Community plays a role to ensure school safety

Last week, the headlines were dominated by the tragic events in Parkland, Florida where another school shooting claimed the lives of 17 victims. Our thoughts and prayers go out to all of the victims and their family and friends as they mourn and grieve after such a senseless tragedy.

In the wake of the shooting, a common narrative has emerged indicating there were multiple warnings by the perpetrator to his peers, onlookers and professionals suggesting something was going to happen.

In his book Team of Teams, retired four star general Stanley McChrystal refers to the work of author Dan Levitin who stated: “In 2011, Americans took in five times as much information everyday as they did in 1986 … during our leisure time, not counting work, each of us processes 34 gigabytes or 100,000 words everyday.”

That was eight years ago. I would suggest the amount has increased as social media platforms have expanded. This statistic also does not mention the increase of information that is actually available. It only looks at the average increase of information taken in by people.

I share this to illustrate people are taking in a lot of ✦readily information and even more is

available. It is just too much for an individual police officer, principal, teacher or parent to be completely on top of in isolation. I also suspect that as society moves forward, the amount of information available will continue to increase as technology advances. It will become even more important for all of us to play a part in public safety by identifying concerning information and forwarding it to the appropriate authorities to act on.

In Lethbridge we have been extremely fortunate that our citizens have been quick to reach out to school officials or the police when information has emerged on social media that may be a threat directed at our schools. This week has caused a lot of reflection on the information we received in 2017 that impacted the safety of our schools and I am compelled to point out a few of the people we as a community need to thank for their diligence and commitment to our city’s safety.

• We need to thank the brave individuals who had concern and demonstrated the courage to do something. Whether they took it to a teacher, the principal, or called the police — all of these individuals acted and that cannot be overlooked. Thankyou.

• We need to thank the administrators and educators who immediately acted and involved the police. They got a taste of the emergency services world and stayed up through the night to help us sift through the information and determine exactly what it was, where it came from and help manage the rumours and speculation.

• We need to thank our officers, specifically our School Resource Officers, who acted immediately in the wee hours of the morning and worked closely with the school to follow up and investigate. I also want to thank the rest of our uniformed officers who then adjusted as necessary to increase our presence when required at the affected schools.

• We need to thank Kevin Cameron and the Violence Threat Risk Assessment (VTRA) process that he developed. It is VTRA that we, police, educators, social services and many other stakeholders, use to assess threats when people bring information forward to us.

We are truly fortunate in Lethbridge that we have citizens with the moral fortitude to do their civic duty and bring concerning information forward. That is what will play a major part in future efforts to keep our city safe. As I pointed out earlier, there is just too much information today for any one person or agency to be responsible for and it is naive to assume the school must know or the police must know. Community safety is not the sole responsibility of somebody else or one specific agency. Community safety is a shared responsibility for all citizens to take part in.