Oficer Nathan Shipp responds during an active shooter training exercise at Albertville High School in Albertville, Ala. AP PHOTO: ERIC T. WRIGHT
Juniors and seniors at the university are not as prepared as sophomores and freshmen for active shooter situations, according to the University Police Department.
Officer Jeffrey L. Kellum, the crime prevention coordinator for UPD, sends officers to teach a course about active shooter situations to every freshman EDHE class. The course, however, started in the fall of 2013, so students who took an EDHE class before that time or have never taken one are uninformed about responding to an active shooter situation, according to Kellum.
According to FEMA.gov, an active shooter is someone engaged in violence toward others, including shooting or attempting to shoot at people in a confined or populated area.
FEMA is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The FEMA website offers many courses to the general public that allow those who qualify for enrollment to learn emergency management.
Among these courses is one about what actions to take if involved in an active shooter situation. While taking the online course, a person can learn about an active shooter response system broken down into three simple actions: respond, prepare and follow up. There is even a certification offered to anyone who completes the course and passes the online exam given at the end of it.
In light of recent gun threats at the University of Alabama, Jeff McCutchen, major of patrol operations for the Oxford Police Department (OPD), has advice for Ole Miss students and other Oxford citizens about what would happen during an active shooting and how to handle an active shooter situation on or around campus.
“The first thing is public safety. We take that whether it is a mass shooting or a single shot fired, if it’s actively going on. We deem it in law enforcement as an active shooter incident,” McCutchen said. “If it’s an active shooter incident, no matter where it’s at, that first officer on the scene- they’re going to immediately go and address that threat because if we don’t, obviously people are going to be losing their lives.”
If an active shooter situation arises, every officer is moving according to McCutchen. He said, the first officer on the scene has to act immediately.
According to McCutchen, the FBI recently released a study saying most active shooter incidents last one minute. He also said there are three reasons the violence may be interrupted: either a citizen acted against the shooter, law enforcement arrived and took action or the shooter ran out of ammunition.
Threats are treated with high priority. The FBI would be contacted and a serious investigation would begin, according to McCutchen.
“If we have a threat, we start running data,” McCutchen said.
According to McCutchen, if a certain group were to be the target of a threat on campus, the OPD would talk to that group. They would interview members and start building a database from the information given by that group.
On campus, an active shooting situation would require the combined resources of the OPD and the UPD, McCutchen said. Both operations would merge immediately.
“It becomes one agency at that point. We all try to work together and stop it for the public,” McCutchen said.
Neither McCutchen nor Kellum can comment on the specifics of the actions taken after that point.
Carl Jensen, director of the Center for Intelligence and Security Studies at the university, is a former FBI agent and spent nine years at the Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI Academy on the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia.
“The bottom line is there really isn’t any such thing as a profile of a mass shooter,” Jensen said.
According to Jensen, the Secret Service did a large study a few years ago to collaborate a behavioral profile of who becomes a mass shooter and why. They found out there really are not a lot of predictor variables, Jensen said.
“Some were bullied. Some were bullies. Some suffer from mental illness, as we’ve seen, but many don’t,” Jensen said. “In terms of what’s going through the mind of a particular mass shooter, it’s really hard to say. Many of them feel wronged, but not every single one does.”
According to Jensen, as a result of the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings, the old police tactic of setting up a perimeter and waiting for the SWAT team to arrive proved not to be a good process. In many cases, the police are a lot closer to the scene than they have been historically better, especially when it comes to school and universities, Jensen said.
In terms of trying to analyze a threat, the FBI will look at the way it is worded, the technique in which the threat is made and the likeliness of the operation to be carried out. That is, if the threat is technically or operationally possible and all three parts of the analysis line up, the threat is serious, according to Jensen.
If a student is faced with an active shooter and an officer has not arrived on the scene, McCutchen said the student’s safety is top priority.
“If you can’t obviously diffuse the threat, run, hide, get out of there,” McCutchen said. “Make it to where you’re safe because we’re coming. That’s our job, we’re coming in to do that. Do whatever you have to do to be safe and let us come in and deal with it.”
