By Christine Spolar | KFF Health News
PITTSBURGH — A false alarm that a gunman was roaming one Catholic high school and then another in March 2023 touched off frightening evacuations and a robust police response in the city. It also prompted the diocese to rethink what constitutes a model learning environment.
Months after hundreds of students were met by SWAT teams, the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh began forming its own armed police force.
Wendell Hissrich, a former safety director for the city and career FBI unit chief, was hired that year to form a department to safeguard 39 Catholic schools as well as dozens of churches in the region. Hissrich has since added 15 officers and four supervisors, including many formerly retired officers and state troopers, who now oversee school campuses fitted with Stop the Bleed kits, cameras, and defibrillators.
When religious leaders first asked for advice after what are known as “swatting” incidents, the veteran lawman said he didn’t hesitate to deliver blunt advice: “You need to put armed officers in the schools.”
But he added that the officers had to view schools as a special assignment: “I want them to be role models. I want them to be good fits within the school. I’m looking for someone to know how to deal with kids and with parents — and, most importantly, knows how to de-escalate a situation.”
Gun violence is a leading cause of death for young people in America, and the possibility of shootings has influenced costly decision-making in school systems as administrators juggle fear, duty, and dizzying statistics in efforts to keep schools safe from gun harm. In the first week of September, the risks were made tragically clear again, this time in Georgia, as a teenager stands accused of shooting his way through his high school and killing two students and two teachers.
Still, scant research supports the creation of school police forces to deter gun violence — and what data exists can raise as many questions as answers. Data shows over half of U.S. firearm deaths are, in fact, suicides — a sobering statistic from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that reflects a range of ills. Gun violence grew during the covid-19 pandemic and studies found that Black children were 100 times as likely as white children to experience firearm assaults. Research on racial bias in policing overall in the U.S. as well as studies on biased school discipline have prompted calls for caution. And an oft-cited U.S. Secret Service review of 67 thwarted plots at schools supports reasons to examine parental responsibility as well as police intervention as effective ways to stop firearm harm.
The Secret Service threat assessment, published in 2021, analyzed plots from 2006 to 2018 and found students who planned school violence had guns readily at home. It also found that school districts that contracted sworn law officers, who work as full- or part-time school resource officers, had some advantage. The officers proved pivotal in about a third of the …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
