Virginia Tech shooting shows campus security has come a long way

Bradley Kamcheff

When reports emerged from Blacksburg, VA, last Thursday afternoon that a shooter had descended upon Virginia Tech’s campus, confirmation that a campus police officer had been killed and headlines of a possible second victim overwhelmed news channels, Websites and every social media outlet.

Throughout the day, there was a jarring litany of that old cliché by anyone that remembers the unspeakable tragedies of April 2007, which claimed 33 lives on Virginia Tech’s campus:

History really does repeat itself.

However, the afternoon of December 8, 2011 will be remembered very differently than the catastrophe that befell the institution just over four years ago. It will be marked as a comparative milestone in the evolution of campus security. It’s a testament to the drastic changes that have been made to emergency notification systems that keep our nation’s student and faculty populations informed and secure.

On Thursday, students and campus personnel were notified within six minutes via text messages, e-mails, updates to the university's Website, Twitter and public address system that shots had been fired in a campus parking lot at 12:30 p.m.

As events unfolded, five more alerts were issued to the campus community while the university remained on lockdown. Within less than an hour of police being dispatched to the scene, students and faculty had been provided information on the location of the shooting and recommendations on how to stay secure, a detailed description of the gunman and finally news that a campus police officer had been killed and that there may have been a potential second victim.

The details would come out later -- the gunned-down police officer was 39-year-old Officer Deriek Crouse, a trained firearms and defense instructor and father of five. The second victim was the apparent gunman, who died of a self-inflicted wound by the same weapon he allegedly had used minutes before to kill Crouse.

What remains a silver lining amidst these inexplicable, very tragic events is the university’s response time and ability to keep the rest of the campus population secure and aptly notified. While it had taken nearly two hours for a message to be dispatched to the campus population during the 2007 shooting, the campus was locked down this time within minutes.

This is the outcome we’re all striving for as systems manufacturers in this industry; to provide systems that will issue crucial information to -- and ensure the safety of -- the campus community as quickly as possible.

And if the response to last week’s incident on Virginia Tech’s campus is any proof, in just four years, we’ve already come a long way.

Brad Kamcheff is the senior marketing specialist with Aiphone Corp. He can be reached at:

brad@aiphone.com