Oregon Campus Shooting Highlights Need for Security

Police respond to a campus shooting in Oregon two weeks ago that has spotlighted what BU and other universities do to avert or prepare for such tragedies. Photo by Morgan Boyer via Fresco News

Parts of this story first appeared on January 21, 2011.

Chris Harper-Mercer’s rampage at an Oregon community college that left nine dead and another nine injured earlier this month has become an all-too-familiar occurrence. Among the 67 campus shooting incidents in the United States between 1992 and 2012, 16 were at colleges and universities, according to the Massachusetts State Police, and the Oregon tragedy was one of 143 school shootings since 2012. Just last Friday, a Northern Arizona University freshman shot a fellow student dead and wounded three others.

Before Harper-Mercer’s killing spree, he’d been an ominous internet denizen, the New York Times reported. He blogged about his sympathy for the man who shot two former colleagues during a live newscast in Virginia in August, listed “killing zombies” and the internet as his hobbies on a dating site, and posed with a rifle on MySpace, where he also reported his interest in the Irish Republican Army and posted footage from the Northern Ireland war, the newspaper said.

Boston University has recently added an online tool to make it more likely that worrisome online rants like Harper-Mercer’s are flagged by security.

Last January, the Boston University Police Department began using software to monitor nine popular social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, Picasa, and Yik Yak, Detective Lieutenant Peter DiDomenica said. “The program tracks social media posts that have the location services function enabled, thereby showing the physical location of the device used to publish the post.”

The program can search for key words bespeaking violence, according to Peter Fiedler (COM’77), BU’s vice president for administrative services. The program erects a virtual “geofence” around that location, allowing police to monitor, in real time, all posts made from there, “based on the type of social media, key words, and users,” DiDomenica said. The software can search for key words in multiple languages and translates foreign-language posts into English.

The software the BUPD is using doesn’t care whether the people it’s monitoring are affiliates of the University or not, he said, but tracks “anything posted in the area of BU by anybody.”

Harper-Mercer committed suicide after a gun battle with police. Fiedler said that the rapid law enforcement response in Oregon underscored the importance of the BUPD’s drills, periodically done together with Boston and Brookline Police, to rehearse possible shooting scenarios (coincidentally, officers were drilling with their Brookline counterparts when the Oregon tragedy occurred).

“We also need our community to step up and report unusual behaviors and/or report people that are of concern, based on what they’re saying, writing, or doing,” Fiedler said. Along those lines, BU Environmental Health & Safety has offered a Blackboard course on Managing Emergencies since last year. Available to students, faculty, and staff, the course has what-to-do information for various hypothetical emergencies, including two active shooter training videos, one in an office setting and the other at Boston Medical Center, said Stephen Morash, BU’s emergency response planning director, who would like to see the BU community take the full class and then the brief quiz at the end.

Harper-Mercer attended the college where he staged the assault, and in fact, 80 percent of the gunmen in the school shootings tallied by the Massachusetts State Police were current or former students at the schools they targeted. After an expelled student shot six people to death at a Tucson community college four years ago—a man who, like Harper-Mercer, had exhibited recurrently bizarre behavior—BU Today spoke with the University team charged with identifying and trying to help troubled students here. (The team doesn’t handle faculty and staff cases; people with concerns about coworkers should call the BUPD or the Faculty & Staff Assistance office.)

The team, comprising police, legal, student affairs, and mental health officials, explained what the University can (and occasionally cannot) do to address these cases, given federal privacy law (FERPA) and the complexities of discerning mental illness.

Team members urged the BU community to report worrisome behavior in students or staff to the multiple, go-to sources who can help—a professor, BU’s Behavioral Medicine staff, the Dean of Students office, or the BUPD. Students and staff can go to the Student Health Services website for advice on identifying people in distress and the BU resources available to them. Erika Geetter, vice president and general counsel for the University, said in 2011 that privacy law doesn’t prohibit people from reporting concerns about a student or staffer to authorities within BU.

Kenneth Elmore, BU dean of students, said that while the group does not meet often, individual members touch base whenever one becomes aware of a student who might need help and possibly require the full team’s consideration.

“There’s a low threshold for us,” Elmore (SED’87) said. “The minute I even think that there could be a threat, I’m going to get some more eyes and ears—‘Hey, Erika, take a look at this,’ or ‘Tom [Robbins, BU chief of police], take a look at this.’ Then we together ask, ‘Should we convene the team to look at this?’”

Among the team’s options is the online threat assessment tool called MOSAIC. The University occasionally has run individuals through MOSAIC, where “we interview the individual,” Robbins said, “we interview associates, classmates, professors, a spectrum of people.” The subject’s profile is fed into a computer, which estimates the likelihood of such a person becoming violent.

The BUPD also relies on old-fashioned, in-person observation. “There have been times,” Robbins said, “that we have sent a detective or an officer to speak with a student, just to put that person on notice that you’re on the police radar, and your actions, although not criminal at this time, spurred us to gather this information.” (One threat assessment expert told the New York Times that a such meeting might goad a student into treatment.) In other, rare instances, said Robbins, detectives have sat in on a class to observe a student.

Whether BU shares any concerns about individuals off campus (with, say, mental health or law enforcement professionals in the home town of a student who has been suspended) involves additional considerations. Typically, a school cannot communicate about a student’s education records without his or her consent. “But there’s this extremely important health and safety emergency exception,” said Geetter. “If you believe there is a threat to the student or others, you can inform people outside the institution without the student’s consent.”

The BUPD makes that decision, and Robbins said there have been instances, involving students or staff who have been dismissed from the University, in which the department has tipped off local law enforcement. Elmore emphasized that such divulgences aren’t made merely because of “a bad vibe,” but are based on observable behavior.

Yet no system for detecting and treating troubled students is perfect. “We cannot ever force somebody to get mental health treatment,” Geetter said, but the University can make treatment a condition for a student’s continued enrollment at BU. “We try to get the individual to understand that it would be in their best interest to get some help. Our initial attempt would be to have them take a medical leave of absence voluntarily.

“If they will not do it voluntarily, we have to have a reason for feeling that they pose a danger to themselves or to the community,” she said. “Then we would place them on leave of absence for medical reasons.” A leave is not permanent. “But if an event hasn’t happened that would occasion expulsion, we would not simply, because of health issues, expel them.”