Film Study: Learning from North Kansas City High basketball game shooting
Coaches watch game film to figure out plays that work and which ones don't. School officials should do the same thing after a shooting on campus to analyze security plans and procedures.
CCTV video shows families and students running for cover when shots were fired at the end of the North Kansas City High basketball game on March 2.
An open records request from KSHB News obtained this surveillance video from the school. The actions of both the shooters and the attendees of the game are important for school officials to consider when planning for gun violence at school events.
Amid the chaos, five teens fired ~50 shots at each other during about 9 seconds time period. Two teenage brothers have been arrested while police continue to work to identify the other three shooters. A teen and an adult were wounded.
Planning and training for shootings at sports games?
Sports games are the second most common time period for a shooting on campus yet many schools do not have a specific plan or training for a shooting in or around the gym during a basketball game.
Games are often played between schools from different counties.
How is emergency planning coordinated with the visiting team?
Are students, staff, and families from the visiting school able to receive emergency notifications (usually text messages and app alerts)?
If police officers travel with the visiting team, do they have interoperable radios that can communicate with the home jurisdiction?
The same radio failures that contributed to 343 FDNY firefighters being killed inside the World Trade Center were cited as problems during the Parkland school shooting response. The school police at Uvalde were not on the same radio channel as other city and state officers.
Over the last 10 years, the number of shootings at school sports events has steadily increased. So far in 2024, there have already been more shootings during sports events than the entire year in 2015, 2016, and 2017.
If you are interested in more details about this problem, check out my feature articles about the rise in gun violence at high school football games on ESPN and NBC News.
Building lockdown?
As fans realized that shots were being fired outside, some of them ran back inside the school. CCTV shows a door to the school being held open so that people can get back into the building.
Locking down procedures inside a school assume that either the threat is kept out of the building, or people are able to put locked doors between themselves and the attacker. During a basketball game, classrooms and other rooms inside the school are probably locked and attendees cannot take shelter inside them.
Once a door is held open, what stops one or more of the five shooters from entering the school?
Where should people go inside the building when most of the rooms are locked?
If families and community members are hiding inside the building, how does the school notify them that it is safe to leave?
Armed staff?
With five different teens shooting at each other, would armed staff and armed Samaritans increase or decrease the risk of bystanders being shot? Just like most shootings at schools, random students and fans at the game are not the target. The most frequent situation that leads to a shooting is a fight that escalates.
Even with this CCTV video, police have not been able to identify three of the five shooters.
How do armed staff identify and communicate who they need to be shooting at?
How do police tell the difference between a teacher wearing a hooded sweatshirt with a gun and a teenager in a hooded sweatshirt holding a gun?
How can armed staff from the home high school identify armed staff from the visiting school?
Usefulness of security technology
Acoustic gunshot detection systems can send an alert to police within a few seconds. The time period from the first to last shot was about 9 seconds. This means the dangerous part of his incident when shots were being fired was over before a police dispatcher would have time to process and dispatch an acoustic gunshot alert. When officers get an automatic alert, a recent peer reviewed study found that police respond slower to ShotSpotter alerts compared to other calls.
Schools across the country have purchased software systems that use existing CCTV images to classify objects as weapons. From looking at this footage, North Kansas City High has pretty high-quality cameras around the campus but image classification software is only as good as the resolution of the cameras that feed it.
All five shooters are visible on the school’s CCTV cameras. Does classification software used by schools identify the visible handguns in these images?
When the duration of the shooting was approximately 9 seconds:
How would a school use visual or auditory firearms detection alerts to better address this situation?
Are the people working at and attending a weekend basketball game on the notification list for these alerts?
If you want more information about AI software at schools, checkout my article about it last month: How do AI security products being sold to schools really work?
Implications
School officials need to make sure that security plans, procedures, and equipment function under the most common circumstances for a shooting on campus.
A shooting during a sporting event with students, families, and staff from two different jurisdictions is not a worst-case scenario to plan for, it’s one of the most likely emergency situations a school will face.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database and a national expert on school shootings. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and Iowa Public Radio the day after the Perry High shooting.