Last year’s mass shootings in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater and a Newtown, Conn., elementary school have brought renewed attention to gun safety training strategies, particularly among universities, nationwide.
Free safety procedure video tutorials are housed on Blackboard, the website on which online course documents and grades for ASU classes are kept. They are available to ASU students, staff and faculty for self-enrollment and address topics such as partner violence and how to react during a mass shooting.
The videos, a mix of instruction and dramatic enactments of dangerous situations, were purchased by University Police to educate students, staff and faculty on how to respond in the case of a dangerous situation on campus, ASU Police officer Brian Kiefling said.
Before the department bought the video program about 18 months ago, this training was only available in person and by a request to the police department.
“It’s a way to get good information out to a larger group of individuals that the department would not be able to reach on its own in the same amount of time,” Kiefling said.
Jim Hardina, ASU assistant police chief, said more than 4,000 people have enrolled in the courses on Blackboard since they were posted. There have been 1,517 enrollments since the beginning of the 2012-13 school year.
Campus police do not have a budget to market the courses and increase enrollment numbers, according to Kiefling.
However, the department may come to an agreement with the University to increase advertisement of these courses soon, he said.
The video tutorial entitled “Shots Fired On Campus,” which discusses how students, staff and faculty should behave in the case of a gunman on school property, has been the most watched, with an average of 72 enrollments per month since August, according to ASU Police.
“There is a perception that the number of shootings is going up because of the media attention, even though, numbers-wise, it’s consistently going down,” Hardina said. “I think that’s why there’s more interest in that particular course.”
ASU Police purchased the video programs from the Center for Personal Protection and Safety, a private corporation founded by former U.S. Department of Defense executive Randy Spivey that specializes in training individuals on how to react in dangerous situations.
The training videos have been used by more than 1,100 U.S. colleges and universities, as well as corporations and government agencies such as Boeing and the FBI, according to the center’s website.
The six programs include interviews with Spivey, experts in the field of emergency training and law enforcement experts.
The first four tutorials available: “Safe Passage,” “Silent Storm” and the two “Flash Point” programs, are intended to help prevent the occurrence of on-campus crime, Kiefling said.
The remaining two, “Shots Fired: When Lightning Strikes” and “Shots Fired on Campus” are focused on dealing with crime that cannot be predicted, he said.
“In the shortest amount of time, you are going to get an in-depth overview of the topic, an explanation of why an individual might act in this particular way, how you can see the warnings signs of (the crimes) and how we would like you to react,” Kiefling said.
Prior to purchasing the videos from the center, ASU Police were lecturing on campus safety and crime prevention to small groups of individuals or University departments.
The department still offers this service upon request, but Kiefling said the online tutorials are more convenient.
“(The online format) allows the University to continue to function around the class instead of people ceasing their jobs to listen to me speak for an hour,” Kiefling said.
It is not required for ASU students, staff or faculty to enroll in any of these safety training courses at the university level.
There are benefits to making this video-enabled training mandatory, said Steve Warren, a senior account executive at the Center for Personal Protection and Safety.
Mandatory training would help to “normalize behavior,” Warren said.
“You have about 10 percent of the population that have that innate ability to act appropriately in a critical situation. And there is maybe 10 percent of the population that, even with training, are going to be locked up and frozen in fear,” Warren said. “It comes down to how you get the other 80 percent of the population to normalize their actions.”
Hardina said it is not the place of the ASU Police Department to mandate the training, but that it is providing the resource to students, staff and faculty to use as they feel necessary.
Students, staff and faculty can find the safety training courses at https://cfo.asu.edu/police-safety-training .
Reach the reporter at svhabib@asu.edu or follow her on Twitter @discoanddessert
