Conference looks at campus threats

Authorities can lock down a kindergarten classroom, a middle school or a prison. But officials say it’s not really possible to lock down a sprawling college campus.

“We’re designed to allow free movement, free thought,“ Michael Young, director of public safety at Washington and Lee University, told his counterparts from across the state during a conference yesterday on campus safety.

The 2008 Governor’s Campus Preparedness Conference brought about 500 people to Virginia Commonwealth University for a day of discussions that spanned issues from terminology to threat assessment.

It was the second year for the conference, which last year focused on security in the aftermath of the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech. Yesterday’s conference took an “all-hazards approach” to also include threats ranging from a natural disaster to a flu pandemic, said Robert P. Crouch, assistant to the governor for commonwealth preparedness.

At one session participants got an overview of new state and federal legislation on campus safety.

The federal Higher Education Act, for example, requires schools to report hate crimes, including larceny and vandalism.

Virginia legislation requires schools to set up threat-assessment teams and adopt crisis and emergency-response plans that must be reviewed and revised every four years.

By January, they must have a first-warning system in place. The conference included vendors selling the latest in communication technology for such systems.

But Robert Dillard, chief of police for the University of Richmond, cautioned against the false sense of security that instant-notification systems offer.

Campus officials still must confirm what’s going on, he pointed out. Not long after the Tech tragedy, a report of shots fired on campus turned out to be “offensive linemen throwing cherry bombs at each other.“

The alerts, he said, have the potential to cause “absolute, total panic and fear.“

At UR, one student remained hidden for more than four hours after a May incident because she was out of cell-phone range and did not receive an all-clear message.

UR has taken a number of steps because of that incident, caused by an intruder with a pellet gun and a fake beard.

The school has installed locks on classrooms and labs so that students and staff can seek “secure shelter”—the term they prefer over “lockdown.“

Peepholes are being installed in doors because people who have locked themselves in aren’t going to open a door for someone claiming to be police, Dillard said.

Michael F. Lynch, chief of police at George Mason University, said he was troubled by the “blame-storming” that followed the Tech tragedy.

Well-intentioned panels and studies make recommendations on how to identify the next shooter, he said.

They also imply the shootings in Norris Hall, where 30 people were killed, could have been prevented if Tech had been locked down after an earlier shooting in a dormitory.

“Virginia Tech cannot be locked down,“ he said.

“I call it impossible.“