posts before and after the post in question to help decide whether it is a threat.

Superintendent Todd Wirt said Orange County is one of two school districts in the state using Social Sentinel.

Privacy concerns

Numerous firms offer to scan social media, but Social Sentinel is unique in focusing on schools.

That concerns some who question whether the company's work invades students' privacy.

“I think anytime we’re expanding school officials’ ability to monitor student activity outside of school I think that should give students and parents pause,” said Mike Meno, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina.

Meno said the Orange County Schools’ including the Sheriff’s Office concerns him as well. “North Carolina has some real ongoing problems with the school-to-prison pipleline, referring students from schools to the legal system," he said. "We know from data that those tools are often used disproportionately against students of color, increasing the school-to-prison pipeline.”

But the school board's attorney, Jonathan Bloomberg, supports the move and calls it brave.

“We’re in a new frontier,” he said, “but I certainly support the ‘rather know it and deal with it’ approach than sort of stick your head in the sand.”

DPS spokesman Chip Sudderth said district leaders in Durham have begun talking about using such a service.

"We've had some initial conversations," Sudderth said. "We're evaluating the cost effectiveness and the effectiveness of those kinds of programs.

He said whether such monitoring of students' social media violates their privacy is also part of the conversation.

"Those services track information that is released on the public internet, so we are not only evaluating the cost effectiveness and effectiveness of such services, but also issues related to student privacy," Sudderth said.

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Gun carnage in America is here every day, every where

Large-scale, high-profile shootings such as the horrific one that just happened in Las Vegas represent just a tiny fraction of the daily drumbeat of gun violence in the United States, reports the Washington Post. 

This year close to 12,000 people have been killed in gun violence incidents, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit organization that tracks shootings via media and police reports.

That works out to around 42 victims of gun violence per day, a figure which does not include suicides.

Sunday alone there were at least 24 fatal shooting incidents in the United States, including the Las Vegas shooting, according to the Gun Violence Archive. That number doesn't include suicides (which account for more than half of all gun shot deaths), and it doesn't include shootings in which individuals were injured but not killed (75,000). It does include fatal shootings involving police officers (737), which are often determined to be justified after the fact.

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Oklahoma death row inmate dead, it is not what you think

This week, a man who was on death row for more than 32 years after being convicted in the 1983 strangulation death of a county jail inmate's life ended in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester where so many of his fellow death row inmates were executed.

DOC public information officer Alex Gerszewski told the Tulsa World that Sammy Van Woudenberg, 65, died on March 5 of natural causes. That's right, natural causes, he wasn't executed although he sat on death row for 32 years.

Van Woudenberg was convicted of first-degree murder in the 1983 death of Mark Berry, who was 25 when he was strangled in the Muskogee County Jail in Oklahoma.

A roster of current death row inmates maintained by the DOC appears to indicate Van Woudenberg, at 32 years and 56 days, had been on death row the longest at the time he died.

Gerszewski said prison staff discovered he was dead while delivering his evening meal to his cell at the .

Tulsa World archives indicate Van Woudenberg had been found incompetent to be executed in 1994, and that he had been sent at that time to a unit for prisoners with special needs to receive psychiatric care. A judge said his death sentence could be carried out if his mental health improved, according to court documents.
So as it turns out, was Wouderberg's sentence really a life sentence--he spent his entire life after the crime in prison?  Was it a death sentence because he died in prison--like a lot of death row inmates or is every life sentence actually a death sentence because the lifer will--like death row inmates--ultimately die in prison?

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PLW:Errors in DNA Testing Occur Regularly

Matthew T. Mangino
The Pennsylvania Law Weekly
September 8, 2015
Kareem Johnson was on Pennsylvania's death row as the result of a 2007 Philadelphia murder conviction. When Johnson allegedly killed Walter Smith, prosecutors suggested that he shot him at such close range that Smith's blood splashed onto Johnson's red Air Jordan baseball cap, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.
In fact, assistant district attorney Michael Barry told jurors, "That hat that was left at the scene in the middle of the street has Kareem Johnson's sweat on it and has Walter Smith's blood on it. ... DNA is a witness. It is a silent, unflappable witness."
According to the Inquirer, prosecutors now concede that they misinterpreted the DNA. The blood was found on a black baseball cap that belonged to Smith—not on Johnson's red hat.
Organizations like The Innocence Project have touted the nearly infallible application of DNA in cases that have exonerated the innocent. The Innocence Project's website lists 330 DNA exonerations over the past 14 years. The website tells the stories of people like Joseph Abbitt, who spent 14 years in a North Carolina prison before DNA exonerated him; and Anthony Capozzi, who spent 20 years in prison in New York; and Paula Gray, who spent 24 years in an Illinois prison.
There are also cases in which DNA was successfully attacked at trial. The O.J. Simpson trial brought DNA collection and analysis into America's living rooms.
Attorney Barry Scheck, who later co-founded The Innocence Project, was one of Simpson's attorneys focusing on the DNA evidence. He told the Los Angeles Times on the 20th anniversary of the trial, "It was a watershed case, but not in ways that people suspect. We did not challenge the underlying reliability of DNA testing methods; we attacked the way that evidence was gathered and processed. We had a 21st century technology and 19th century evidence-collection methods."
In Italy, American student Amanda Knox, along with her boyfriend, was convicted—based in part on incriminating DNA evidence—of killing her roommate, Meredith Kercher. Her body was found in a student house that she shared with Knox. She had been repeatedly stabbed and slashed.
After the first trial, Knox was sentenced to 26 years in prison and her boyfriend to 25. In 2011, their convictions were overturned.
Knox then returned to the United States, but an Italian appellate court overturned the acquittal and upheld the guilty verdicts. Knox was then sentenced in absentia to 28 years in prison.
DNA collection and analysis played a prominent role in Knox's conviction and appeal. That collection and analysis had come under scrutiny.
"There are some worrying features in this particular case, maybe because the individuals live in the apartment and their DNA will be everywhere. That's the issue in this case. There's no dispute that they were in the apartment, but for legitimate reasons," professor Peter Gill, a lecturer of forensic genetics at Oslo University in Norway, told the Daily Mail. "The evidence is weak. What I'm saying is there are possibilities of transfers, of contamination, which has to be seriously considered."
On March 27, seven-and-a-half years after their arrest, Italy's highest court exonerated Knox and her boyfriend.
There are, and have always been, problems with DNA analysis. There are occasions when a crime scene has an enormous amount of evidence to analyze for DNA markers. For instance, when an offender commits a burglary by breaking through a window and in the process cuts himself and subsequently bleeds throughout the structure.
Even small samples are reliable—a strand of hair, a mouth swab or a semen sample. They are the sorts of high-template-number DNA samples that have been effectively used in successful prosecutions and exonerations. In these cases, there's plenty of material to test, normally only one person's DNA and for the most part the testing procedures are standard. As a result, reliable, definitive results are expected and provided.
More often than not there is very little DNA at a crime scene, if any at all.
Trace DNA samples are defined as any sample that falls below recommended thresholds at any stage of the analysis, from sample detection all the way through profile identifications. According to McClatchy DC, trace DNA is saddled with complications, creating confusion in and out of courtrooms and prompting a new realization that "forensic science can't always lead to clear-cut results."
Also of concern is the use of touch DNA—a very insignificant amount of residue DNA that's left on an object. The sample can be as small as a few human cells, according to McClatchy. This DNA can be replicated and tested, but a conclusive match can be difficult, if not impossible.
Working with small or contaminated samples can result in false positives or just erroneous analysis, resulting in incorrect outcomes.
"DNA tests are not now and have never been infallible. Errors in DNA testing occur regularly. DNA evidence has caused false incriminations and false convictions, and will continue to do so," William C. Thompson wrote for the Council of Responsible Genetics.
Thompson wrote, "When DNA evidence was first introduced, a number of experts testified that false positives are impossible in forensic DNA testing. Whether such claims are sinister or not, they are misleading, because humans are necessarily involved in conducting DNA tests."
At least two of the first 200 people exonerated by post-conviction DNA testing were convicted, in part, due to DNA testing errors. Thompson concluded in both cases a combination of technical problems in the laboratory and careless or mistaken interpretation of the test results produced inaccurate DNA matches.
Prosecutors, defense attorneys and the courts are trying to get a handle on how to properly present, defend and admit certain types of DNA evidence.
"This is something we are trying to figure out ourselves," Paul Cates, communications director for The Innocence Project, told McClatchy. "We realize that there's a lot of discussion about [low-template-number DNA] in the scientific community and we are doing our own research to figure out where we are on this."
The zeal to prosecute, or defend, has led to the use of DNA evidence that may not be as reliable as originally thought and is certainly not infallible, as some may have suggested in the past. 
Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George. His book, "The Executioner's Toll, 2010," was released by McFarland & Co. Contact him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.

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'Active Shooter' incidents not on the rise-contrary to public opinion

As defined by the federal government, an active shooter "is an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area, typically through the use of firearms." Even though they may wish to kill large numbers of victims, these assailants typically fall short of their objective.
Among the 110 active shooter cases identified since 2000, nearly three-quarters resulted in fewer than four fatalities, which is the usual threshold for mass murder, wrote James Alan Fox, the Lipman Professor of Criminology, Law and Public Policy at Northeastern University, in the USA Today.
Moreover, nearly one-quarter of the active shooter cases were resolved without any victims losing their lives. While all of these episodes were undoubtedly frightening to those impacted directly or indirectly, the majority should not be equated with the few catastrophic slayings that have grabbed the headlines and alarmed the nation.
Besides the confusion surrounding terminology, evidence suggesting an increase in active shooters is suspect, at best. The data used by the FBI and others focusing on active shooter incidents derive in large part from newspaper sources. That the term "active shooter" is of recent vintage tends to bias any attempt to examine trends based on searching news coverage.
In sharp contrast to the "active shooter panic" is that mass shootings, instances in which four or more are killed by gunfire, are not on the rise. Over the past three-plus decades, according to official homicide data reported annually by law enforcement agencies nationwide, there have been on average about 20 mass shootings a year, with neither an upward or downward trajectory. The only increase has been in publicity and dread.
Fox concludes, "The reason why the rampant misimpression about a raging epidemic in active shooters matters so greatly is in how it drives public opinion and public policy on guns, mental health and security. Excessive alarm, fueled by misleading news reports, leads to knee-jerk responses that are not necessarily for the best."
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