Many students are in the dark if there’s an active shooter on campus.
Nayyab Waleed: I have no clue at all what we do, to be honest.
That’s Nayyab Waleed, who’s in her first year at USC.
For junior Tyler Vondriska, knowing what to do in case of an active shooter is necessary because it keeps happening.
Tyler Vondriska: I haven’t really learned the safety procedures from USC itself, but unfortunately living in the United States I feel like I’ve been trained in schools throughout my entire life so I have a general sense of what to do.
Other schools teach their students what to do... says junior Grace Gerstner.
Grace Gerstner: When I was in like high school, we had like what we should do but I’ve never learned anything about what the USC protocols are.
which sadly.. like any other school... is not immune from threats...
Nick Zhao: I think it’s always a risk...
Sophomore Nick Zhao
Zhao: There definitely should be kind of a learning model...I don’t think they’ve ever went over that with us…I know what I should do, but officially no one’s ever told me anything.
USC doesn’t conduct any kind of drill to practice what to do in active shooter situations. Neither do other universities like UCLA, Chapman, or Occidental College.
But why don’t we?
Patrick Prince, the Associate Vice Provost for Threat Assessment and Management with Campus Wellbeing and Crisis Intervention, explained the trade-off of why — or why not — to hold a campus wide drill.
Patrick Prince: When you do a simulation…how do you do it in a way that doesn’t create more emotional distress and triggering than it does comforting and teaching?
Prince: Does it have the real outcome we’re looking for?
Prince says strategic rather than systemic training, is the best option. He says training their administration.. faculty.. and staff... is more efficient than trying to train all students.
Prince: The more effective training is with senior leadership, with our DPS, with our first responders. And to do it system-wide doesn’t really seem to have a positive return on investment.” “We could probably do them all day, every day, and still miss a lot of folks.
Prince says USC’s measures are multi-faceted and complex...
Prince: We do our threat assessment as a layer. We do our emotional intervention as a layer. We do our follow up. We’ve got people of concern that we pay attention to, some times years after they leave USC.
The Department of Public Safety’s active shooter protocol is published on their website..... which contains a lot of important and helpful information about what to do in case of an active shooter... with links to videos . And if there is an emergency... students and others should be alerted through DPS’s emergency text notification system called TROJANS ALERT.
And at a minimum.. remember this from Patrick Prince... Run. Hide. Fight...
Prince: The first thing you need to do is get away, run. If you can’t run, then you hide until you can run. And if you can’t run or hide, then you fight until you can run.
Run. Hide. Fight...
Run. Hide. Fight...
Run. Hide. Fight...
Let’s hope we never have to use that...
For Annenberg Media, I’m Sophie Sullivan.