Before the Virginia Tech shooting in April 2007, the ASU Behavior Response Team didn’t have a name or even an official mission.
The BRT, which was unofficially established in the early ‘90s, aims at handling issues in the workplace before they escalate into bigger problems such as arguments, harassment or even shootings, said Jillian McManus, ASU director of Organizational Health and Development for Human Resources.
“Obviously we have not had any major experience that has made news or headlines about these kinds of situations that other universities have experienced at this point,” she said. “So we’ve been able to mitigate quite a few scenarios.”
ASU’s Assistant Chief of Police Rich Wilson has served on the team since it began and has assisted in a number of cases to deter any workplace grievances from turning violent.
“We can intervene and actually get them assistance before things get punitive instead of taking disciplinary or law enforcement action,” he said. “We’re finding them the help they need on whatever their stresses or grievances might be.”
Staff from the Employee Assistance Office, ASU Police, the Office of General Council and the Office of Human Resources makes up the BRT.
“The BRT comes together on short notice whenever an ASU employee has made an explicit threat against co-workers, or exhibits behavior that can reasonably be interpreted as threatening,” said Kevin Salcido, ASU associate vice president of Human Resources.
The team typically evaluates about six to eight cases a year, he said.
Cases the BRT has dealt with include domestic violence disputes, stalking, threats, and emotional or mental health issues.
During one incident, Wilson said a University employee developed a mental condition and started displaying odd behavior in the workplace.
“A contact that we developed, that knew the employee, had called us and said they were concerned that the employee was headed to work with a couple of guns in their vehicle,” Wilson said.
Because Wilson and the team were able to discover the situation early they evacuated employees and students from the area and confronted the man, who had two semi-automatic handguns in his vehicle.
“It turned out the weapons were still in the car but he was highly educated and we were able to get him the support that he needed to get stabilized and make things safe again,” he said.
McManus said after the Virginia Tech shooting, ASU began to talk about putting in place a response team to mitigate any situation from turning violent.
“When Virginia Tech occurred, campus violence and violence in the workplace had a lot of notoriety ... a lot of attention,” she said.
McManus added that when ASU officials began discussing the need for some type of behavioral response team, they realized there was already one in place.
Salcido said the benefit of helping these employees is that it not only keeps employees safe from violent acts, but students and the campus safe as well.
“In virtually every workplace or campus shooting the person who committed the violence had already been identified as a potential threat,” Salcido said. “The BRT exists to act as a mechanism to ‘connect the dots’ and monitor situations that have the potential to threaten workplace (and) campus safety.”
Reach the reporter at sraymund@asu.edu
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