Wheeler: Preventing school shootings: Lessons from Oxford and Uvalde

Winston Churchill said that “those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” The horrors of the November 2021 Oxford, Michigan, and May 2022 Uvalde, Texas, school shootings provide a series of lessons about the use of law enforcement in schools. These build on lessons learned from past school shootings and summarized by the Federal Commission on School Safety (FCSS) in its Final Report issued in December 2018. This should be a starting point for legislators and policymakers interested in enhancing school safety, and in particular how they expend the additional federal and state funding devoted to that goal.

Indiana law envisions two scenarios in which schools may place police in schools. First, Indiana Code § 20-26-18.2-2 provides that “[a] school resource officer may be employed … [through] … a contract …[or] a memorandum of understanding between the local law enforcement agency and the school corporation.” Second, under I.C. 20-26-16-2, “[t]he governing body of a school corporation or charter school may establish a school corporation or charter school police department under this chapter.” The Oxford shooting, which involved a sheriff’s deputy employed as a school resource officer under a memorandum of understanding, and the Uvalde shooting, which involved a school police department, provide a window into the pros and cons of each approach.

On Nov. 30, 2021, a student in Oxford, Michigan, opened fire on his classmates, killing four and wounding seven others. The shooting followed a series of red flags to the school, which included “countdowns and threats of bodily harm, including death, on his social media accounts, warning of violent tendencies and murderous ideology prior to actually coming to school with the handgun and ammunition to perpetuate the slaughter,” according to a lawsuit filed by a victim’s family. One day before the shooting, a teacher observed the student searching for ammunition on his cellphone during class and reported this fact to school administrators. Administrators removed the student from the classroom, interviewed him and attempted to contact his parents but failed. According to a complaint filed by the victims, the teachers and administrators “deliberately decided to exclude the school safety liaison officer from notice of such dangers” and sent him home without additional investigation or discipline.

The next day, the student brought his backpack to school containing a journal in which he threatened to murder his classmates and, more consequentially, a 9 mm Sig Sauer SP2022 and 30 rounds of ammunition his parents had given him earlier in the month as an early Christmas present. On the day of the shooting, a teacher found a drawing on the student’s desk that showed a “semiautomatic handgun pointing at the words ‘the thoughts won’t stop help me’” as well as various pictures and threats about killing other individuals.

The student was once again brought to the office, carrying his backpack, where he remained until his parents arrived. Once again, the SRO was excluded from the meeting and was not advised of the threat. After meeting with the parents, who agreed to get the student mental health counseling, the student was released back to his classroom with his backpack. The administrators never looked in the backpack sitting at the student’s feet. Mere minutes later he went to the bathroom, removed his gun and began his killing spree. He was disarmed and arrested by the SRO, an Oakland County sheriff’s deputy, in six minutes. Had the school administrators shared information with the SRO as recommended in Chapters 17 and 18 of the FCSS’s Final Report and convened a threat assessment team as recommended in Chapter 5, this tragedy could have been averted. At a minimum, if the SRO had been involved during the removal and interviews on the day of the shooting, he may have at least looked in the backpack and found the gun, ammo and journal, thus again averting the tragedy.

The Oxford shooting clearly demonstrates both the utility of school-based law enforcement — as many more students or staff would have been killed or injured if not for the timely intervention of the SRO — but also the need to involve the SROs early on if a threat is perceived and to share information, particularly through the convening of a multidisciplinary team that includes not only law enforcement but mental health professionals. This is not limited to shooting situations but also situations in which students express suicidal ideations (as it appears with the student in Oxford) or other mental health crises as discussed in detail in Chapters 3 and 4 of the FCSS Final Report.

While the Oxford case clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of having an SRO on site, the Uvalde, Texas, shooting demonstrates the need for school-based law enforcement (especially in-school police forces) to be trained and equipped in the same manner as other law enforcement officers. The Uvalde case has been highly reported, and while the facts seem to change every day, there can be no dispute that the five-person Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Department was understaffed, poorly trained, poorly equipped and simply not up to the task at hand.

For example, because of the size of the school district, there was no SRO at the school at the time of the incident, the chief of police did not even bring a radio when responding to the shooting, the radios did not work inside the school, and because he was the “chief,” he became the incident commander, which had tragic consequences: “Peter Arredondo, the chief of police for the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, stopped at least 19 officers from breaking into the school as the gunman opened fire for at least an hour. Arredondo believed that the shooter had barricaded himself and that the children were not under an active threat, Steven McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said … . ‘From the benefit of hindsight where I’m sitting now, of course, it was not the right decision. It was a wrong decision. Period. There was no excuse for that,’ McCraw said at a news conference. ‘There were plenty of officers to do what needed to be done, with one exception, is that the incident commander inside believed he needed more equipment and more officers to do a tactical breach at that time.’” (NBC News.)

As Indiana policymakers consider improvements to school safety, they should keep in mind the lessons of past school shootings:

Size matters: When Indiana schools, under I.C. 20-26-16-2, choose to create school police departments, there should be some outside review to determine if the school has the ability to train, fund and especially understand how to properly use its police force to avoid an Oxford situation. Without such a review, a school police department may only provide the illusion of safety as in Uvalde, which demonstrated that small schools simply lack the resources to provide proper training and equipment to avoid a tragedy.

Use existing law enforcement: Schools that do not have the resources to employ, train and equip their own school police departments should use I.C. 20-26-18.2-2 to obtain law enforcement officers from existing law enforcement agencies under MOUs, as described in the Chapter 13 of the FCSS Final Report.

Increase funding: Indiana should use a portion of the increased federal funding and any additional state school safety funding toward training and equipment for schools that operate their own police departments, as well as to fund MOUs with law enforcement agencies.•

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Thomas Wheeler is a member in Frost Brown Todd’s Indianapolis and Washington, D.C., offices. Opinions expressed are those of the author.