#12 This Is NOT a Drill
Hello, friends. Thanks for sticking around. I really do appreciate it. The above cartoon shows my basic reason for not posting this stuff on Facebook. Like any writer I want people to see what I write.
And in that same spirit, I don’t often ask for much from you, but I’m going to ask that you do me a favor. If you like this newsletter, tell someone about it. Just one other person. If you all do that for me on any sort of regular basis, we could increase the population around here. Feel free to forward it to whoever or share it on social media. Unlike the previous version of this newsletter over on TinyLetter, this one is open to everyone.
And thank you again for your responses to these newsletters. Know that I read every one even if I don’t respond to every one.
Creatively, I’m preparing for my second residency at Goddard College in February. The first residency was one of the most enjoyable, creative, and challenging weeks of my life. After our classes we tend to gather at one of the houses we’re staying at and share our writing. I’m writing some things specifically for that purpose this time around.
Also with this newsletter, I tried something a little different. The essay ‘This Is Not A Drill’ took some time and considerable research. If you like this sort of thing, let me know and I’ll do more of that kind of thing. And if you don’t like it, let me know so I don’t waste my time.
What I’m Listening To
I’ve long been a fan of James Blunt. You may be familiar with him from his most famous song, ‘You’re Beautiful’. Many of his songs sound desperate or sad. I’ve often seen videos of him singing with tears in his eyes. And so one might easily dismiss Blunt’s latest video, ‘Monsters’, as just another song he sings on the brink of tears, but this one is different. He’s not singing about lost love. He’s singing about his dying father. And while I am lucky enough to have both my parents still around, I’m all too aware of their mortality as we get older.
The video shows him singing directly at the camera, eventually showing Blunt sitting continuing to sing the song next to his real life father (who is in desperate need of a kidney transplant). All proceeds from royalties from the video go to Help for Heroes and the British Legion. Both James and his father are veterans.
What I’m Clicking On
Many writers I know and many more I don’t know have been talking a lot about this article in the Atlantic. It’s a speech given by George Packer on his acceptance of the Hitchens Prize. I agree with much of what he says and am thinking about the rest.
In case you needed another reason to get off of social media, let the New York Times tell you about Clearview, a facial recognition software company that compares your image with social media and gets a hit 75% of the time. Of course there’s no information about the percentage of false positives and the technology is being used by police departments across the country. So here’s hoping everyone who looks like you manages to avoid law enforcement.
In politics, Bernie Sanders supporters are turning on him because he’s become too popular. Some of them apparently feel that Joe Rogan supporting him is too much. I was a supporter of Bernie early on in 2016, but stopped because many of his followers I interacted with criticized me for not condemning Hillary Clinton. It’s not enough to endorse Bernie Sanders. You must be the right kind of person to support him and you must support him in the right way because not only is Bernie sinless but so are his followers. Or so the rhetoric seems to go. One does not build a coalition that can win elections by imposing purity tests on those who support the candidate. It seems many in the Bernie camp have yet to learn this despite their loss in 2016.
Also in politics, four years ago Corey Lewandowski was running Trump’s Presidential Campaign. Now he’ll send you a personalized birthday message for $55.
What I’m Thinking About:
This Is Not A Drill
On April 26, 2013 an Oregon elementary school teacher named Linda McClean at Pine Eagle School District No. 61 was reading emails at her desk when she heard a loud bang. She turned in her chair as a man in a black hoodie and goggles entered her classroom, pointed a pistol at her, and pulled the trigger.
On December 6, 2018 in Florida at Lake Brantley High School a shaking voice on the school intercom announced that they had a Code Red lockdown. He added before signing off, “This is not a drill.” At the same time teachers at the school received a text message via an emergency app the school district paid for. It said:
“Active Shooter reported at Brantley/Building 1/Building 2/ and other buildings by B Shafer at 10:21:45. Initiate Code Red Lockdown.”
Having heard that Lake Brantley had gone to Code Red, a nearby Middle School went to Code Yellow. Children at the Middle School who had siblings at Lake Brantley cried for fear of their safety. At least one student at Lake Brantley fainted. Another vomited. Another hopped a fence and ran away from campus. Many texted their parents to say goodbye.
Almost exactly a year ago, a group of armed men entered Meadowlawn Elementary School in Monticello, Indiana. They took the teachers four at a time into another room and shot them in the back. The remaining teachers outside could hear screaming in that room. Then the gunmen came and grabbed four more and did the same to them. One of the men said, “”This is what happens if you cower and do nothing.”
It will likely relieve you to know that no one was killed in these incidents. They were active shooter drills. In Oregon the man used blanks. In the Florida incident no one at the school was told it was a drill until nearly an hour after it began. In Indiana the teachers were shot with plastic pellets.
This was part of something called ALICE training. ALICE stands for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate. On their website they proudly proclaim that they have ‘trained’ over 18,000,000 people in schools, businesses, police departments, and churches. Their courses can range anywhere from $500 to $5,000. It is not uncommon for school districts to expend tens of thousands of dollars for this training.
ALICE was founded as Response Options by Greg Crane and Allen Hill. Crane and Hill are two former members of the North Richland Hills Police Department outside Fort Worth, Texas. On December 15, 1999, they both participated in a SWAT raid on a home in which they had been told there was a marijuana grow operation. Though neither were on SWAT, they both showed up with Hill going in first. The raid was a ‘no knock’ warrant, meaning they did not announce themselves before coming through the door. They initially had trouble using a device to open the door. When they did, Troy Davis, who had heard someone trying to open his front door was aiming his 9mm pistol at the door. 1.8 seconds after that door came down, Allen Hill shot and killed Troy Davis. They eventually found three dead marijuana plants. Hill soon left the department after the incident due to the media coverage which among other things broadcast the fact that he was called ‘Peenie’ by his fellow officers because he had a habit of taking his penis out in front of other officers. This is one of the men who founded the company that would become ALICE.
Hill and Crane eventually had a falling out. Hill left to start his own company. Crane rebranded the company as ALICE. There is no mention of Hill on their company website.
If one were to only pay attention to headlines and breaking news stories one might be fooled into thinking that school shootings are an everyday occurrence. It seems that we’re always hearing about them and that they’re increasing on such a level that this sort of training seems at least understandable if not justified. But the truth of the matter is that in the last twenty years more children have been struck and killed by lightning than have been shot and killed in active shooter incidents at school. A Harvard professor estimates that on any given school day between 1999 and 2018 a student has a 1 in 614,000,000 chance of being shot at school. Another study found that school shootings accounted for only 5% of education related deaths. Compare that with transportation to and from school causing 36% of fatalities. In raw numbers there have been only 81 school shooting deaths in the United States over the last 20 years. 64 of them were children. These numbers often get inflated by including every incident involving a gun or gun suicides at schools, but the fact of the matter is that in a nation with over fifty million students, less than a hundred of them were shot in an active shooter situation.
It should go without saying that even one child shot and killed at a school is too many and that anyone who has lost a child to a school shooting isn’t going to consoled by the fact that such an occurrence is rare, but the fact that it is rare should give the rest of us pause when it comes to reacting to these shootings.
If these active shooter drills were simply an overreaction to a rare but deadly occurrence we could lump it in with the rest of the security theater that we engage in here in America. We take off our shoes and can’t carry containers of liquid onto planes for the appearance of security, but we know such actions are largely unnecessary. But unlike taking off one’s shoes, active shooter drills are not harmless and I’m not just talking about the welts.
Those teachers in Indiana were not told they were going to be shot with anything. All too often these drills involve children who are traumatized by these armed men running around pretending to shoot their teachers and classmates. ALICE claims to have engaged in these drills in over 5,000 school districts. By their own accounts, they have potentially traumatized millions of children and got paid for it. And yet there is little, if any indication that these so called training sessions have helped save even one life.
Since there seems to be little or no evidence that active shooter drills do what they claim to do, it’s worth looking at what these drills actually accomplish.
Perhaps the biggest problem with these drills is that they can easily traumatize the very people we’re trying to protect. Melissa Reeves, a former president of the National Association of School Psychologists and a professor at Winthrop University told NPR:
“Well, what you’re doing is you are creating a sensorial experience, which really heightens all of our senses. And what these drills can really do is potentially trigger either past trauma or trigger such a significant physiological reaction that it actually ends up scaring the individuals instead of better preparing them to respond in these kinds of situations. And there’s actually examples of where these drills have been done very irresponsibly and they have traumatized individuals or have actually led to bodily harm.”
Beyond traumatizing teachers and children, these drills also cost school districts a tremendous amount of money. I’m not just talking about money spent on training or security equipment. There have been dozens of lawsuits in the wake of these drills. Linda McClean, the Oregon elementary school teacher who had a gun fired at her face during the drill in 2013 sued the school district and won an undisclosed amount. One state found that during just two years of active shooter drills, they had paid out over $400,000 in compensation thanks to lawsuits from individuals who were traumatized or injured during this security theater.
One might wonder why ALICE isn’t getting sued. A waiver from 2018 that they have participants sign includes the following:
ALICE has a release form for participants to sign. It includes the following:
“Participation in the Course carries with it certain inherent risks that cannot be eliminated regardless of the care taken to avoid injuries. The specific risks vary from one Course to another, but the risks range from (1) minor injuries such as scratches, bruises, and sprains (2) major injuries such as eye injury or loss of sight, joint or back injuries, heart attacks, and concussions to (3) catastrophic injuries including paralysis and death.”
The flip side of these drills costing money is that it also makes money. School security is a $2.7 billion industry. With everything from training to prepare for something that almost definitely won’t happen to bulletproof backpacks to the app used in the Florida drill, there is money to be made by keeping people afraid of something that kills less children than drowning. Last year the government allocated an additional $70,000,000 for the sort of training ALICE provides.
Like the fear caused by these drills, they show no sign of dissipating any time soon. There are 42 states with laws requiring some form of active shooter drills. So while your child will likely never encounter a real active shooter at their school, they are very likely to experience one of these drills.
Whenever we see the horrific images from a mass shooting at a school we are compelled to ask how we can prevent this. Our fear of it happening again or happening to our children at our schools can cause us to overreact or act irrationally. As parents and responsible citizens we owe it to the children we claim we want to protect to fight this fear with common sense and tell our representatives to do the same. Active shooter drills are not effective at limiting mass shootings. They are traumatizing the people we want to protect and giving profits to people who do not deserve them. Quite frankly, it’s just wrong.
Sources for more reading on the topic:
School shootings are extraordinarily rare. Why is fear of them driving policy? - The Washington Post
We always overestimate the risks of horrible events.
ALICE Training Institute Is the Company Behind America’s Scariest School Shooter Drills | Teen Vogue
There’s little evidence that confronting gunmen works.
That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed this newsletter, tell someone. Share it. Tell me what you liked.
If you didn’t enjoy it but still got down to this part, let me know what you’d rather I write about.
- Jack Cameron