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The 14-year-old kid was not a monster until the second that he pulled the trigger inside Apalachee High killing 2 classmates, 2 teachers, and wounding at least 9 others. For at least a year prior to the attack, this kid cried for help and was ignored by police, teachers, school administrators, community members, and his own family. Committing a school shooting is a final act of violent public suicide when a kid feels like society has forgotten him (or her) and there is no other option.
These are not excuses that justify a school shooting. To prevent the next attack, we need to understand why they happen and take meaningful action to stop them.
Host: David Riedman
Guest: Aaron Stark, father, mental wellness advocate, and someone who wants to show love to the kids who are dirty, homeless, abused, alone, and forgotten by society
TED Talk (41 million views): I Was Almost A School Shooter | Aaron Stark
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.
School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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Every school shootingâthe latest at Apalachee High in Georgiaâis the culmination of a long chain of failures as parents, police, and school officials all missed their chances to act on overt warnings. Could analyzing and studying the information within the K-12 School Shooting Database be the key to stopping them?
From Freakonomics Radio+ episode: The Only Person That Tracks Every U.S. School Shooting
This was only the first half of my interview.
If you want to listen to this entire bonus episode of Freakonomics Radio, itâs available through the SiriusXM Podcasts+ subscription offering on Apple Podcasts. To get Plus episodes, you can sign up for SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts here.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my recent interviews on New England Journal of Medicine and my article on CNN about AI and school security.
School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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Host: David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database
Guest: Dr. Matt Nobles, Criminologist and Methodologist, University of Central Florida
* All research projects start with finding data or evidence, and then applying a research methodology to answer the question.
* Federal crime data is incomplete, published ~2 years after crimes occur, and doesnât add up when multiple sources are cross-referenced.
* Before 2000, there wasnât a federal mandate for colleges and universities to report crimes on campus. Dr. Noblesâ first major research project was analyzing unreported sexual assaults on campus.
* There is not a Higher Education School Shooting Database because itâs very hard to define the boundaries of a university campus (e.g., is a shooting during college nightâspecifically targeting college studentsâat a bar next to campus a higher ed school shooting?)
* Without standardization of crime data, we donât know the characteristics of crimes, we canât measure the impacts, we donât know if rates are going up/down, and we canât develop useful public policy.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.
School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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Host: David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database
Guest: Dr. Jason Koele, Missouri middle school principal
Dissertation: Differences Between Missouri K-12 Educator Perceptions of Safety on Campuses that Allow Teachers Concealed Carry and Those That Do Not
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.
School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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Host: David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database
Guest: Dr. David Perrodin, Professor at Viterbo University and author of School of Errors & Velocity of Information
School of Errors establishes another voice in the discussion of how to promote safe schools. It challenges the unchecked expansion of school fortification and questions the realized benefit of inter-agency collaboration during a sentinel event. This book offers an alternative to traumatizing simulations by providing clear options for improving school safety by the empirically-proven effective measures of leakage detection (preventive) and sensemaking (reactive). School of Errors restores the scientific method to school safety and clears a path through the media rhetoric fogging this vital topic.
Purchase School of Errors: Rethinking School Safety in America (2019) for special price of $5.99 this month for listeners of this podcast.
* Digital book on Spotify
* Barnes & Noble
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.
School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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Host: David Riedman, founder of K-12 School Shooting Database
Guest: Dr. Ken Trump is the President of National School Safety and Security Services, a Cleveland-based national consulting firm specializing in school security and emergency preparedness training
In this episode we discussed:
* Evolution of school security during the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and 2020sâall time periods that Dr. Trump has been working inside k-12 schools.
* Landscape of school safety is not just deliberate school shootings. School safety includes fires, natural disasters, riots, fights, gangs, drugs, weapons, rapes, sexual assaults, and kidnappings.
* The 1989 attack at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, CA was the most legislatively impactful school shooting in history because it drove Californiaâs state assault weapons ban, the federal assault weapons ban, Gun Free School Zones Act of 1990, Safe School Act of 1994, and the COPS program to use federal funding to pay for local police officers in schools.
* Deliberate pre-planned school shootings primarily happen in small, rural communities where the schools have the least resources to prevent, respond, and recover from these attacks.
* School safety canât depend on federal grant funding because the grants eventually dry up and local school budgets donât have enough money to sustain police officers, guards, maintain equipment, and subscriptions for security tech.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.
School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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Host: David Riedman
Guest: Jon Romano, convicted school shooter and mental health advocate on TikTok
The purpose of the corrections system is to:
* Confine and separate a dangerous threat from society.
* Punish an offender for their wrong.
* Rehabilitate a person so they can re-enter society as a pro-social contributor.
Itâs the department of corrections not the department of confinement. In most states a young teenager cannot be sentenced to life in prison which means that even a convicted school shooter will return to free society.
Jon Romano was confined, punished, and rehabilitated in adult prison from age 16 to 31. He now works as an advocate for helping other depressed and suicidal teens before they go down a violent path of self-destruction.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.
School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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Host: David Riedman
Guest: Sonali Rajan, Ed.D., M.S., Associate Professor, Department of Health Studies & Applied Educational Psychology at Columbia University & President of the Research Society for the Prevention of Firearm-Related Harms
Research Paper: Protocol for a nationwide case-control study of firearm violence prevention tactics and policies in K-12 schools
Research Methods: Authors created a nationally representative dataset of schools that experienced intentional gunfire on the campus during school hours since 2015 using the K-12 School Shooting Database. Matched control schools will be randomly selected from the US Department of Education's national database of all public schools. The following study will analyze 27 school safety strategies organized into seven key exposure groupings.
Conclusion: As the first national, controlled study, its results will provide novel and needed data on the effectiveness of school safety tactics and policies in preventing intentional shootings at K-12 public schools.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.
School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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Host: David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database.
Guest: Dr. Benjamin P. Comer, Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice at Texas Christian University.
Paper: Definitional Discrepancies: Defining âSchool Shootingsâ and Other Incidents of Gunfire Affecting Schools
We discussed:
* How the K-12 School Shooting Databased started.
* Landscape of ~30 different info sources about school shootings from the âColumbineâs Angelsâ blog in the 1990s to anonymized government reports that omit school names.
* Definitions run amuck when the US Secret Service excludes a sniper firing 240 rounds at a school because the shooter was not on school property when the shots were fired.
* Broad data collection creates the foundation for many different projects and types of research.
* Five recommendations for reconciling the differences and using a standardized methodology for research going forward.
* If we misunderstand the baselineâ99% of shootings at schools are not mass shootingsâwe create policies designed for 1% of gun violence which are misaligned with the most common circumstances on campus.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.
School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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Host: David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database.
Guest: Dr. Jillian Peterson, forensic psychologist, professor, and executive director of The Violence Prevention Project Research Center.
I obtained exclusive access to the CVPA High School shooterâs manifesto from KMOVâs investigative reporting team. Last year, I narrated the documentary KMOV produced about this attack. Parts of the images are redacted because they name specific school staff members who are not aware they were targets during this school shooting.
Dr. Jillian Peterson and I discuss:
* Details of the manifesto.
* How this document is the same and different than other writings from mass shooters and school shooters.
* Reframing school shootings as âdeaths of despairâ because the perpetrators commonly exhibit severe depression, attempted suicides prior, and a desire to die during these attacks.
* Suicide prevention programs may be more effective at preventing school shootings than security and fortification.
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Host: David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database
Guest: Justin Seals, school security director, school police officer, and military veteran.
We discussed:
* Justinâs career as a Navy Corpsman, Army Chaplain, patrol officer, school police officer, SRO unit supervisor, and school security director.
* How school policing has changed and evolved post-Columbine, post-Sandy Hook, post-Parkland, and post-Uvalde.
* Differences in safety and security at public schools compared to private schools.
* Systemic gun violence, gang violence, and teens who habitually carry guns every day on campus.
* Dealing with students who are armed with knives and guns in ways that doesnât risk escalating a police intervention into a shooting on campus.
* Being a role model for students, creating relationships, and being proactive in defusing conflicts.
* Mentality that a successful school police officer needs to have each day is completely different from a patrol officer working on the street.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.
School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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Host: David Riedman, creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database
Guest: Dr. Rodrigo Nieto GĂłmez, professor at the US Naval Postgraduate School and expert in criminal innovation, AI, and national security.
Articles referenced:
* How does OpenAI's ChatGPT-4o assess school shooting threats compared to human police officers?
* Did OpenAI create the best weapon detection software available with ChatGPT-4o?
During this episode we discussed:
* Rodrigoâs unique background being born in Mexico and educated in Paris, yet he is an expert in US national security and defense policy.
* Criminal innovation moves faster than the systems designed to stop crime.
* ChatGPT-4o turned everything upside down with an omni-model that can analyze text, audio, and images. This is 10 years ahead of where experts thought AI would be today.
* Standalone machine learning classification models (flagging guns on CCTV, hearing gunshots) are irrelevant now in the same way that paying for a voice transcription service is no longer needed.
* ChatGPT is different from any existing single-purpose software model because it has been trained with 13 trillion pieces of data. The first generation of AI school security companies are now like Kodak when affordable digital cameras hit the market.
* Unlike image classification models, ChatGPT can identify a toy gun being used in a squirt gun fight because it knows what water, toy, playing, smiling, grass, and kids all are. ChatGPT understands the entire context of the situation instead of searching for specific objects that might match training data.
* Without any special training ChatGPT analyzed school shooting threats and gave scores comparable to the aggregate scores of 240 human experts. ChatGPT performed significantly better than most of the individual police officers!
* Without being prompted, ChatGPT created a threat assessment model based on multiple factors including time, location, and specificity of the threat. ChatGPT also suggested emergency actions to take.
* When humans hallucinate (give the wrong answer), we canât really tell what happened or easily fix it. If ChatGPT gets something wrong, we can see where it went wrong and create a better prompt for the next response.
My biggest takeaway from talking to Rodrigo is that things that we thought were impossible for computers to understand are now possible, and this changes everything for the future of school security.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and New England Journal of Medicine.
School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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Host: David Riedman
Guest: Robin Cogan, National Association of School Nurses and Relentless School Nurse Blog
On the show we talked about:
* Robinâs career in occupational health and deciding to work inside Camden City, NJ schools for the last two decades.
* Role of a school nurse as the Chief Wellness Officer and being the frontline emergency medical responder for hundredsâor thousandsâof students each day.
* Investing in a Student Wellness Team with school nurses, psychologists, and social workers can identify at-risk students and provide a wide array of assistance to prevent situations for escalating into violence.
* Nobody wants to call a child a âthreatâ like a terrorist or criminal. Instead of âthreat assessmentâ, school nurses and trained healthcare professionals can use positive language to promote wellness.
* School nurses are trained to treat problems caused by trauma rather than a law enforcement focus of taking criminal action against children.
* Healing centered engagementsâsuicide prevention, crisis intervention, and wellness checksâcan stop almost any student who is experiencing severe trauma from escalating to the point of committing a planned attack.
* Educating parents about the extreme risks of having unsecured guns at home or inside vehicles, and the life-saving potential of locking up unloaded firearms.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and Wisconsin Public Radio after the Mount Horeb Middle school shooting.
School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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Guest: Dr. James Densley (Criminal Justice Dept Chair at Metropolitan State University and Co-founder of The Violence Prevention Project).
Nobel prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman passed away in March. I started the research for this paper when I read his final book, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement, back in 2021.
Noise is the unwanted variability in decisions made by experts who are looking at exactly the same information. We measured the amount of variability in threat assessments. This study is the first time noise was measured in this context!
We talk about methods for this study, challenges with the peer review process, results from a survey for 245 police officers, and implications for dramatically changing how schools and police think about assessing threats. Our findings show the need to rethink the current âthreat assessment teamâ model.
* Part 1: Impact of 'noise' on assessing school shooting threats
* Part 2: Measuring 'noise' when assessing school shooting threats
* Part 3: Results from 'noise audit' when assessing school shooting threats
* Part 4: Ways to reduce noise when assessing school shooting threats
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and Wisconsin Public Radio after the Mount Horeb Middle school shooting.
School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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On May 1, police were called for an active shooter at Mount Horeb Middle in rural Wisconsin. Officers spotted a teen outside of the school with a long black rifle and killed him when he didnât comply with commands. Four days later, police provided an update that the rifle was a $100 pellet gun available at Walmart and Amazon.
Robert Chappell, the executive editor of Madison 365 News, has two kids at Mount Horeb Middle and High schools. He arrived at the school at the same time as the first two police officers.
On WORT 88.9 A Public Affair, we talked about:
* Missed warning signs to prevent the attack before a 14-year-old student brought a gun to school.
* Many of the highest casualty school shootings happen in small communities where âit could never happen hereâ.
* Confusion with messaging, delays in reunification, and prolonged lockdowns with students being separated from their siblings and families.
* Lack of standardized system to report red flags.
I wrote this article about the missed warning signs at Mount Horeb Middle and also spoke with Wisconsin Watch about school shootings in small communities.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database and an internationally recognized expert. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and New England Journal of Medicine.
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On the latest episode of The Room Where It Happen with Baer Halvorson, we talked about a path forward 25 years after Columbine as school shootings are more frequent and more deadly. The status quo isnât working. Is this because using the wrong planning assumptions two decades ago made school security more complicated than it needs to be?
We also discussed school security issues including:
* Failures at Uvalde are the same systemic problems that never got fixed after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.
* How kids get access to firearms and new trend of teens habitually carrying guns at school all day.
* Most common profile of a school shooter.
* Using the same resources to prevent both community gun violence and planned attacks.
* Types of attacks a school needs to be prepared for ranging from snipers to hostage standoffs.
* Predictions for 5-10 years from now based on data analysis.
* Whatâs the one thing I would change in the design of every school building? Two exits from every classroom so kids can get out quickly during an emergency.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database and a national expert on school shootings. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and Iowa Public Radio the day after the Perry High shooting.
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Every parent wants to know any time a gun is fired at their kidâs school. I was a guest on the âTalking About Kidsâ podcast with R. Bradley Snyder to discuss the importance of collecting data on gun violence at schools.
We talked about:
* Government definitions of âschool shootingâ exclude domestic violence and gun violence in marginalized communities
* Difference between âactive shooterâ versus âschool shootingâ
* Failure of one-size-fits-all approach to school security by locking down for every scenario
* Problems with using exclusionary discipline to punish a student who is identified as a threat (an expelled student can come back to the school with a gun)
* Looking at planned attacks from the 1970s and 1980s to remove the noise (e.g., social media, video games, current culture war issues) and identify the root causes
* Shootings are most common during transition periods (arrival, lunch, dismissal, after school) and this is a time period that is rarely in school security plans
Subscribe to Bradleyâs show for new episodes each week focused on parenting and education. You can listen to the full episode with my interview on any podcast app.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database and a national expert on school shootings. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and Iowa Public Radio the day after the Perry High shooting.
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Twenty-five years after Columbine, school shootings have become more frequent and more deadly. An entire generation of students have either been traumatizedâor worse, taught how to be a school shooterâduring lockdown drills. The status quo is not working.
On the EM Weekly podcast, Zack Borst and I discussed how schools are missing decades of best practices from overlooking the emergency management cycle (prepare, respond, recovery, mitigate) for school security planning. Effectively evacuating a school during an emergency requires planning and help from the âwhole communityâ just like a flood, tornado, or earthquake.
We also covered:
* Benefits of collecting widely inclusive data
* Planning for shootings at sporting events
* Role of emergency managers in school safety planning and training
* Persistent dangers from swatting and threats
* Confusion during the response at Michigan State
Zack covers a wide variety of emergency management issues. Checkout his show.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database and a national expert on school shootings. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and Iowa Public Radio the day after the Perry High shooting.
School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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On the Digital Politics weekly podcast, I was interviewed by Deepak Puri, CEO of The Democracy Labs.
We talked about:
* Differences between mass shootings in public places and school shootings
* Capturing data to show a holistic picture of gun violence on school property
* Understanding the drivers that lead to school shootings
* Danger of swatting hoaxes that falsely report a school shooting in progress
* How school shootings are different from terrorism
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database and a national expert on school shootings. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and Iowa Public Radio the day after the Perry High shooting.
School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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Clip from my interview on the New England Journal of Medicine Intention to Treat podcast.
Iâm on the show with Dr. Cornelia Griggs, a pediatric trauma surgeon and education director of the Center for Gun Violence Prevention at Massachusetts General Hospital.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database and a national expert on school shootings.
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