Virginia Tech Security response, 2 missing hours, was this a colossal failure of imagination ?

Question

I believe we have a duty to preserve the honor and dignity of those individuals effected on Monday. We can only honor these individuals , their family and friends, their colleagues and their brothers and sisters in nation by asking the difficult questions surrounding the decisions made by the University and Security personnel not to notify everyone on campus that they were in fact ( as they have admitted ) not 100% certain there was no gun man on the loose.
I've no wish to condemn the security personnel or the University staff....I've simply much less desire to see this on the news any time in the future. I therefore call on everyone to expand their understanding of what happened ...what went wrong ....how WILL we prevent this from happening in the future ......We are a thinking and willful scociety...We can and must be more careful and place at the center of our lives the Imagination for the better mechanisms of our safety...

Answer 1

Security and police watch WAY too much TV. They are willing to accept the first premise as the answer and stop investigating any crime as soon as they have a reasonably plausible explanation.

When they 'thought' it was a domestic dispute, they quit thinking altogether. This is a symptom of yet another problem as well, in which the police think that they don't have a responsibility to resolve 'domestic disputes' with the same alacrity as impersonal crime, on the premise that the killer is not interested in harming others.

Everything is NOT as neat and tidy as TV, and even real domestic disputes need immediate, full-scale attention if we're to successfully thwart murder sprees.

Answer 2

hindsight is ever 20/20. The police thought the first shooting was domestic - the kind of thing that happens all the time in the real world not TV, nora. Since they learned that the boyfriend owned a number guns, that was their best lead. They went after him and searched his apartment. They even pulled him over and took him into questioning. They did their job to the best of their ability.

Who could have possibly known or thought that it was the work of a deranged psycho who was out to randomly kill dozens of people two hours later? That kind of stuff usually only happens in movies and TV.

You insta-should-have experts would have been just as easily bewildered without the comfort of hindsight had you been involved in this situation a few days ago. Be real, people!

Answer 3

Put yourself in front of an easel with paints. What would make. There is no excuse for not searching the campus after the first incident no one could have guessed the second would happen. These "trained" people should have had enough vision to extend routine protection to the area just like they do when it is a house or business. Failure is a small word right now.

Answer 4

I don't see how campus security can be held to blame for this. They had a limited time in which to assess the situation, and they decided at that time that this was an isolated incident, and were looking for the first victim's boyfriend as a suspect.

Think about it, when a gun crime happens anywhere, the area itself is cordoned off, but not the entire neighbourhood. Who could have imagined what was actually about to happen? An email was sent for information and as a warning, but it's not easy to reach 23000 students, most of whom were on their way into college anyway, and it is a big campus.

I believe the staff responded in the best way they could at that time with the information they had. There was no way of knowing that there was a gunman about to do that. It's hardly a common event.

Answer 5

An investigation has been ordered by VT's president. You are raising questions that are of obvious concern to everyone.

Answer 6

home securty is still bad