Seven systemic failures before the school shooting at Apalachee High

The FBI and police failed to take action on months of threats and red flags. School officials failed to act 30 minutes before the shooting when they received an overt warning.

Even with limited information available about the attack at Apalachee High in Georgia, I see at least 7 major systemic failures. Success in any one of these areas could have prevented the attack before anyone was murdered or wounded on the campus.

1. FBI and Georgia law enforcement failed to act on obvious red flags.

2. Lack of an emergency action plan and training at Apalachee High for how to deal with a phone call about an imminent threat.

3. School officials wasted 30 minutes after a warning phone call instead of taking immediate action to protect students.

4. Staff spent time searching for the wrong student because they lacked resources, training, knowledge about enrolled students, or didn’t have systems to figure out where students are on campus.

5. In a resource constrained environment, new security tech like panic button badges may have distracted administrators from critical tasks like planning and training for an imminent threat (instead of pushing a button when it’s already too late because 13 students and staff have already been shot).

6. School resource officers can respond quickly to a shooting but their presence on a large campus does not prevent attacks from occurring.

7. While Georgia has spent +$104M into school security tech, it appears that the state lacks a system to transfer education records and information about prior threats.

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If you missed my articles this week:

• Podcast Ep 14. Society, institutions, & communities have failed when a 14-year-old takes an AR-15 into Apalachee High

• Podcast Ep 13. How to prevent school shootings with Stephen Dubner

• Article: Data analysis of 'insider' school shootings like Apalachee High

• Article: Apalachee High follows the same patterns as hundreds of other school shootings

FBI and Georgia law enforcement failed

After the Parkland shooting, the FBI paid a $127.5 million settlement to the families of the victims because they interviewed the shooter and failed to take appropriate actions. The families of 19 of the victims in the Uvalde elementary school shooting filed a $500 million federal lawsuit against nearly 100 state police officers who were part of the botched law enforcement response.

And here we go again:

FBI Atlanta Statement on Incident at Apalachee High School

In May 2023, the FBI's National Threat Operations Center received several anonymous tips about online threats to commit a school shooting at an unidentified location and time. The online threats contained photographs of guns. Within 24 hours, the FBI determined the online post originated in Georgia, and the FBI's Atlanta Field Office referred the information to the Jackson County Sheriff's Office for action.

The Jackson County Sheriff's Office located a possible subject, a 13-year-old male, and interviewed him and his father. The father stated he had hunting guns in the house, but the subject did not have unsupervised access to them. The subject denied making the threats online. Jackson County alerted local schools for continued monitoring of the subject.

At that time, there was no probable cause for arrest or to take any additional law enforcement action on the local, state, or federal levels.

At some point we shouldn’t be shocked that the FBI and law enforcement are dropping the ball because there haven’t been any meaningful changes made to address the systemic failures. We need a standardized national reporting system like we created with See Something, Say Something after 9/11.

The FBI also can’t do basic things like count how many active shooter incidents happen at schools each year: Seven 'active shooters' at schools the FBI forgot to include in their 2023 report

These persistent failures to identify threats, share information between agencies, and communicate during critical incidents happen during school shootings, and same same failures happened with the US Secret Service during the attempted assassination of Trump: Systemic failures before the Trump assassination attempt are the same as school shootings

Emergency action plan and training

What should a school administrator do when they get a phone call from a parent warning that a student is “suicidal and homicidal” and there is an “extreme emergency” about to happen?

The time to figure out what to do to address an imminent threat is not when you answer the phone. This is an extremely predictable type of situation that a school should have a plan and training for.

Schools across the country deal with threats, hoaxes, social media posts, and phone calls every day. By my estimates, there are more than 100,000 school shooting threats made every single year. I’ve co-published a peer-reviewed paper about school shooting threats and the lack of standardization for how to deal with them. I co-wrote an Op Ed in the LA Times 3 years ago about needing a standardized playbook for how to deal with threats.

In my four part series on how school police officers assess school shooting threats, the most important finding is that there is HUGE variation in how individuals perceive and take action based on different threats. The very first episode of my podcast is with Dr. James Densley and we discussed the ‘noise’ in this process.

When the school got a phone call about an imminent threat and didn’t take actions that matched the severity of the situation, this is a failure rooted in lack of planning and training for this predictable situation.

Wasting 30 minutes after warning

When a school receives a threat—call from a parent, swatting hoax, note found in the bathroom—a decision about what actions to take needs to be made within seconds. There is a wide range of actions school officials and campus police can take.

Based on my study of noise, individual police officers made wildly inconsistent assessments when deciding the severity of school shooting threats. This has real world consequences because missing a threat can be deadly while overreacting unnecessarily shuts down a school.

Having multiple officers evaluate a threat individually and then using an aggregate of their scores yields more consistent results. Our most important finding is that no single person should be tasked with assessing the severity of a threat on their own.

Schools can’t gloss over the severity of planning and training for how to assess and respond to threats. This gets even more complicated when there is a combined shooting and bombing threat because these two elements have conflicting emergency procedures. Inaction—like what happened at Apalachee High—is not an option.

Searching for the wrong student

The names “Colt” and “Colton” are very close. So are Ashly, Ashley, Ashlee, and Ashlie. Regardless of how confusing kids with similar names might be, school administrators need to know who the kids are on campus and where they are during the school day.

The shooter was “Colt” and when his mother called the school to warn them about an “extreme emergency”, admins were confused and went looking for another student named “Colton”.

“Around the same time, a school administrator went to the son’s math classroom, but there seemed to be confusion involving another student in the class with a name similar to that of Gray’s son. Neither student was in the room, and the official left with a backpack belonging to the similarly named student, she said. The shooting began minutes later.”

School admins found Colton’s backpack while Colt pulled an AR-15 out of whatever bag he used to sneak an AR-15 assault rifle into the school.

Panic buttons are for when it’s already too late

There is a difference between creating a functional product and creating a product that consumers/users actually need (see: unnecessaryinventions.com). Do panic buttons address an information void or unmet need during a school shooting?

These alarm buttons also bring a real risk from false alarms and before a new alarm system is installed on campus, there are a few important questions that every school administrator should ask. (see: Faulty Active Shooter Alarms Cause Real Harm to Students and Staff)