Guest: Retired police chief Patrick Flannelly served 27 years with Lafayette Police Department which borders Purdue University in Indiana. He served 10 years as chief of the department and now hosts of the Coptimizer Podcast.

Brown University has 235 buildings (most built between 1770-1926) on its 143-acre urban campus in downtown Providence, RI. The school has 20,000 students in a community of 200,000 people.

Latest photos of suspect (white male around 5’8”):

Locations of the doorbell cameras where photos of the suspect were recorded:

Background on Brown University shooting:

* Why hasn’t the Brown University shooter been arrested yet?

* Brown University school shooting and brief history of higher ed attacks

* Prior episode with Patrick: Systematic Failures: Why Predictable Problems Repeat at Schools

David Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.

School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

New Paper: Run, Hide, or Freeze: Social and Emotional Influence on Behavior in an Immersive School Shooting Simulation

Abstract: As school shootings rise in frequency across the United States, understanding how individuals respond during such crises is critical for developing effective safety protocols. This study used an immersive, computer-based simulation to investigate how social influence and emotion level from non-player characters (NPCs) affect behavior during an active shooter event. A total of 285 participants were randomly assigned to one of six experimental conditions varying NPC behavior (run, hide, or mixed) and emotional intensity (high vs. low). Participants were more likely to run when surrounded by NPCs who ran and more likely to hide when NPCs hid, showing that social influence significantly shaped behavior. Emotional evocative imagery and sounds, however, did not significantly affect decision-making. Increases in negative affect after the simulation and male gender were also associated with a greater likelihood of running. These findings suggest that visible social behavior, rather than emotion, drives emergency responses and highlights the value of social modeling in safety training.

Guest (primary author): Kevin Kapadia, PhD candidate in Quantitative Psychology at University of Southern California

First Paper (part 1 of the simulation series): The Impact of Social Influence and Threat Uncertainty on Behavior in a School Shooting Simulation

David Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.

School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Article (pre-submission/pre-publication): Early Medical Response in Active-Shooter Incidents. A Systematic Review of After-Action Reports

Guests:

* Dr. Dominique Wong is an attending physician the Cabell Huntington Hospital Emergency Department and chair of the hospital’s Medical Readiness Committee. She also serves as a tactical physician and medical director for police SWAT and Tactical EMS teams, trains law enforcement officers and the US military, and serves in leadership roles with the American College of Emergency Physicians, Tactical and Law Enforcement Medicine Section.

* Dr. Clay Young is a board certified emergency physician with over 25 years of clinical experience. As a former director of a flight service he has demonstrated leadership in pre-hospital emergency medicine. Dr. Young is committed to advancing public safety through the education and training of law enforcement personnel in life saving interventions and active shooter medical response. He is a graduate of the University of Kentucky college of medicine, a father of four, and an active hiker and fly fisherman.

* Dr. Beth Toppins is an emergency medicine physician practicing in her hometown of Huntington, West Virginia. A graduate of Marshall University School of Medicine, she has served as an Emergency Department physician at Cabell Huntington Hospital since 2003 and currently serves as the Emergency Department Medical Director. She previously held leadership roles in regional EMS and has worked alongside Drs. Wong and Young to provide medical training to law enforcement across West Virginia. Outside the hospital, Beth is a proud mother of four and wife to Eric, and the children’s pastor at Christ Temple Church in Huntington, where she is an active member.

Abstract:

* Background: Timely medical response can improve survivability in active shooter incidents (ASI). This systematic review evaluates law enforcement, emergency medical services (EMS), rescue task force (RTF) and tactical emergency medical support (TEMS) medical response in ASI.

* Methods: After-action reports (AARs) from U.S. ASI (1999–2022) were retrospectively reviewed. Point of injury (POI) medical response time for police, EMS, RTF, and TEMS was reviewed. Medical response type provided by law enforcement was also examined

* Results: Thirty-one AARs representing 19 ASI were analyzed. Police provided medical response in every case, most commonly (84%) casualty extrication. In 21% of incidents, law enforcement provided the full spectrum of response: direct care, extrication and transportation to a hospital. RTF victim access was frequently delayed and in 43% of incidents, RTF providers never reached casualties at the POI. TEMS medical response times varied. Barricade hostage situations delayed all medical responders.

* Conclusion: Police consistently provided early medical care in ASIs, while EMS, RTF and TEMS faced challenges accessing ASI casualties in a timely manner. These findings suggest law enforcement officers play a critical role in early medical response and may help reduce preventable deaths in AS incidents.

My additional points on this topic:

School shooting victims who could be saved with rapid transport to a hospital have died inside their schools because EMS crews are directed to wait outside until police issue an ‘all clear’ order. To address this long-standing problem, many agencies created combined EMS/police ‘rescue task force’ units or tactical EMS units with body armor to go inside and find victims…but these units take ~30 minutes to arrive and assemble. At this point, critically wounded students and teachers are already dead.

In October 2022, a teacher and student were shot with an AR-15 rifle inside CVPA High in St. Louis. They were still alive when police killed the shooter, yet EMS waited outside for 20 minutes until police gave the all clear. Teacher Jean Kuczka and 15-year-old student Alexzandria Bell both died waiting for help inside.

With military-style rifles being used by most school shooters, a school campus is like a battlefield where “the majority of combat casualties die within ten minutes of the trauma” (PubMed: Wounded in action: The platinum ten minutes and the golden hour). Instead of unnecessarily cautious policies that protect adult EMS providers against theoretical (and often imagined) dangers, we need to shift the status quo to accepting managed risks to save the lives of innocent children with critical gunshot injuries.

Here are two of my articles about this problem:

* When ‘Eddie Would Go’ so should police, fire, and EMS

* Wounded victims can die when plans are based on the ‘second shooter’ fallacy

David Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.

School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Interview with the directors of HBO’s new documentary Thoughts & Prayers. Their film premiers this Tuesday night at the DOC NYC film festival and is available streaming the same night. (note: I set up this interview, HBO didn’t ask me to promote this film or provide any financial incentive).

This 90-minute documentary traces the $3 billion active shooter preparedness industry in the United States and its effect on students and educators.

Here is the iPhone note that I wrote right after watching it:

This documentary is a postmodern 90-minute examination of the insanity of modern America. It shows the worst parts of fear and gore culture combined with capitalism. Nothing is more telling than the smirks and chuckles from the security product vendors as they boast about how each school shooting increases their profits. When people offer ‘thoughts and prayers’ after every attack, their words are as empty as the industry this film brutally portrays.

Zack Canepari is the award-winning director of ‘Fire in Paradise’ about the wildfire that destroyed the entire town and Jessica Dimmock directed an award-winning series ‘Flint Town’ about the water crisis and economic conditions in Flint, MI. They team up to present an absolutely gut-wrenching look into the school security industry. The format, presentation, and content is unlike anything I’ve seen before.

David Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.

School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Police to students: “The way you guys were eating chips, it picked it up as a gun. AI’s not the best. Can’t trust stuff like this at a school man. Good thing you guys didn’t run [laughs]...that would have made a major problem.”

Bodycam footage shows Baltimore County, MD police handcuffing 4 students who were waiting to be picked up after football practice when they got an alert from AI software that detected a gun on the school’s CCTV system.

What happened in Baltimore County is more than a minor technical glitch because four teens were forced to the ground at gunpoint because faulty software misinterpreted a bag of Doritos as a gun. The school district spent the equivalent of twenty-five teachers’ salaries on an AI system that can’t tell the difference between a snack and a threat. The outcome is students are even less safe when police with guns drawn show up on campus looking for a shooter who doesn’t exist.

Until AI can truly comprehend context rather than just pixel clusters—and using the most advanced models becomes financially feasible for video analysis—basing student safety on image classification probabilities will continue to cause avoidable disasters like this. When outdated 2010s machine learning software can’t tell the difference between a bag of chips versus a gun, it doesn’t belong on a school campus.

Read more:

* AI classified Doritos chips as a gun and then police pointed real guns at students

* CNN: I study school shootings. Here’s what AI can — and can’t — do to stop them

* How do AI security products being sold to schools really work?

* FTC takes action on school security tech vendor after investigation

* What happens when a school security startup fails?

David Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.

School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Host: Dr. Chris Bellavita, senior faculty at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security.

Guest: Dr. David Riedman, creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database and author of ‘How Critical is Critical Infrastructure’ (thesis chaired by Dr. Bellavita).

Articles mentioned:

* Imagining Future Homeland Security Threats: Known and Likely to Unknown and Unlikely

* Questioning the Criticality of Critical Infrastructure: A Case Study Analysis

* The Cold War on Terrorism: Reevaluating Critical Infrastructure Facilities as Targets for Terrorist Attacks

* Ep 59. Can AI and LLMs like ChatGPT assess school shooting threats?

* Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

David Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.

School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Guest: Allizandra Herberhold, LMSW, works with radicalized, at-risk, and violent teens and young adults to prevent mass shootings and counter violent extremism.

Host: David Riedman, creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database.

Samples of TCC Content:

TCC style cartoon that I used ChatGPT to generate:

Links discussed in the show:

* Allizandra’s Website: Parents4Peace. We center our work on those most affected by extremism—families and targeted communities—while equipping frontline professionals to intervene early and stop hate before it escalates. We address hate at its source, across every ideology.

* Ep 57. TCC, gore videos, groypers, and online radicalization

* Meme culture, Groypers, school shooters, and ‘Anomie Extremism’

* Discord Platform: What schools and parents need to know to prevent a school shooting

David Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.

School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Last week, I successfully defended my PhD dissertation. This episode is a short overview of my research on using LLMs like ChatGPT to assess threats of violence.

My Dissertation: LLMs Versus Human Experts: Mixed Methods Analysis Measuring Variance in School Shooting Threat AssessmentsAbstract: This study measures the unwanted variability in expert judgments by testing six frontier large language models (LLMs) on fictitious but realistic school shooting scenarios derived from 1,000 real threats made in the United States (note: there are approximately 100,000 threats made nationwide to schools each year).

Using prior decision science research, this dissertation measures the accuracy and consistency of assessments by LLMs compared to a prior study of 245 human law enforcement officers who rated the severity of the same six threat scenarios. Quantitative results demonstrate that the LLMs produced severity ratings within one point of the mean of ratings by human experts (ΔM ≤ 1) with no statistically significant differences (p > .05), supporting the primary hypothesis that LLMs can approximate the accuracy of human threat assessments. Aggregate LLM scores displayed lower variance than human ratings, showing both a wisdom-of-crowds effect and reduced judgment noise. Qualitative thematic analysis of narrative explanations revealed that LLMs consistently focused on specific aspects of the threats, while humans were influenced by lived experiences, adherence to formal procedures, and personal assumptions.

The findings suggest that LLMs can enhance the reliability of school-based threat assessments as part of a human-LLM hybrid team, or as the sole assessor in under-resourced or rural schools that lack trained human experts. This study contributes to the fields of behavioral economics, decision science, violence prevention, and serves as a framework for comparing the assessment abilities of LLMs to those of humans.

Freakonomics/People I (Mostly) Admire Interview (2021): Daniel Kahneman on Why Our Judgment is Flawed — and What to Do About It

David Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.

School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Guest: Simon C. Osamoh, a former British detective and security director at Mall of America.

Host: David Riedman, creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database.

Book: How to Survive a Mass Shooting: Practical Tools to Prevent Gun Violence and Protect Yourself When It Happens

David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.

School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Guest: Allizandra Herberhold, LMSW, works with radicalized, at-risk, and violent teens and young adults to prevent mass shootings and counter violent extremism.

Host: David Riedman, creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database.

Website: Parents4Peace. We center our work on those most affected by extremism—families and targeted communities—while equipping frontline professionals to intervene early and stop hate before it escalates. We address hate at its source, across every ideology.

Links discussed during the show:

* Meme culture, Groypers, school shooters, and ‘Anomie Extremism’

* Discord Platform: What schools and parents need to know to prevent a school shooting

* Another neo-nazi school shooter radicalized online

* Ep 54. School shooter felt "my only friend was my gun"

David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.

School Shooting Data Analysis and Reports is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.