The Hindsight Culture

Great Debates
21

Well, I assumed he would have searched my bag once I had presented my student card had I been a student.

But the fact that the shooter WAS a student strikingly illustrates the level of security that would be required to bring the possibility of such heinous acts down to the desired level of zero possibility.

My ultimate point is that the the level of difficulty in accomplishing acts of horror like those we saw at VT is proportional to the strength of security in general as it applies to students, staff, and visitors.

It would be very, very difficult to achieve and maintain a level of security that would preclude the possibility of such horrible acts.

22

No, it would be impossible. I don’t know how many colleges and universities there are in Lebanon, but I’d guess there aren’t all that many. We’ve got thousands. And even if shooter couldn’t get into a university, he can just wait outside until the football game, or some such, is over.

23

Yes, for sure.

I was also thinking, ‘Ok, so the admins and police sound a campus-wide alarm immediately after the first incident. The entire campus goes into lock-down or is evacuated…and… so what? The shooter just waits until the all-clear is given and campus life returns to normal, whether that is later in the day, the next day, or whatever. He had the option to act whenever he wanted’

24

The thing that drives me crazy about all this “hindsight” stuff–and I’m attempting to watch or listen to as little coverage as possible, so I could be wrong–but why can’t this simply have been a massive coincidence? If the murders in the dorm were unrelated domestic violence (which does happen at colleges) and later the same day some other guy goes nuts and kills 30 people, how can not closing a 2600 acre campus with a population of 30,000+ (something I can’t imagine even being doable) be anyone’s fault in any way? I mean, it makes no sense to walk to some other dorm, shoot two people, leave, walk to a different building two hours later, and then shoot another thirty. Is it impossible to think that someone might have just managed to get away with murder thanks to an amazing coincidence and a handy dead man who had killed 30 people?

25

Why would anyone assume that a maniac gunman was on the lose and that the original shooting wasn’t just an isolated incident?

And how would you close down a campus of 30,000 people in two hours anyway? That’s like a small city. And how would it have helped? You have no idea where the gunman is going.

And it’s not like VA Tech is some military installation. What are they supposed to do? Sound ‘general quarters’ with some kind of air-raid siren and have 30,000 screaming students run into fortified bunkers?

I’m watching some dumb thing on Nightline or whatever last night with some ‘security profession’ giving advice on teaching kids to use their belt as a doorstop and how it’s ‘OK to throw a PC through a window’ in a crisis situation. Well no shit jerk.

Ours has become a cluture of timid, self-righteous, reactionary morons who are quick to blame and slow to actually do anything useful.

26

If the only alternatives were to (a) shut down the campus, or (b) business as usual, then I think there would be an argument for business as usual. (A very weak one, IMHO, but be that as it may.)

But that’s our old friend, the excluded middle. And the most obvious middle alternative would be - as I’ve been saying - providing information for others to act on as they chose. And in a way, I think the act of doing so would quickly have pushed things to alternative (a), shutting down the campus.

If you email all the professors, letting them know a gunman has shot and killed two students on campus this morning and hasn’t yet been apprehended, but they’re welcome to hold classes as scheduled or not as they choose, and if you email all the students with the same message, only giving them the choice to attend classes or not as they choose, and you call or fax the offices of the academic departments, telling them to post the warning on some classroom or building doors where students who missed the email can see it, then the campus in all likelihood mostly shuts itself down.

Again, if someone killed two people in my office complex, and the killer wasn’t immediately apprehended, I doubt they’d wait two hours before doing a lockdown and evacuation.

27

And if a killer with a gun had escaped the building next to yours and fled the city - as the police said in their initial report was what all evidence pointed towards - and yet your boss still kept your office closed, completely screwing your schedule and the schedule of 30,000 of your co-workers, you’d be in the Pit throwing a shit-fit.

28

Oh, I see: we’re excluding the middle again.

Whose post are you responding to? You’re certainly not responding to mine. You are arguing against measures I haven’t advocated.

But just for the hell of it - what evidence did they have, when they investigated the first shooting, that the killer had fled the city? What ‘initial report’ are we talking about? What questions did the university president ask of the cops to make sure they knew what they were talking about - to make sure the risk of a continued threat was so minimal, despite two dead bodies in a dorm on campus - that it wasn’t worth even notifying people? When did he first talk to the police?

29

I wouldn’t say I am arguing about the excluded middle, what I get annoyed about are the folks who can hypothesize the exactly appropriate response and actions and then decide that there was an incredible failure of judgement because that wasn’t done.

30

Yeah. This has bugged me too. In general, I think the campus officials handled the situation reasonably well but I have yet to hear anyone explain how you can be sure (or even pretty sure) that the perpetrator of a crime (in this case double homicide) has left the area.

I suppose one could assume that the criminal has left the area to avoid being caught. But that is just a little too “make an ASS out of U and ME” for my taste. The VT campus is a big area and if there is a murderer running around at large I think that whatever steps can be taken to warn EVERYONE in the campus community of this should be taken. After that, as RTF says, it’s up to the individuals to decide what to do.

31

Couple of things, specifically, on their warning approach or lack thereof.

  1. How in the hell do you alert students that aren’t on campus? If you advocate email, obviously everyone isn’t connected 24/7 and cell phones aren’t nearly as much of an option as mentioned.

  2. Again, if they locked down or cancelled classes, how quickly would that have taken effect? Especially after dealing with the initial crime and the subsequent police, discussing and deciding on a course of action and finally, getting the word out in whatever way they felt best. I’m thinking that perhaps 1 1/2 to 2 hours didn’t end up being that long after all given the situation.

  3. I do still believe that letting them leave if they wish, like schools do when there’s really bad weather and they’re already in session. Normally, they don’t officially close it down for the day if the kids are already there. I realize this was different, but considering the assumption that this was an isolated incident, I can see why they didn’t do either of the above. Finally, leaving, in my humble opinion is still your best bet. Of course you (and others) could be picked off by a potential sniper, but I feel that’s a more educated choice and would have far less casualties than being a sitting duck who might be methodically murdered.

32

So you don’t know whether you have a killer still on the loose on campus, which covers quite a bit of area, and extends into the surrounding town. Therefore you post notices on all the classroom doors, or all the building doors, that there is a killer running around loose, and classes may be cancelled. So what do you have? A whole population of panicky students, and word spreading like wildfire throughout the area. Nobody knows what to do, or where it’s safe to go. People get back into their cars and try to leave, driving oh-so-carefully of course in their frightened state of mind. Students try to decide whether to get out of there or hole up in the dorm or classroom building. And in the meantime the killer will be sighted in about a hundred different places, both on campus and around the city and state. And there will be reports of further shootings here and there, even if they don’t happen. Doesn’t sound like a good way to keep anybody safe, or to help the police get the initial job done.

The fact is, the first thing they had was an isolated murder in one dorm. They were working on that. There was no way anyone could have predicted the next step in the shooter’s agenda.

33

You can’t warn everyone. All I would expect would be a good-faith effort to warn those that you can, and hope that the tendency of students to talk with each other fills in most of the gaps.

That’s true for elementary and secondary schools. But colleges aren’t bound by that, since their students are adults that don’t have to be picked up by their parents.

34

Exactly. Nobody could predict anything. But they did know that the killer was armed, dangerous, hadn’t been apprehended, and while nobody knew whether he was still on campus, that applies both ways: they didn’t know he’d left either.

The problem with not telling anyone is that if anything goes wrong, you’re responsible. If you give people full information and they make the wrong decisions, then at least it’s on their heads.

True. But they don’t just go about their day, oblivious to the threat.

OK, fine.

They’d hole up with people they knew, people who they had reason to trust. Good.

Stuff like that happened on the morning of 9/11 too. Nobody got hurt because of it.

And how well did that work out?

While there’s a killer on the loose, isn’t the police’ most important job to make sure he doesn’t kill anyone else?

It’s like when there’s a jailbreak. The convicts could be anywhere. And you know what the authorities do? They let everyone know there’s been a jailbreak. They get on the radio and the TV, and warn the people. And everyone seems to muddle through OK. Would you rather that police not tell anyone when a jailbreak occurs, so they can ‘do their job’ and track down the escapees without interference?

35

True and I agree that one must try to the best of their ability. However, it’s my opinion that it would roughly have the same net results.

Ok, you are correct. But in my limited experience with college, students once released (even due to the cancelling of classes, because they’re information – by classmates one-on-one too – wasn’t anymore than what everyone else believed at that point, or even after the second shootings began) either go back to their dorms to hang out (which obviously in this case wouldn’t have been a good idea) or gather in places (like the commons, the cafeteria, the ante rooms, etc.) to hash out details.

36

All right, let’s consider this. Why have you assumed that this was a campus issue? The police had a pretty strong bit of evidence that it was the equivalent of a domestic dispute. The campus has 20,000+ students and some number of faculty and staff beyond that with 11,000 commuters coming in from all over.

When a domestic dispute murder occurs in a city of 20,000+, (40,000 if you include the surrounding town of Blacksburg), do you shut down the city (or even make a big deal about “warning” the residents) before you have a decent idea who you’re looking for? (The police initially had a separate suspect (which probably led to the early reports of two shooters) who was being queried when the second round of shooting broke out.)

With a domestic dispute and a likely suspect in custody, just what message do you broadcast? In contrast, a year or so ago, the school did shut down when a prison inmate killed a person and escaped with weapons, later killing a policeman, as well. In that case there was a known entity who had an obvious motive to be roaming a campus (looking for kids with money and cars). What percent of domestic disputes turn into massacres? (I am aware that several massacres have followed on the murder of spouses or parents, but it remains a really small percentage.)

The first warning was sent out 20 minutes prior to the second shooting:

There were also reports that the college began notifying RAs, by phone, soon after the first incident was discovered, although I have not seen any indication of how the warning was worded.

I think hindsight is a wonderful human ability. I think second-guessing is a less admirable trait.

37

Everything I’ve said above was based on the presumed absence of a suspect. I knew they hadn’t grabbed Cho; I had no idea they’d have managed to grab the wrong guy so quickly and authoritatively.

People have been making the argument in this thread that it was perfectly reasonable for the police and University administration not to have alerted the campus, not because a suspect was in custody, but because the police believed the suspect had left the university and the area.

Which in fact your own link supports:

I’d like cite for your new facts (not that I doubt you, but I’d still like to see where you’re getting this from), but anyway: if you’re going to criticize me for having the facts wrong, that’s fine. But if you’re going to criticize me for inappropriate second-guessing, shouldn’t you do that on the basis of the generally agreed-on understanding in this thread of what the police and the University administration would have and have not known in the hour or so after the first shootings?

38

WaPo, today:

Oh.

39

Another serious problem in the general population is the belief that they can be “safe”. As in “TSA screening at airports is required to keep us safe.” What is missing is that these people do not recognize that situations transition from highly dangerous to almost perfectly safe by passing through many shades of gray on the way. There is no “safe” there is only “less safe” or “safer”

This becomes a problem, because many people believe that “if we only do X, then we will be safe.” Of course since “safe” is a condition that can never be met, then X is never enough. So they are forced to look for “the” failure that caused the problem. Cost vs. benefit, and all sense of practicality is pushed aside, as we must become “safe”.

In this case, authorities made entirely reasonable decisions and actions based on information available to them, and the leagle enviroment in which they operated. The fact that the situation eventually became dangerous is no reflection whatsoever on the quality of those decisions.

40

Tom, I’m still curious about your claim that the police had a “likely suspect” in custody. Again, all I see is that the police knew of the existence of a boyfriend, and dispatched some uniforms to bring him in.

Even if they managed to bring Thornhill in before Cho started shooting up Norris Hall, I don’t see that even that demonstrates more than the police knew of the existence of a boyfriend, and were able to even put their hands on him.

That isn’t evidence. That’s acting on a knee-jerk assumption - an ancient assumption that if someone gets killed, the victim probably knew the killer. IIRC, it’s still a better-than-even bet, but by a much slimmer margin than it was 40 years ago.

And obviously, a lot depends on where the killing took place. If someone gets killed in their private residence, then the killer was either someone who lived there, or someone who was allowed in, or someone who broke in. The number of people who get killed each year by a stranger breaking into their private residence is not that large, no matter how it might fuel the home security business. Of course the killer’s probably going to be someone in the household.

A college dorm is a whole 'nother matter. Who has access to a dorm? First of all, the hundreds of students living there do, and many of them, in a large dorm, don’t know one another. Second, it’s not that hard, if you’re a student, even if the dorm has doors that lock, to just be there when someone’s leaving a dorm, and have them hold the door open for you.

IOW, there’s no logical reason that a college dorm killing should be assumed to be domestic, in the absence of other evidence.

And I doubt there’s good statistical evidence on that score, either: college dorms are so rarely the site of murders that the database, if anyone’s bothered to put one together, has to be pretty small and statistically unreliable.

So, barring still-unknown evidence, there was no reason for anyone to believe that this killing was a domestic crime.

At any rate, the question of whether this is merely hindsight will be adjudicated in court. Any bets on how that will come out?