Op Ed 10-4-24
Community members gathered at a makeshift memorial in front of Apalachee High School,
where two students and two teachers were killed in the shooting.
Credit…Christian Monterrosa for The New York Times
SOS: Surveillance on Shooters,
charting a new course out of our nation’s nightmare
By Marcie Powers and Tom Van Lokeren
Marcie Powers and her husband Tom Van Lokeren are founders of Save Big Trees, whose mission is to protect from the threat of catastrophic wildfire 1100 Giant Sequoia trees near their cabin in the heart of the Sierra Nevada mountains of CA.
It wasn’t just another school shooting. This was another shooting that could’ve been prevented – “100% percent,” as the sister of a student just gunned down declared.
The recent tragedy in Winder, Georgia at Apalachee High School – where a 14-year-old wielded an AR-15-style assault weapon to slay two students and two teachers, injure nine others and traumatize a high school and community – typifies what we believe is the biggest challenge schools face when it comes to averting school shootings: recognizing and acting on warning signs that school shooters almost always give well before they open fire, and doggedly gathering, analyzing, sharing and acting on intelligence.
In Georgia, red flags abounded. Cold-hard warnings were in plain sight. Critical intelligence wasn’t sought or shared. Concrete evidence once again dribbled out after the massacre.
As a Washington Post investigation concluded last week, it was “a story, like so many before, of neglect, dysfunction and missed or ignored warnings.”
We are repeating over and over again a massive failure of threat assessments and intelligence management.
Just as in the lead up to 9/11, there is simply not enough connective tissue between all the players to shepherd a school shooting threat to resolution without mass carnage.
It’s painfully obvious we have unrealistically put too much responsibility on the FBI, state and local law enforcement, and parents and schools, to solve this crisis alone.
Our idea is to create a national, independent non-profit organization – SOS: Surveillance on Shooters. A repository of all the lessons learned from past shootings, it would offer a comprehensive approach to intervening when the credible threat becomes known. Highly-trained, multi-disciplinary, feet-on-the-street specialists that can be consulted or called in to help schools and local law enforcement get a handle on a situation and create a unified command.
SOS would be run by former law enforcement experts in shootings, behavioral analysts, mental health professionals, cyber-security experts, forensic psychologists and licensed private investigators.
Two fathers of children gunned down in the Oxford, MI, mass school shooting in 2021 told us they welcome the idea of a non-governmental organization to look to for help.
“The government in all its forms, from schools to the legislature, are failing to deal with this national health crisis,” said Steve St. Juliana, whose 14-year-old daughter Hana was killed. “At this point, any positive change in approach is badly needed. The families of the Oxford school shooting proposed a similar approach as SOS to Michigan’s governor, yet almost no action has been taken so there is definitely a need for an organization like SOS.”
Buck Myre, who lost his 17-year-old son Tate, said: “I’m all for the idea of better communication and information sharing to connect the dots and potentially help perpetrators with the support they need so an evil act does not occur. We will not gun-legislate ourselves out of this crisis!”
Jim Cavanaugh, former career ATF special agent in charge, has encouraged us to “go forward with this novel idea.” He expressed: “It is time for law enforcement to establish these teams, with partners, to stop these killers on the front end. I have said it over and over on NBC networks ….Your idea for the non-profit organization/partnership might be the catalyst that makes it happen.”
SOS experts would be highly trained in identifying troubling behavior and conducting holistic investigations. They would advise and forge a connection with local law enforcement to collect intelligence from neighbors and relatives and other potential sources of information, analyze it and act on it. And help the troubled child.
SOS would be on-call to local law enforcement and schools – and fund – experts to train them. They would provide hands-on help to schools and establish much-heralded Behavioral Threat Assessment Teams to identify high-risk kids.
We have analyzed a plethora of school shootings and heard the same drumbeat of bumbling by law enforcement and missed opportunities by teachers and counselors, the same disjointed orchestration of surveillance and action to derail unstable individuals on the pathway to violence.
It’s time to chart a new course out of our nation’s nightmare.
We believe SOS – run by the best of the best, specially-trained personnel to
address each credible threat as a special mission – answers the call to rethink traditional policing with a trusted organization they can turn to and depend on to actively and competently help monitor potential school shooters. And doing it in part by nurturing relationships with people in the troubled individual’s circle to get to the bottom of the threat – and help the individual.
Now, to actualize our vision, we seek those with significant financial resources who want to solve big problems to fund SOS and get it off the ground, so we can get down to the business of saving precious lives. Please contact us at Surveillance On Shooters
| Surveillance On Shooters |
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Marcie Powers is a former press secretary to two US Congressmen and writer for the President’s Daily News Summary for President Ford. She had a 16-year career in executive communications and public affairs for IBM, plus 15 years in PR for high tech and Internet startups. Marcie’s father, FBI Special Agent in Charge Edward J. Powers, cracked the biggest robbery in 20th century America, the legendary Brinks Robbery. Tom is a former tax and forensic accountant and founder of an alternative advertising company for high tech startups in San Francisco. He and Marcie founded Save Calaveras Big Trees http://www.savebigtrees.org Retired, they live halfway between Yosemite and Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada mountains of CA. __________________________________________________LA Times:Anger builds after controlled burn badly damages California sequoias
Photo credit by Jan Hovey, Jan Hovey Media
Marcie and Tom and their community holding hands around two 500-2000-
year old giant sequoias badly damaged in a prescribed burn after what they
believe was a failure of operational surveillance by the state of California.
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