CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – When the deadly shooting occurred, I was about half a mile away at my sorority house. I could hear law enforcement and the chaotic response.
I listened intently to what leaders had to say then and now, as I sat down with the university’s chancellor to find out what’s next for the university. Below are edited excerpts from that conversation.
My first question for you is in the press conference immediately following the August 28th shooting, you said that there were lessons to be learned and now a little over three months later, I’m wondering what you would say those lessons have been.
Well, let me just say that you prepare for days like that, that we had on August 28th, and you hope you never have to activate a plan.
We learned that we might be able to enhance our communication plan around it, and we made some adjustments around that that we saw that went into effect 16 days later when unfortunately, we had to have a second lockdown.
The active shooter training option. We want to look at ways to increase the number of individuals that are taking that active training, active shooter training, and most likely, I am in support of us requiring that of our students, faculty and staff. We are working on that right now.
Well, you also just said yourself and I know Chief Brian James has also said that he is in favor of mandatory active shooter training. I also want to make a note for our viewers that the incident report came out and that feedback from the portal. They also indicated that the Carolina community is largely in favor of it, but that still hasn’t happened at the university yet, and I’m wondering what’s holding the school back.
So that feedback we had about 3,600, 3,700 responses. I was very pleased that so many people offered up their feedback around their experience.
Like I said, there’s no perfect response to it. And part of that will be how would we develop and implement a mandatory active shooter training process.
Right. Well, as you said, I mean, we’re going to know a lot more in the spring about what happened. We already know a lot more today about what happened. But one question that I have is could this shooting have been prevented?
There are sort of three areas that we are focused on right now. The first is, you know, the actual response. Some of the things we just talked about, what can we improve upon, whether it’s around communication, whether it’s around the, you know, the trainings that that should be put into place. The second area is around the physical space. What can we do better to not just locking down facilities, but also thinking about the way in which we would route traffic and whether it’s pedestrian traffic or cars around campus to try to prevent some of the chaos that can ensue in an event like that. And then I think the third area is perhaps the one that you’re referring to, and that is what are the what are the root causes of of an event like that. And we’re focused on that as well, and taking a real close look to see if something could have been prevented there in this situation.
Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz, thank you so much for being here.
Thanks so much.