HS police chief stresses layering, better communication for schools
Hot Springs Police Chief Chris Chapmond touted layered two-way communication and better social media monitoring during his intelligence and communications subcommittee report at the Arkansas School Safety Commission meeting in Little Rock on Tuesday.
Chapmond, who serves as chair, presented two of the subcommittee’s recommendations for approval, as did other subcommittees: mental health and prevention; law enforcement and security; audits, emergency operations plans and drills; and intelligence and communication, while the physical securities subcommittee recommended four.
The commission unanimously approved all the recommendations.
The first recommendation read, “School districts should develop layered two-way communication access between staff members and administrative staff via various platforms to ensure information sharing and improve alert processes.”
“That sounds really complicated,” Chapmond said. “But all we’re suggesting is that there are multiple communication platforms at each school district to ensure that we’re getting critical information out to everyone. And it goes both ways: from staff level, below the staff level, to administration and administration back down the chain of command.”
Examples he gave included using alert systems, such as mobile applications, intercoms, or radio systems.
“We’re not suggesting any particular type of communication system; just simply stating that there needs to be multiple,” he said.
He noted that from his perspective in law enforcement, in every critical situation debrief the department has ever had, communication has been a failure at some point in time.
“And we did ensure that communication is going up and down the chain of command appropriately and critical information’s getting delivered,” he said. “We saw that failure at the Robb Elementary School (in Uvalde, Texas) and then, again, every situation you debrief, communication seems to be an issue.”
Arkansas School Safety Commission chair and director of the Criminal Justice Institute, Cheryl May, also stressed the importance of the layering factor for communication.
“There may be one system that fails and being able to have multiple systems is that important,” she said.
Chapmond said with the Uvalde shooting in May, the school had a mobile application, but because of the lack of internet access and failure to use the intercom system in place, the situation got as bad as it did. He said the subcommittee was recommending “there be multiple ways to get that critical information out in a timely manner.”
“I can say this is a problem that … it’s not recent,” said commission member Bill Temple, a retired special agent
with the FBI. “This thing has gone back, the communications problem, even before Wi-Fi and email and all that, has gone back decades. It’s always an issue.”
“I’ve never been involved in a critical incident or even a tabletop exercise that communication failures have not been one of the primary points of contention when talking about success and failure,” Chapmond said.
The second recommendation to be approved was that school districts “should develop capabilities to monitor communication platforms to include social media outlets as it relates to threats or triggering phrases used by potential active attack suspects.”
Through Secret Service reports and presentations, Chapmond said the social media footprint was “huge” from the failures identified at Uvalde, further noting there were a lot of key indicators missed, not only by school officials but by law enforcement and the community as a whole.
In a recent presentation from the Little Rock School District regarding its success in monitoring district communications’ systems, 77 incidents were identified as “rapid response incidents,” he said, where they intervened at some level.
“So we know that the information’s being shared,” he said. “We know that these potential suspects are talking about what they’re doing — and we’re just missing it. So having the capability to monitor our communications schoolwide and then from a law enforcement standpoint, we believe it is a very solid recommendation.”
Chapmond noted that the nearly 80 incidents identified requiring intervention came on school-owned devices.
“We know constitutionally, we can’t monitor everything all the time. There’s some issues there. But the school systems having the ability just to monitor what the kids have access to or the teachers have access to has proven to be very fruitful,” he said.