No one is in panic mode?

From the SF Chronicle a few weeks ago

A small private college lifted a campus lockdown Tuesday evening after police spent the day searching for a man who was seen with a gun in a residence hall, school officials said.

Classes at Ferrum College were canceled for the rest of the week, and students were told they could leave early for spring break, which was to have begun after classes Friday, school spokeswoman Natalie Faunce said.

Earlier Tuesday, Ferrum College President Jennifer Braaten activated an alert system and ordered the school locked down after a member of the housekeeping staff reported seeing a young man walk into a residence hall with a handgun, Franklin County Sheriff Ewell Hunt said at a news conference.

...

"No one has been hurt; no one is in a panic mode," Braaten said.

All campus buildings had been searched by Tuesday evening and police said they still had no idea who the man with the gun is or whether he is a student.

Students were taken to the gymnasium during the day for security reasons, but were escorted back to their rooms Tuesday evening.

Campus is locked down, classes are canceled for a week, every building on campus is searched, residence halls are evacuated and students herded into a gym. But they're not in panic mode.

Giving them a target in Tunica

Tunica High School is right on the edge of a small, rural town. It had 10 miles of woods and cotton fields between the high school and the casinos. (I've spent some time in Tunica). South of Memphis, it's the heart of the Mississippi Delta country.

Personally, if I drove past the Tunica High School and saw somebody walking around with a shotgun I'd have not thought anything of it. It's not exactly like nobody in rural Mississippi has a shotgun.

But, the Tunica County Sheriff thinks different. They locked down the high school when they heard a report of somebody walking around (outside the school) with a shotgun.

You can't be too careful. If they took away the targets and pissed off a guy with a shotgun he might shoot at a bird or something.

On a related note, a comment on the Tunica SO from a long time Tunica County resident. A few years ago I was playing poker in a Casino in Tunica County and there was an old black woman playing in the seat next to me. We got to talking about Mississippi and she said how things sure had changed since she was young.

She said, "Used to be, iffen you was a black woman and you got in a fight with your old man and the neihbors called the Sheriff, well, they'd send Bubba out and you was in trouble.".

"Nowdays, they'll send out Bubba and LeRoy both and you're in Big Trouble".

Maybe detectives could explain?

At a high school outside Houston

HOUSTON -- A northeast Harris County high school was placed on lockdown after a threat was phoned in, KPRC Local 2 reported Tuesday.

Sheldon Independent School District officials said the call turned out to be a prank.

No one was allowed in or out of C.E. King High School during the lockdown.

Harris County Precinct 3 deputy constables were at the school to provide extra security.

Investigators searched the school and did not find anything.

Detectives are working to determine who made the call and why.

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Maybe detectives could determine what the intended purpose of a school lockdown is? Who is it supposed to protect? How does it protect them?

Not just a lockdown, but a felony arrest of a 12 year old

This kid in Gainsville, Florida showed a gun to two kids he thought were his friend. They weren't his friend. His life is now destroyed. He'll not make that mistake again.

Hawthorne Middle/High School was placed on lockdown for just under an hour Monday morning after a former student brought a handgun on campus, according to Sgt. Keith Faulk with the Alachua County Sheriff's Office.

Faulk said a 12-year-old boy rode his bicycle to the Hawthorne Middle/High School campus Monday morning with a .38-caliber revolver in his backpack.

The boy had previously attended the Hawthorne school, but was transferred to the Horizon Center due to disciplinary issues, Faulk said.

Faulk said the boy showed the revolver to two students. The two students then told administrators what they had seen, which prompted the lockdown.

Principal Susan Arnold said the incident started between 11:15 and 11:30 a.m., and the school was on lockdown until about 12:15 p.m.

"We had to make sure the gun was not on campus and then the deputies helped us look where the two students thought he'd put it," Arnold said, noting the two students who saw the gun thought the boy had hidden it in some bushes.

Faulk said deputies quickly determined that neither the boy nor the weapon were still on campus, and the lockdown was lifted.

Deputies then located the boy's residence, where his grandfather told deputies he did own a few weapons. Deputies were able to positively identify one of the grandfather's weapons as the revolver brought to the campus, and the boy was arrested.

Deputies filed charges including armed trespassing on a school grounds, which is a felony, and carrying a concealed weapon against the 12-year-old, Faulk said.

He didn't harm anyone, he didn't threaten anyone, he posed no threat to anyone. Twelve. Felony charges.

For the convience of the police

School officials in Huntington, WVa also seem to think the primary purpose of a school lockdown is to make life convenient for the police.

HUNTINGTON -- West Middle School was placed under lockdown Monday afternoon following a stabbing near campus.

Officials said the lockdown is just a precaution while police search for the suspect. Police said someone was stabbed on Jefferson Avenue before noon.

No indication at all that someone was inside the school with a weapon or that students were in danger in any way. Just that the police didn't want a bunch of people watching them while they searched the area around the street.

Protect them from possible exposure to drugs

A school in New Hampshire had to lockdown the school, and disrupt an advanced placement exam, because somebody in the school might have had possesion of drugs.

Just think of the bloody damage that could have resulted from a loose reefer in the exam room.

These people aren't just idiots. They're insane.

If the cops want to serve a search warrent the school can't stop them. But the search does not require a lockdown. It might make it easier for the cops, but that's not the concern of the school.

Take care of the students, in particular take care of the ones who are actually interested enough in an education to take an advanced placement exam. I doubt very many of those cops even know what an advanced placement exam is.

A lockdown that locks them out

A school in Colorado got the idea of a lockdown right, although I'm not sure it wasn't more by accident than anything else. They had a lockdown at 6.am., and kept students away from the school until they determined it was safe.

I'm not sure the whole thing wasn't pointless, but at least it was aimed in the right direction, towards actually protecting students rather than just creating an appearance of doing something.

They don't fool around in California

They lock down the schools because of a squirrel. You can never be too safe.

A chair fell over. Lock it down. Call in a SWAT team.

Kent Washington is populated by idiots. Not just idiots running the schools. Some kind of idiot juice has been added to the water in Kent Washington, clearly by foreign terrorists.

A high school was put into lockdown Friday afternoon after a report of shots fired.

The King County Sheriff's Department says a school employee called them around 2 p.m. The employee was told that someone heard a "pop, pop, pop" sound coming from one of the rooms that they assumed was gunfire.

Deputies say it appears one of the teachers was having a chair stacking contest. A stack fell over, resulting in the sound which was mistaken for gunfire.

Deputies took no chances with the initial report. Video from the scene showed at least 15 police cars, along with a pair of vans, parked outside the building. Officers could be seen walking around.

The best part is the last sentence. It's the part that demonstrates that not just the school and police officials are idiots, but the TV reporters are also idiots.

Several kids could also be seen gathering outside the school.

Uh. Was the school in a lockdown? Or was the school evacuated? Or did they just go on a lunch break?

Sometimes lockdowns might be worthwhile

It appears that most of the time school lockdowns are designed to only pacify the public by creating a pretense of protection when the reality is that the lockdown actually puts children at risk (Columbine is the best example of that risk being realized). But there are times when you could make a rational argument in favor of a school lockdown.
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Four people are in custody after a police chase that ended at the playground of Delaware Elementary School this morning, said Grant Story, spokesman for the Springfield Police Department.

The incident prompted a short lockdown at the school located at 1505 S. Delaware Avenue.

Story said the incident, which happened sometime before noon, started when a man saw his stolen vehicle being driven and followed the vehicle to the area near Delaware Elementary School.

At least one of the four people in the stolen vehicle fled on foot when police officers arrived, according to Story. Police used a taser gun to subdue one person, and one tried to hide himself in the playground at the school, Story said.

In this Missouri example you can make an argument in favor of the lockdown, and the argument is at least rational. It seems unlikely that a lockdown in this case would cause harm, but I'm still not convinced it actually ads any layers of protection.

Maybe. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. So far there's no evidence that the Springfield Missouri schools are run by complete idiots. Even the cops appear to be well behaved.

Code red lockdown?

It's getting hard enough to figure out what a lockdown is. Now we have different kinds of lockdowns -- in Madison, WI they have Code Red Lockdowns.

MADISON, Wis. -- La Follette High School officials said the school's lockdown policy could get some changes after a lockdown on Friday, which was triggered by a false report.

Code Red lockdowns were called Friday morning at Sennett Middle School and La Follette High School after a report that a man with a gun was headed toward a school, WISC-TV reported. The report to 911 turned out to be false.

La Follette Principal Loren Rathart said that the lockdown itself went great, saying that all doors were locked and students were under cover within three minutes of the 911 call.

But school officials said that despite notification of all parents by phone and Internet, a huge security concern surfaced.

Rathart said that more than 100 concerned parents came to the school after their children called them on their cell phones.

Staff said they met the parents at the front door and sent them to offices, where things got chaotic.

"We try to discourage that as much as possible because, until we're able to release students and get this place secure, we don't know whether there is a threat. And so having parents come to school may mean that they're going in harm's way," Rathart said.

Earlier I'd reported on this happening at a middle school. After reading the current report it seems it happened at two schools, it's not clear at all what happened.

But, what is clear is that the school officials intendially lockdown students in a way that keeps them in harms way. They say that in their public statements. They think that's a good thing?

These people are just idiots. There's no nice way to say this. Idiots.

Cops -- the new rumor mill

Call the cops whenever you hear a rumor at a junior high school?

Boy, that sounds like a plan that just can't fail.

The meeting was prompted by a rumor Thursday that a student brought a gun to Kahler Middle School. An investigation determined the claim was unfounded.

From now on, police will be notified immediately of rumors of violence. Once police establish there is no imminent threat, they will back out and let school officials handle the situation, Quinn said.

"Our Police Department is trained," Dyer Councilwoman Nan Onest said. "They need to be the first people we call

Police are trained to evaluate rumors among 13 year old kids?

Is there some new FBI school (in Hawaii?) they attend to get this training? Do they have special internet training in using scopes.com?

An insane lockdown

When I was in the Navy you could often skate through the day by walking around with a clipboard or a toolbox -- by carrying some device that indicated you were on your way to accomplish some specific task. You never had to actually do anything -- just appear to be doing something.

Later, when I grew up and became a corporate dweeb, my job was Project Manager. That meant I wrote a lot of status reports. In the corporate world a status report serves the same purpose as the clipboard did in the Navy -- it's evidence of activity, not actual activity.

Telling people you're doing something isn't quite the same thing as actually doing something. Project managers often draw a pretty good salary to spend their time telling people that someone else is doing something. Great job.

Sometimes that's what a school lockdown is. It's an appearance of doing something that just works out better than actually doing something would.

Who runs the schools in Greenville, MI?

GREENVILLE - Greenville school officials put their middle school on lockdown Tuesday morning after a threatening note was found in a locker.

In a statement, Superintendent Dr. Terance Lunger said a middle school student found a threatening note in a locker, indicating a bomb was inside. The school was locked down, "with normal activities continuing as much as possible."

Greenville Public Safety asked the Michigan State Police K-9 unit to help with the locker search.

Lockdown? They think there's a bomb in the building and they lock everyone inside the building?

Or maybe they don't actually think that there's a bomb in the building, they just want to pretend they do, you know, just in case of the off chance that there really is one. So they do something that they think provides some kind of external evidence of proper activity.

Of course the only thing it's actually evidence of is complete insanity on the part of the school, and the police that cooperated with the nutcases who runs these schools.

Lockdown

I used to know what lockdown meant. I'm not so sure anymore.

I had an adjunct job one summer, teaching economics for a Texas junior college. The particular campus my course was taught at was the Ellis II unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (corrections department). It was a maximum security prison unit outside Huntsville, Texas.

When we had a lockdown it meant nobody moved, nobody came in, nobody went out. Lockdowns were instituted when a count was off. Prisons take frequent body counts of inmates throughout the day -- when they did a count that didn't match what it was supposed to it could mean that they miscounted, it could mean an inmate was someplace he wasn't supposed to be.

So they'd lock it down and do another count, and just keep counting until they got the count right. We never had a lockdown during class, but I did arrive for class during a lockdown once, which meant I waited in the parking lot for an hour.

The purpose of that lockdown was to put all the inmates in known locations to hasten the recount. Counts are important to ensure inmates stay where they're supposed to say, it's part of the security. But it's the security of the corrections officials that's paramount, not the security of inmates. Prisons don't have lockdowns to protect the inmates, they have lockdowns to protect the CO's and control the inmates.

So, what I'm confused about is Why do schools have lockdowns? What's the purpose? Who's security are we concerned about and what are we keeping them secure from?

The school lockdown that made everyone aware of the practice of lockdowns outside of a prison setting was the one at Columbine High School. What was very clear in that case was that the security being ensured by the lockdown was the security of the responding police officers, not the security of the students.

The students where in the process of being killed while police secured the perimeter of the school, to enforce a lockdown. So, exactly how are parents supposed to respond when they learn their child is in a school under lockdown?

According to school officials in Winslow, New Jersey they are supposed to respond with quiet compliance, the same way the children being locked down are supposed to respond.

Meanwhile, some parents criticized the behavior of other parents during the four-hour lockdown of the high school as police investigated a report of an unidentified gunman in the school on Thursday.

According to a letter Swirsky sent to district parents, a student reported seeing an unidentified male student in a stairwell lift his T-shirt to reveal a gun after making a threatening statement. Neither the alleged gunman nor a weapon was found.

During the lockdown, about 200 parents appeared at the high school in a scene that verged on chaos.

Some parents accused officials of lying to them by telling them that the incident was simply a drill.

Swirsky has said employees had been directed to advise parents that an investigation was under way at the school.

On Monday, the criticism was directed at the parents who showed up at the high school during the ordeal.

Dawn Pearson, the mother of two students and a district teacher, said if the parents had flocked to the high school during a true emergency, they could have undermined any rescue effort.

Lockdowns do not facilitate a rescue effort. They make it easier for police to search for the bad guy and protect students from being accidently killed by police who can't tell the bad guys from the good guys. They do not help in any rescue effort, and lockdowns do not protect the students from the existing threat. Lockdowns only protect students from new threats introduced by nutcase cops running around with guns.

We should stop the practice of instituting a school lockdown whenever a school is faced with some threat. School evacuations, maybe. School lockdowns, never.

This is not a drill

We used to have combat drills when I was in the Navy. Shooting drills, abandon ship drills, collision drills, fire drills, etc. (we never had a repel boarders drill, although it turned out later we should have). Never, during a drill, where we told it was not a drill.

When we went to General Quarters (combat) for real we were told "This is not a drill". That phrase was part of the official broadcast announcement on the ship for when we went to emergency stations. "This is not a drill".

They didn't fool around with that phrase because you knew that when you heard that phrase you were supposed to kill somebody. That phrase struck fear in the hearts of brave men, because it actually meant something and we knew what it meant.

It seems that officials at a school in Tennessee have decided that it's not important to make sure that words retain a real meaning

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. -- Staff members of an elementary school staged a fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it was not a drill as the children cried and hid under tables.

The mock attack Thursday night was intended as a learning experience and lasted five minutes during the weeklong trip to a state park, said Scales Elementary School Assistant Principal Don Bartch, who led the trip.

When you teach kids that it doesn't mean anything when you tell them "it's not a drill" then what do you do when it really isn't a drill? Are you going to have a way to communicate that? Do these teachers think it might be important to be able to communicate that?

I can't believe they had a drill and told people it was not a drill. I'm just stunned by the danger inherent in such a thing.

During the last night of the trip, staff members convinced the 69 students that there was a gunman on the loose. They were told to lie on the floor or hide underneath tables and stay quiet. A teacher, disguised in a hooded sweat shirt, even pulled on a locked door.
After the lights went out, about 20 kids started to cry, 11-year-old Shay Naylor said.
"I was like, 'Oh My God,' "she said. "At first I thought I was going to die. We flipped out."
Principal Catherine Stephens declined to say whether the staff members involved would face disciplinary action, but said the situation "involved poor judgment."

There's an emphasis on how frightened the drill made the children, and the cruelty of doing that. But the stupidity of the teachers runs much deeper than that. The most important thing in an emergency is that people actually know it's an emergency.

They blew the tornado sirens the other night here in Cushing, Oklahoma. I got out of bed, got dressed, got a flashlight, turned on the TV, prepared to go to my backyard storm shelter if the situation warranted it. That's because I knew that when they blow that siren it's not a drill. It's not time to fool around. Those kids need to know that when their teachers tell them it's an emergency that it's not time to fool around. They no longer have any way to know that.

That kind of behavior by the school staff actually puts the children at future risk.

Update:
Instapundit pointed to my post. I'm impressed.

I made a comment on a post by Ann Alhouse.

After being assured it's not a drill, the rational response by the students would be to find a weapon and kill whoever was pushing against the door.

As pointed out above, the irrational teachers never thought of that possible response, they just assumed hiding under the furniture is the response that would be taken by everyone.

I commented on this earlier this morning. The real problem is that drills like this one tend to make students less safe, not more safe.