From an increase in clear backpacks to prevent guns in school, reports of teachers bringing in active shooter preparedness kits, schools implementing more classroom protections like new door systems to some of the hardest hit school zones adjusting to new school safety laws, an increase in violence and high-profile active shooter incidents across the country have public safety inevitably on the mind of parents, educators and administrators.
According to CNN’s analysis of data from the Gun Violence Archive, Education Week, and Everytown for Gun Safety, the country has seen at least 53 school shootings this year with 37 at K-12 schools.
So far 2023 is on par with the 55 school shootings reported around this time last year. Over the past three years, mass shootings have been near record highs with numbers above 600 mass shootings annually according to the Gun Violence Archive.
Gregory Vecchi, Ph.D. the Director of Training for an active shooter preparedness system, SafeDefend and formerly the Chief of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, has focused on active killer situations for the past 15 years including during his time in the FBI as a hostage negotiator. Vecchi sat down with The Crime Report to discuss misconceptions both law enforcement and the general public have when it comes to active shooter prevention and response.
THE CRIME REPORT: Could you tell me a little bit more about your career in law enforcement?
VECCHI: I’ve got about 30 years of law enforcement experience. The majority of it was spent in the FBI as a special agent. I investigated drug traffickers and terrorists, hostage takers, outlaw motorcycle gangs, organized crime, and things like that. Then I ended up going out over to Iraq and I was embedded with the military’s FBI.
So I spent some time over there interviewing enemy combatants and doing the investigations. I was picking up body parts and stuff like this from roadside bombs and then trying to track all of the bombs and plans back to the US so we could get the information of plans that were ongoing, terrorist attempts.
When I came back, I was in the Crisis Negotiation Unit full-time as a hostage negotiator involved with international kidnappings in places like Haiti and Trinidad and Tobago. Then I got into the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit and eventually became chief of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit.
What we did in that unit is we would focus on the offender. The whole idea was it was behavior-based and the way we figure it, is that if we understand the offender, you understand the behavior or the meaning behind their behavior and then you can use that against the offender in your training for if you’re going to try to do an interview interrogation, or you’re trying to figure out if someone’s going to be violent. The type of offender I’m focused on, and have been for the last probably 15 years or so, has been the active killer: the person who ends up shooting up schools, shooting up workplaces.
And so that’s kind of leads me to SafeDefend and then after I got out of the Bureau, I also started a consulting company and I do a lot of threat assessments. I also spend a lot of time still working on the prevention piece, trying to figure out who’s going to be violent and how to train them so that you can better assist in stopping violence before it happens.
TCR: How has an increase in mass shootings in the last few years or more so the current climate around mass shootings impacted the work you have been doing?
Well, there’s definitely been an increase in school shootings and workplace shootings, but violence is kind of up all over the place.
The thing that strikes me is this whole active shooter problem that we have here in the US has basically spurred and spawned and created this immense school safety industry where everyone is selling metal detectors and processes and all this other stuff.
It’s become a really big business and one thing that I can say from my perspective is that most people don’t really have an understanding of who these offenders are. Everybody is getting metal detectors and bulletproof glass and they’re focusing on visitor logs and they’re adding fencing and everything around their perimeter and doing all this target hoarding stuff.
What we fail to see is that in the school environment, the majority of the attacks are not going to happen from someone that you don’t know, it’s going to come from within. In fact, it’s going to specifically come from either a current or former student.
So if the overwhelming majority of the problem is people that you know and people that you love, why are we spending all of our resources focusing on the small percentage of the problem, which is that stranger, that crazed guy coming in?
Even in the workplace, employees and former employees make up the majority of the threat.
When you’re thinking about school safety, school security, when you’re thinking about prevention, I think you have to have an understanding of the probabilities.
The second thing that we have to pay attention to is: why do these people choose to kill people?
TCR: How do you sum up the motivations of active shooters in your work?
You have to think back and understand behavioral science, understand the behavior of these offenders. What we find Is that almost always, and I would challenge you to find hardly any cases that don’t match this, almost always the motivation or the reason behind these attacks is not because they’re evil. It’s not because they’re mentally ill, it’s not because they have a gun, it’s only because they have a grievance that has become so bad in their mind that, that violence becomes the answer
They get to this situation where they’ve got a stressor in their life, such as bullying, for example. That’s one of the biggest triggers of this in terms of reasons why they get the grievance. They come to school, little Billy is bullying them. They tell Billy to stop it, Billy won’t stop it. He maybe goes to his mom and dad and they try to get Billy to stop it. He won’t stop it.
For whatever reason, over a period of time, this kid does everything he can to try to get this bullying stopped. But he can’t and it really is stressing him out, then it finally gets to the point, kind of the breaking point, where first off, he can’t cope with the situation anymore and number two, he doesn’t know where to turn for help, or he thinks there’s no help.
That’s when they go into crisis.
It is very similar to when I used to negotiate with a guy who maybe has lost his job and he comes home and his wife is gonna divorce him and he freaks out and he gets stressed out and then he takes her, he barricades her with a gun to her head, Then I show up and my opening line was always ‘Hi, I’m Greg with the FBI, are you okay?’ Because these people, as bad as they are in terms of what they’ve done, they’ve killed people, they’ve hurt people, they’ve raped people, they’re not good people, in terms of their behavior but you have to be able to understand that they’re in crisis, and it’s no different from that kid who’s being bullied in school.
So when trying to predict who’s going to be violent in a school you have to go from an understanding of, it will be a kid in crisis. If you have a method and a process to analyze that through behavior, then you can pretty much tell who is in need of help. You can then sit down and you can talk to that kid and use crisis intervention and suicide intervention techniques.
TCR: Could you tell me about the distinction you are making in using the language active killer as opposed to active shooter?
Well, the killer is going to find the weapon. It might be a gun but It also might be a knife and most people don’t realize that only about 60 percent of school active killers use guns. About 40 percent use edge weapons because they can’t get guns or don’t want to use guns. They prefer knives. So there’s another fallacy, that when you’re calling everybody an active shooter, you’re missing 40 percent of the problem. An active killer is in crisis and their will to kill is not going to go away because they can’t get the tool that they want.
Then, they collect the guns and the ammo and they do all this reparation. They go to the shooting ranges, they check the door locks in the school. Are they unlocked? What’s the best time of day to do this? And then, and only then, is what we see on TV right after it all happens.
What I’m trying to get across is there are two sides to this analysis and two sides to this safety issue, number one is the prevention side and that’s through understanding these behavioral patterns that every single kid goes through everyone, every shooter, man, woman, child, I don’t care if they’re elderly or they’re young in grade school.
Then if you miss the signs or don’t have the training to know what the signs are, or you just miss it, then you’re going to have to deal with the response piece.
The response piece is knowing how to escape the offender, knowing how to evade the offender, and knowing how to engage the offender if necessary.
TCR: What misconceptions have you seen, even from law enforcement on dealing with active killers?
VECCHI: There are a lot of misconceptions and misconceptions start with misunderstanding who the offender is that we’re dealing with.
So I think one general misconception is that somehow mental illness is correlated or is a causation of these shooters doing what they do.
And that’s simply not true. You can throw whatever statistic you want out there, but let’s say that you say 60 percent of them have some sort of mental illness or depression, Well, that means 40 percent don’t. It’s like when you say we have a 60 percent chance of rain, well, okay, we don’t want to do anything because it might rain.
Well, it’s 40 percent chance that it won’t rain, right? So there are two sides to that. There’s no evidence to suggest that mental illness is correlated with these attacks. Now, what I will tell you about mental illness is that it’s a perceptual thing. So you say somebody that’s psychotic, let’s say it’s a paranoid schizophrenic.
And this person truly believes that where they work is with the CIA and they’re after them and they hear voices and they have hallucinations and delusions. Well, the bottom line is that they feel threatened and they really truly believe that the CIA is after them and it becomes a grievance and so it’s not because of the mental illness that then they become violent as they go through those stages of Crisis and violent ideation and the research and planning and the preparation and all that stuff up to the attack.
