Introduction
School shootings are a pervasive safety and security issue that continues plaguing the nation for the past several decades. There is a need to implement effective and consistent solutions that would guarantee the safety of the population while also providing a measure for risk assessment and prevention. The issue will be discussed in regard to the Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment implemented between 1972 and 1973. The experiment was carried out by the Kansas City Police Department that would initiate different levels of the patrol with the help of fifteen beats. Routine preventive patrol “was eliminated in five “reactive” beats, normal routine control was maintained in five “control” beats, while in five “proactive” beats, the patrol was intensified by two to three times” the standard (Stevens 87). The aim of the experiment was to determine whether the citizens in the community would notice changes as well as whether people would be satisfied with the levels of patrol implemented by the police. In addition, the experiment had the objective of measuring the changes in recorded crimes as well as related behavioral change.
Main body
Despite the increased efforts of the Kansas City Police Department, the core finding was that the citizens did not notice any difference in patrol levels. The intensified patrol did not influence commercial or residential burglaries, auto thefts, or vandalism. All of the mentioned offenses could be prevented by the normal degree of control. Therefore, the implication of the experiment was that the increasingly visible presence of the police force did not influence reducing crime in certain circumstances. Instead, the focus could be shifted on initiative targeted crime prevention as the primary police deployment strategy instead of routine preventive control.
Assuming that the results of the study are valid, increasing patrol around public schools may not have the expected effects on preventing shootings. Concerned parents should understand that there is little to no value in increasing the number of police officers patrolling public schools in preventing crime or making students, teachers, and other staff feel safe. Instead of routine preventive control, it could be more useful to invest resources and technology in targeted crime prevention that would be more efficient and effective in preventing shootings. The “class bias” argument does not hold up in this case because police patrols have limited resources and should respond to targeted crime prevention regardless of the area in which it is occurring.
Conclusion
With the limited human resources of the police department, addressing the potential threat of school shootings can be done by creating evidence-based threat assessment programs at schools, implementing expert-led security upgrades at schools, initiating effective and informed planning to address emergency situations, and creating safe and equitable schools. The police can assist the community by encouraging secure firearm storage and initiating background checks on all sales of guns. The collaboration between communities and the police force is imperative for achieving success in preventing shootings at schools. Schools should engage in proactive risk assessment and the reporting of their findings to local police for further processing and assessment (Every Town for Gun Safety). In addition, the support for extreme risk laws is imperative to ensure that police officer and family members can take proactive action to address the ganger of potential gun violence and prevent the access of at-risk individuals to firearms.
Works Cited
Every Town for Gun Safety. “Keeping Our Schools Safe: A Plan for Preventing Mass Shootings and Ending All Gun Violence in American Schools.” Every Town Research, 2020, Web.
Stevens, Dennis. An Introduction to American Policing. Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2018.