Predictable: The Fragmented Media Will Give Us All Our Post-Oregon-Shooting Outrage Blankets

from the two-minutes-hate dept

As you no doubt have heard by now, and as we already tangentially discussed earlier, there has been yet another mass shooting in America. This time, it came to Oregon, where a single gunmen made his way into a community college and managed to murder nine innocent people, injure others, before his own life was extinguished, either by his own hand or by those of law enforcement. And, as we wake up the next morning, anyone with any interest in civil society and culture grapples with the story. President Obama remarked that these stories have become routine, seeming to suggest that everyone has become numb to these events, accepting them as part of the American life. He's wrong about that. Desperately and importantly wrong. Instead, the truth is that the public is the opposite of numb. The public is angry. Unfortunately, because of the way that a fragmented and ideologically aligned media landscape has emerged in the past two decades or so, we all end up angry about different things, with our outrage stoked and guided in avenues that put us at odds with those that have had their outrage stoked and guided in entirely different avenues.

Predicting these avenues is trivially easy. A cursory glance at the story of a mass shooting and the media reaction to it provides everything required to act as a Nostradamus for the outrage outlets we will see. Over the next few days, we'll hear stories about the gunmen being from a broken family, with traditional family breakdown serving as a punching bag for remorse. Some outlets will discuss the shooter's video game hobby. Or his interest in horror movies and novels. Some outlets will focus on his access to guns, while others will focus on his reported targeting of Christians and religion. Still others will scream "false flag!", sadly undermining the very real lives lost and lives shattered through injury and terror. Too many of us, a majority of us, will ingest the news of the shooting in the medium and outlets of our choice, chosen specifically because that medium and outlet feeds us the meal we want the way we want it. Cable news started this, of course, planting flags of partisanship in a realm once at least thought to be dominated by facts. Spin-masters will work their magic, taking dead bodies and boldly morphing them into causes and outrage. Meanwhile, the shooter gets exactly what these shooters want: fame. Rather than employing the seriously genius "some asshole initiative" by refusing to name these shooters or focus on them in any way, we'll do the opposite and turn on the spotlights. We will be distracted.

Put another way: we will retreat. Retreat away from the horror of death and into the comforting arms of the outrage that lets us feel like it all means something else to us. Here's what you'll see. A discussion about guns will arise before quickly falling away and nothing will happen. A conversation about 4chan, and other internet sites, and whether or not more needs to be done to police the internet looking for potential killers will be sparked, but nothing will happen. Some will lament the decline and/or targeting of religion in America, wondering aloud, stupidly, if too much religion or not enough of it is responsible for the killings, but nothing will happen. Violent media, be it games, movies, or novels will be trotted out as sacrificial lambs for our anger, but nothing will happen. From the fringe will be another crowd, bleating that none of this actually happened and that it's all fake news and actors playing out a game of gun-snatching that never seems to actually materialize, because nothing ever happens.

Why? Because we retreat to fragmented media and mediums that focus our outrage onto the target of our choice. Facts matter little if at all, as one can tell by the speed with which reports and reporters begin funneling our outrage. This is a problem, one started by mass media and continued, unfortunately, on the internet. There's nothing wrong with choice, of course, when it comes to us choosing our media outlets. The problem as I see it is when the choices become fragmented by political or ideological lines. The fact that we can name a media outlet and guess with an unfortunate amount of accuracy exactly what spin will be put on the reporting of a mass shooting is a problem. The answer to that problem is, as usual, the dropping of ideology, of political dogma, of the retreat. So, as you read the news about this reporting in the coming weeks, notice the rush to find factors of blame and reject them.

The news is that this was a tragedy. The sad news isn't just that we're not going to do anything about it, but rather that we're not going to do anything about it even though we all have a cause in it.

Filed Under: culture, echo chambers, fragmented media, journalism, media, media bubbles, school shootings, shooting

Middle School Principal Suspended Over Unannounced School Shooter Drill

from the not-enough dept

Listen up, everyone, because I think this is important and I'm very serious about this. The Florida middle school we recently discussed that conducted an unannounced active school shooter drill with armed police bursting into darkened classrooms full of terrified students and teachers has taken action. That action has been suspending the school's principal pending an investigation to be conducted by the school district.

"I very much regret that this occurred," Superintendent of Schools Kathryn LeRoy said Tuesday evening during a School Board meeting. LeRoy said Jewett Principal Jacquelyn Moore was suspended Tuesday pending an internal investigation. In the past, the School District has not informed students, parents or staff members in advance about lockdown drills. But LeRoy specified some new rules for the future.

Let me be clear: this isn't enough. The issue of irrational overreaction to an exaggerated fear of school shootings runs far deeper than one principal, and her suspension should not be allowed to assuage the outrage and anger this story has generated. This cannot become a sweep-it-under-the-rug story. None of this has occurred in a vaccum, after all. We've seen examples of these kinds of insane drills in the past and we've recently covered stories about potential massive amounts of money going into systems designed for school shooting situations. And, damn it, I cannot repeat this enough: school shootings are incredibly rare, they are not increasing in frequency, and the average child is safer in their school than they are in most other places on Earth. In the face of the actual reality regarding school shootings and our reactions to them, a principal's suspension is not enough. It must only be the start. Because if it isn't, here's what you'll get from people like the aforementioned school Superintendent LeRoy.

From now on, she said, officers will not carry weapons during such practice; administrators should send a message to parents at the beginning of the drill and let students know a drill is taking place; and staff members should be on hand at the school entrance and answering phones to let callers know the lockdown is just a drill.

What the hell is the matter with you people? I realize that for a politician or government official, or even someone in law enforcement, standing in front of a public whose fear has been stoked by a sensationalist and lazy mass media, telling them all to calm the hell down because they're getting worried over nothing isn't the popular thing to do. It isn't the politically expediant thing to do. But it would be the right thing to do. When that happens, you'll know things are actually getting better, and not before.

Filed Under: drills, school shootings, schools

Selling Fear: The First US School Installs A Shooting Detection System

from the fear-itself dept

If there is one thing that really irritates me more than anything else, it's when people use fear as a sales tactic. This gives me many opportunities to be pissed off, since fear is commonly used to sell stuff, with varying degrees of depravity: fear to sell warranties, fear to sell wars, fear to sell surveillance on the public, fear to sell political ideology. But using the fear parents have for their children in the wake of tragic school shootings, particularly doing so while outright lying about statistics to scare the hell out of parents even more, just might be the worst of them all. And that brings us to the news that a Massachusetts school has become the first in America to implement a DARPA developed "shooter detection system."

Authorities fired tester blanks Tuesday in the Methuen, Mass. school, which authorities did not name for security reasons, to demonstrate the Guardian Active Shooter Detection System, which alerts police of gunfire within one second, according to Reuters. Police officers and Democratic congresswoman Niki Tsongas attended the demonstration, but students were not present, as schools were closed for Veteran’s Day.

The technology, which boasts “near zero false alerts,” was developed by Massachusetts-based Shooter Detection Systems, in partnership with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a U.S. government’s military technology development arm. The company also worked with a major defense contractor that has deployed thousands of similar gunshot detection systems to war zones.

Congratulations, America. A defense contractor tried to sell you on the idea that our schools are war zones and you bit like a musky on a minnow. The manufacturer's website, along with most of the accompanying news articles, are filled with statistics all about how school and mass shootings are on the rise. Obviously this serves as evidence that such shooter detection systems are needed. That way, the $100k per school systems can alert authorities when these increasingly common shootings occur. The most common figure you'll hear from these contractors and in the news is the same one authorities used in buying this detection system: there have been 88 school shootings in America since the Sandy Hook tragedy in 2012. The claim comes from Everytown.org, an organization dedicated to gun control and safety. And if that statistic sounds shocking to you, there's a very good reason for that: it's complete bullshit.

Politifact summarizes this nonsense nicely:

The main reason for the criticism of Everytown’s count is that its definition of "school shooting" is relatively broad. The group’s criteria goes beyond what many people would consider "school shootings" -- incidents in which a student or an intruder enters a school and fires at innocent students and staff. For many people, this is the first thing that comes to mind when they hear the phrase "school shooting" -- an incident such as Sandy Hook or, before it, the 1999 Columbine shooting in Colorado that left 15 dead, including the shooters.

[Everytown.org's] definition allows for incidents that don’t typically call to mind the term "school shooting" -- for example, a case in which a man unaffiliated with Alogna High/Middle School in Iowa killed himself in the school’s parking lot in the middle of the night, or an early-morning armed robbery on a street that goes through the Marquette University campus in Wisconsin. Both count in Everytown’s tally.

They then tally up the incidents using the common sense school shooting criteria: 10 instances of what we'd actually call school shootings, 39 incidents that were common criminal activity (such as robbery, etc.), 16 cases that occurred outside of school hours by people not affiliated in any way with the school, 6 suicides, and 3 accidental discharges. So, 10 school shootings, as we commonly refer to them, over the past two years. Look, that's 10 too many, of course, and every instance of gun-related death at a school is a tragedy in its own right, but that stupid, wrong, idiotic 74 shootings statistic (before it was 88 school shootings) was pitched to concerned parents, school officials, and politicians by both a company that has insane amounts of money to gain and a complicit, sensationalistic and lazy mass media and nobody is bothering to tell people that these are lies. If the company is pitching an increase in school shootings as a primary reason for spending six figures per school on their product, what happens when I show you that school shootings are not on the rise?

We asked James Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University, for some perspective. He pointed to the 2013 "Indicators of School Crime and Safety" report compiled by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. There were about 45 school-associated violent deaths (not just by guns) at elementary and secondary schools each year between the 1992 and 2010 school years, according to the report. The highest annual total was 63 deaths in 2006-07, while the lowest was 31 in 2010-11. In other words, Fox said, the number of gun deaths documented by Everytown over the past year and a half are not out of the ordinary. About 15 to 20 kids in grades K-12 are killed at school each year, along with a similar number of college students, he said.

"I don't mean to minimize the horror of these events or the pain and suffering of victims, but schools are safe, safer than other places that our children spend time," he said. "For some kids, school is even safer than their home."

Yet there is the politician, the school officials, and police, marching through a Massachusetts school, firing off blank rounds within the hallways that, if not for Veteran's Day, would otherwise be filled with young boys and girls, all to test a shooter detection system pitched by a corporation with monied interests on false claims and statistics. That's on us all for not demanding better from ourselves, our media, and our politicians. We deserve to be bilked this way for allowing the pitchmen of fear to prey on us so easily and for setting aside our skepticism in favor of the more facile emotion of terror.

Filed Under: fear, fud, gunshot detection, school shootings, shooting detection
Companies: shooter detection systems

Educational Exercises Aimed At School Shootings, Drug Abuse Result In Terrorized Students And K-9 Attacks

from the administrators-and-cops:-both-woefully-underqualified-to-educateq dept

In what seems to be a continuance of the questionable "scared straight" programs (questioned by no less that the DOJ), schools are involving kids in drills ostensibly aimed at educating them about how to react in extremely rare situations. Recently, we covered a so-called "drill" that involved a hijacked bus full of kids, which was "defused" in front of an audience comprised mainly of educators and people holding the local PD's purse strings. It was a rousing success, if your measurement standard starts at "everyone dies" and tops out at "no one was injured." This was portrayed as an essential bit of "anti-terrorism" training and an educational experience for bus drivers and students, but considering it all played out in front of town officials, the ultimate purpose seemed to be nothing more than a chance for the cops to play dress-up and get all duded up in some underused tactical gear.

Scott Greenfield covers another bit of "education" aimed at, well, who knows what exactly. The new concern is the "active shooter," and several schools are performing drills onsite in order to train staff (and children) how to react in case of school shooting.

Today, schools are engaging in active shooter drills. Trying to impute the best of faith to those who came up with the idea, it’s because this is perceived as the most likely tragedy that a school can face. It may not be likely, but it does happen. So why not be prepared?

"If you missed last week’s 'mad gunman terrorizes American schoolchildren' news story,this time out of North Carolina, don’t feel bad; these days they’re common enough that it’s not reasonable to expect any one person can keep up with them all.

Still, last week’s story was notable for two reasons: One, nobody actually got shot; and two, the gunman was on the school’s payroll. Seriously: Administrators at Eastern Wayne Middle School later sent parents a letter explaining that they sent a masked gunman to various sixth-grade classrooms as an 'enrichment lesson on exhibiting good citizenship and observing your surroundings.'"

The explanation letter, reducing a basic concept of disaster preparedness to the idiocy of “exhibiting good citizenship” (a good citizen does not get shot?) can be forgiven. To the extent school administrators were ever capable of using comprehensible language to explain something clearly and accurately, they are now paid by the jargon phrase used and can’t be expected to forget the entirety of their education and experience. Just ignore it.

There's more stupidity here, including the fact that children aren't being informed that these are, in fact, drills.

A suburban Chicago high school ran a “code red” drill with the gunmen shooting blanks in January. Last month, an Indiana school ran a shooting drill replete with blood and a body count.

Last year, an El Paso, Tex., school set up a shocking surprise lockdown simulation that enraged parents like Stephanie Belcher, whose son sent her a panicked text message.

“He said, ‘I’m not kidding. There’s gunshots and people screaming and we were locked in a storage closet,’ ” Belcher told KFOX-TV. “These kids thought that their classmates were being killed and that they could be next. There’s no excuse for that.”

The potential for harm, either physical or emotional, is high. "Preparing" students for a highly unlikely event by terrorizing them teaches them nothing more than "this situation is terrifying." It's highly doubtful anyone from the administration side is learning anything either. If they were, they might realize how counterproductive it is to prepare for an event you can't control by inducing a uninformed state of panic in the student body. No amount of tying "try not to die" to citizenship ideals is going to change that.

But cops and admins like drills, especially when it gives law enforcement a chance to show off their "tools" (often just guns and tactical gear). Cops and admins also like teaching kids that any policy- or law-violating act is sure to result in swift and zealous punishment.

In Brazil, Indiana, Judge J. Blaine Akers decided to kick off a weeklong "Red Ribbon Awareness" event at the courthouse by grabbing some local elementary school students and subjecting them to a simulated drug search. Things went predictably bad.

According to the report, the officer and his K-9 partner, Max, as well as another K-9 team were requested by Clay County Superior Court Judge J. Blaine Akers to carry out a simulated raid of a party with actors in place to help "educate the Clay County fifth-graders on drug awareness."

He added the juveniles in the scenario met with officers prior to the start and were asked to remain still when the dogs searched for narcotics.

McQueen said a very small amount of illegal drugs were hidden on one of the juveniles to show how the dogs can find even the smallest trace of an illegal substance. He added all this was done "under exclusive control and supervision of members of the court and law enforcement." Four scenarios were carried out that day with the incident occurring during the third scenario.

"As I got closer to the actors, Max began searching the juveniles," according to the officer's report. "The first male juvenile began moving his legs around as Max searched him. When the male began moving his legs, (this is what) I believe prompted Max's action to bite the male juvenile on the left calf."

In appreciation for his participation in this bizarre "simulation," the fifth grader was gifted with a free trip to the hospital to treat puncture wounds. There's a lot that's impossibly stupid about this judge's ill-advised "demonstration," but there apparently wasn't a single cop who thought this might be a bad idea -- certainly not beforehand and, judging from the post-incident comments, not in hindsight, either.

"It was an unfortunate accident," said Brazil Police Chief Clint McQueen. "Wish it hadn't happened like that but it did. We are trying to evaluate (the incident) to make sure nothing like this happens again."

Easy. Don't subject people, whether they're elementary student or adults, to fake drug sweeps, especially if you're going to plant drugs on them and send a dog trained to react aggressively to drugs and sudden movements out to give them a nasal patdown.

There's also this, as was pointed out by criminal defense lawyer Robert Fickman:

What's important to note within this story beyond the obvious, is the unstated ease in which the cops planted dope on the child.

That's comforting news for anyone who's had a law enforcement officer touch their person or belongings. Also comforting? The fact that the officers pursued statements from other children to corroborate their story.

The other K-9 officer met with Walters after the incident and said that several other children involved in the scenario saw the young man shake his legs when Max approached.

McQueen said the incident was not anything "out of control," but just a quick reaction by the dog to the young man's sudden movement.

Kids move. Kids get nervous or bored or uncomfortable and move. Even adults, innocent adults, get nervous when engaging with law enforcement and will move inadvertently. These officers put kids in the path of an animal that's been trained to be half-investigator, half-weapon and expected everything to go well.

And all of this was, according to the judge who set it up, an "educational" experience meant to raise "drug awareness." But in practice, it's little more than Scared Straight Lite. Instead of spending time with criminals, kids are spending more and more time in the presence of armed officers -- people they believe are supposed to be their protectors but whose actual mileage may vary after being bitten by an attack dog or locked in a closet listening to gunshots and screaming.

On the other hand, perhaps some sort of educational growth is being obtained, although it certainly isn't what those ordering this drills and exercises would hope to be the outcome. Kids may be learning that law enforcement officers are inscrutable and possibly dangerous. They may be learning that inadvertent movements, if viewed as "threatening" or "sudden" by officers (and their dogs), are instantly punishable by the application of pain... or worse. They may also be learning that those in power entertain themselves by performing a whole lot of dubious "somethings" that toy with the emotional health of those under their control, solely in order to show constituents that they're on top of the problem -- whether it's school shootings, drug use or plain old disobedience.

Filed Under: dogs, law enforcement, overreaction, school shootings