Incident Prevented through Information-Sharing

Summary:
Polk Community College in Winter Haven, FL closed their campuses on September 22 in response to a threat that a 39-year-old work-study student, Randy Thurston, was going to shoot someone on campus. Thurston had been suspended because of several sexual harassment complaints against him, and then threatened to shoot one of his accusers. Read more about the investigation here.

Analysis:
This story provides a great illustration of how information about a potential campus shooting may be detectable before harm occurs -- but that the information is likely to be scattered among multiple people in small bits and pieces. In this case, campus personnel first became concerned about Thurston because of his inappropriate behavior. And although the college suspended Thurston, they didn't assume that the problem went away. Quite the contrary. They notified local police about their concerns and eventually three law enforcement agencies were cooperating on an investigation.

Finally, a therapist who was treating Thurston was allowed to share normally confidential information because Thurston had threatened someone. In the wake of the shooting at Virginia Tech, there has been a lot of discussion about laws and regulations that keep mental health professionals from being able to share information about a patient. But the fact is that every state has some type of "duty to warn" or "duty to protect" that requires mental health professionals to alert someone if their patient threatens to kill themselves or kill someone else. In a situation like this, the mental health professional does not necessarily lose their ability to treat the patient when they report a threat to police. In fact, the mental health professional can play a vital role in advising the court about options that could help reduce the threat and get the person the help they need.

Threat assessment is the process of looking for pieces of information that suggest someone is planning to do harm -- and then pulling them all together to see what picture emerges and see what can be done to prevent an attack. Nothing bad happened at Polk Community College because they did just that. The system worked.