Elisa Meggs had a sister and several friends at Northern Illinois University when a gunman opened fire in a lecture hall last February.
"It was scary," Meggs said. "After the NIU incident, I'd always look at the door if someone was late for class."
Still, the Weinberg sophomore and others at Northwestern said they think a new training program meant to prepare students and faculty for a similar situation might only make things worse.
"Shots Fired on Campus" is a 20-minute video that walks students through their options if ever caught in an "active shooter situation," said Randy Spivey, executive director of the Center for Personal Protection and Safety, who developed the program in conjunction with the FBI.
The video shows viewers how they could survive an attack by running, hiding or working together with others to overpower the shooter.
The program also teaches viewers how to use readily available items such as laptops or textbooks as weapons and how one might recognize red flags in potential attackers.
"It could actually do more scaring than preparing," Meggs said. "And if something like this were to happen, I would probably run or hide, but I'd be too panicked to think, 'Oh, I should do whatever the video told me to do.'"
The video, filmed at Eastern Washington University and Gonzaga University, was released in June and has been used by 525 colleges and universities nationwide, said Spivey, who used to run hostage-survival programs for the U.S. Department of Defense.
"After the Virginia Tech tragedy, we saw that there was a real gap in training people in what to do in an event like this," he said.
The video, which features a dramatization of an on-campus attack and interviews with law-enforcement experts, sells for $495. For an additional $1,000, colleges can display the defense video on their Web sites, he said.
Although Northwestern has yet to purchase the video, Assistant Chief of University Police Dan McAleer said his office and the Division of Student Affairs are considering using the film.
"We haven't decided yet whether we are going to utilize it," he said. "We are still reviewing our options, but it's likely that we are going to utilize that product or something similar to it."
It's important to educate people on how to protect themselves, McAleer said. And according to Spivey, that's exactly the idea of the program.
"There's a huge difference between a trained individual and an untrained individual in response to a crisis," he said. "An untrained individual might be startled, fearful and move into panic mode, but this is the exact wrong thing to do."
But a video like this might not work, said sociology Prof. Thomas Durkin, who teaches the freshman seminars Crime, Torture and Justice and Social Interaction: Individual and Society.
Durkin, a former prison guard, warns that there are consequences to using those kinds of videos.
Although it might be a good product, anti-crime programs are complicated and don't always work out the way they are intended, Durkin said.
"For example, the D.A.R.E. program spread like wildfire because it indicated that as a community we are serious about something," Durkin said. "Unfortunately, the research has shown that D.A.R.E really doesn't do that much, but it still goes because people say, 'Well it has to look like we are doing something.'"
The video could also create more situations like the one Meggs described, where students are paranoid while in class, said political science Prof. Lars Toender.
"It's really important that we approach this in a sensible manner," Toender said. "But if all it does is play on people's fears, that kind of approach might turn Northwestern into a place we don't want it to be."
alexfinkel@u.northwestern.edu
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