FIRST OF TWO PARTS
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With school shootings rising across the nation, the chief of the U.S. Secret Service center that is trying to stop targeted attacks on schools has a message for Hawaii: The Aloha State is not immune. Such violence can happen here.
That’s why Lina Alathari, chief of the National Threat Assessment Center, stressed that prevention efforts are crucial, and that a strategy called behavior intervention/threat assessment recently has proven effective in stopping scores of potential violent events in schools across the nation.
But while more Hawaii schools and institutions finally are joining the threat-assessment movement and getting trained, critics say efforts so far are uneven, hindered by years of denial that the easygoing islands, home of the aloha spirit, could be visited by the specter of mass violence.
Alathari said there’s no time to waste. Her voice catches slightly when she recalls what some grieving survivors of the 17 students and adults killed in the 2018 Parkland, Fla., massacre have told her: “We never thought it could happen in our community, until it did happen in our community.”
Mass shootings in the U.S. are at historic high levels, and school shootings resulting in injury and/or death — 27 so far this year — are on pace to set an annual record. There have been 399 mass shootings in the U.S. so far this year documented by the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive. They include the May attack in Uvalde, Texas, where an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School — the deadliest school shooting in a decade.
“With every new headline, people in Hawaii are wondering, when is it going to be us? We do have protective factors here, but we’re definitely not immune to this,” said Erica Yamauchi, a Honolulu mother of two young children in public schooling, and the co-lead for the Hawaii chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. The local nonprofit group used to have a few dozen members, but since the Uvalde school shooting, 500 more have signed up.
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The Hawaii Department of Education over the summer break undertook an unprecedented effort to train almost 900 school employees in violence prevention, but is lagging in other areas, such as drills and inspections.
Some of the University of Hawaii’s 10 campuses are further ahead than others in prevention strategies. One UH-West Oahu official is leading a pilot project developing national-standard threat-assessment teams at five community college and K-12 campuses.
Meanwhile, the Honolulu Police Department and other law enforcement agencies around the islands recently have stepped up training for their staff on how to respond if such an attack occurs.
THE WARNING SIGNS
Alathari, who was brought to Hawaii last week to help train more than 100 leaders of Hawaii public and private K-12 and college campuses, said Secret Service research has found that many shootings at schools could have been prevented if threat- assessment systems had been in place to promptly identify and treat students who show potential for harmful acts.
She said the public needs to understand that that perpetrators almost always exhibit warning signs, but the problem is that people around them often notice but don’t report them.
“We see these behavioral patterns over and over again,” she said, such as “interest in violence and Columbine (the 1999 mass shooting in Colorado), significant stressors leading up to their attack (such as bullying), communicating about their intention to carry out attacks to others, engaging in objectively concerning behavior, fascination with weapons, fascination with mass attacks … posting online about them.”
Half of school shootings of all types are committed by current or former students, and the largest group, about one-third of them, are motivated by a dispute or grievance, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office study. Accidental shootings were second-most common, followed closely by school-targeted shootings.
Targeted school violence is preventable when people intervene, Alathari maintained. Her center lays out an eight-step model for schools that is widely considered the gold standard. It includes building a “multidisciplinary threat-assessment team” of teachers, counselors, administrators, psychologists and others; defining the behaviors that trigger investigation and intervention; and setting procedures for reporting concerns and involving law enforcement.
Hawaii is in the middle of the pack among the states in starting up threat- assessment systems. On the leading edge are more than a half-dozen states, including Virginia, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, that have mandated threat- assessment initiatives through legislation, while “there are some other states that don’t have anything,” Alathari said. Hawaii as a whole “is being very proactive,” especially in the past three years, she added.
POLICE TRAINING
Even though Hawaii has had only one mass shooting, the so-called Xerox shooting in 1999, the Honolulu Police Department also is ramping up training and preparations in case of an active-shooter situation, in response to the growing incidents on the mainland.
HPD recently began training officers to integrate the department’s response to an active-shooter situation with other city, state and federal first responders, department spokesperson Michelle Yu said.
That is on top of the Advance Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training developed by Texas State University, also known as ALERRT, which HPD has been training officers in for 10 years, Yu said.
“ALERRT provides active- shooter response techniques for active-shooter situations in places such as schools, workplaces, malls and theaters. It stresses the importance of direct intervention to ‘stop the killing and stop the dying,’” Yu said.
The department has a mobile training team that provides supplemental training for patrol officers, she said. HPD also is part of Threat Team Hawaii, a joint initiative with the FBI and Hawaii State Fusion Center that works to identify, assess and manage situations where the risk of violence is imminent or anticipated, Yu said.
HPD provides active- shooter presentations for schools, hospitals, businesses, community organizations and other groups. The presentations “cover what to do if confronted by an active shooter, a history of active-shooter events, civilian response options, and training drills and exercises,” Yu said. The free presentations can be requested at 808ne.ws/hpdrequest.
The Maui Police Department has stepped up patrols near schools and recently sent out a news release saying that “in light of recent events across the nation, the Maui Police Department wants to assure the community that one of the department’s top priorities is ensuring our schools are safe. The department has emergency plans and procedures in place to prevent and respond to an emergency event. The community can expect increased uniformed patrols in all school district areas throughout the county and School Resource Officers on campus at their designated schools.”
Still, violence prevention — which is different from active-shooter response training — remains a key best practice, said Beverly Baligad, director of compliance and chair of the behavior intervention team at UH-West Oahu.
Yamauchi, of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, joined Baligad and Alathari in hoping that the DOE will implement well-trained threat- assessment teams at schools statewide to prevent school violence. Improved awareness of the importance of secure gun storage, and of Hawaii’s relatively new “extreme risk” law that enables a court to take away guns at least temporarily from someone who poses a risk of harm, should also be high priorities, Yamauchi said.
Baligad — who is leading the threat-assessment pilot project at Leeward, Maui and Kauai community colleges, the public Kapolei Middle School and the private Island Pacific Academy — said Kapolei’s team this past spring helped bring about a terroristic- threatening arrest of a person who demonstrated potential for a violent attack and had access to guns.
She said growing pockets of community leaders are learning how to build well-trained threat-assessment teams with set policies and processes, but it takes time, and takes helping people understand that prevention is the way to keep violence from occurring in the first place.
“I think a lot of people misunderstand, and mistake active-shooter training with behavior intervention. If they did active-shooter training, they’ll say, ‘Oh, we’re completely prepared,’ ” Baligad said. “But the question has to be, what preventative measures did you take so that an active shooter doesn’t happen? That’s a distinction people have to make very, very clear.”
REPORT SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY
If there is an immediate emergency, call your local police department or 911.
If you witness someone saying or doing something that suggests they may harm themselves or others in the future, call police, or speak promptly with an appropriate authority — a school principal, or a work supervisor, for instance. Don’t stay silent. “Public safety and security is everyone’s responsibility,” says the U.S. Department of Homeland Security website.
The Hawaii State Fusion Center focuses mainly on stopping counterterrorism and cybersecurity. To report suspicious activity, go to hawaiifusioncenter.org or email hsfc@hawaii.gov. Describe what you observed, including who or what you saw; date, time and location; and why it’s suspicious. Include contact information so that officials can follow up.
