Safety Pres 1 History

Hello, my name is Bob Harkins. I'm the Associate Vice President for Campus Safety and Security for the University of Texas at Austin. I want to thank each of you for taking time today to view these presentations. For the last two years, myself and other members of the campus safety and security community have visited throughout the campus to give presentations on our system here at the University of Texas. This presentation will serve as kind of a capsule cast of an overview of that system. We have divided it up into four divisions. The first deals with the history of campus violence. The second deals with the organization, structure, plans, and planning that have gone into the University of Texas at Austin Emergency Management System. The third element is the various types of communications that we use during emergencies and the fourth element is that outlining the individual responsibilities that we all have at the University of Texas. Let's go ahead and get started with the history of campus violence. The history of campus violence begins for the University of Texas on August 1st 1966 when Charles Whitman, a graduate student in the school of architecture, killed his wife, killed his mother, and then ascended the 307 foot tower and began a 96-minute shooting rampage on the students and the citizens of Austin. "This is a KLRN news bulletin. A sniper with a high powered rifle has taken up a position on the observation deck of the tower on the campus of the University of Texas. He is firing at persons within his range. All Austin area residents are warned to stay away from the University of Texas campus area." This resulted in a total of 17 people being killed, 30 people being wounded on that tragic day. But even in the worst of tragedies good can come out of that. From that situation the decision was made to arm the police at the University of Texas and across many college campuses in the nation. The concept of SWAT teams was evolved and became kind of a standard practice for police in these types of situations. And another one that's not thought of often is kind of the first time that EMS trauma centers were really called into a need at Brackenridge Hospital there was identified the need for the trauma center and trauma centers kind of began from that point forward. We move forward to April 1999 when in Colorado at Columbine High School Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold came to school that day on 20 April and began shooting in their classrooms and in the hallways of that high school. The result was 13 killed. There were 24 wounded and the significant event that comes out of that was watching police respond to that event. We had police officers that arrived on scene and they did the normal police practice of sealing off the area and waiting on SWAT teams to arrive. In the meantime shooting was taking place inside the facility. Out of that tragedy came the concept of alert training and the training of police officers, each and every police officer to form up into teams to go into to take out somebody who is an active shooter or somebody who is doing great damage to a community. We move forward to April 2007 when Cho came to the Virginia Tech that day to do violence to the students at the - Virginia Tech University. Cho killed two students in a residence hall. While the campus police and everybody descended on that residence hall he went to a classroom building, chained the doors, and began killing people in classrooms. He ended up killing 30 people in those classrooms - in the four classrooms, and wounding an additional 17 before he was actually killed by the officers that reacted to that situation. What came out of Virginia Tech is a big lesson for everybody was that two hours between the initial shootings in the residence hall and the shootings in the classroom building. The communications that did not take place to the campus have become an area that many people have looked at as a great deficiency - that university's ability to react to that situation. As we move forward, we come forward to September 28, 2010 - University of Texas again, when on this day Colton Tooley decided that he would come to campus to take his own life. You see here on the bus you see him moving on and sitting down, you can see the protrusion out of his backpack, that's his AK-47. He departs on Guadalupe and moves up to the campus and on this slide you'll see where there are some X's where he began firing in the air. He was as close to you as the person sitting next to you when he decided to open fire with his AK-47. He expended 11 rounds outside, had over 30 rounds on his possession. When he heard the siren go off on campus and heard police sirens responding, he pulled a ski mask over his face, went into the Perry-Castañeda library, went to the sixth floor and took his own life. We were lucky that day, sad that we lost a student from the University of Texas but very, lucky that he decided that he was not going to kill others and only kill himself. He came to campus to commit suicide and then that's what he did. When we responded to the events on September 28th we used a variety of means of communications. Within seven minutes we had 54,000 text messages distributed to the campus. We used sirens, the text messages that I had indicated, we used e-mail, we used the World Wide Web, we used pagers, TV's, social media, radios, and public media to get the message out to the campus. We had had cross training with the Austin Police Department. As a matter of fact the first two teams that went into the library to eliminate the threat were combined teams between Austin Police Department and University of Texas Police Department. Our ability to do this was based on our cross training that we had done earlier. So September 28th when you look back from August of '66 to September 28, 2010, a lot has happened and a lot of things have been done on this campus. Thank you very much for viewing these presentations on the campus safety and security system at the University of Texas. If you have any questions, please contact me at bharkins - h-a-r-k-i-n-s - @austin.utexas.edu. Thank you again for helping up make the campus safe and secure.