The teachers are the ones who are going to face the gun. And they are thinking about that. I've talked to dozens and dozens of teachers through the years and every one of them, that's their biggest fear is that they won't be able to protect the children and they won't be able to get out of their classroom.
Katherine Schweit headed up the FBI’s active shooter program where she authored the bureau’s landmark research about mass shootings and how to best respond to save lives.
In the wake of the massacre of children and their teachers in Uvalde, Texas, school safety weighs heavily on the minds of teachers and students’ families.
Hello I’m investigative reporter Robert Riggs.
In this episode of True Crime Reporter®, we discuss why the number of mass shootings is spiking to the point that some parents are afraid to send their children to school.
In October of 1991, I covered the mass shooting at a crowded Luby’s Cafeteria in Kileen, Texas.
A lone gunman crashed his pickup truck through the front door of the restaurant. He proceeded to murder 23 people with two semi-automatic pistols before killing himself when confronted by police.
It was the mother of all mass killings in America, marking the start of an epidemic.
In September of 1999, I covered the mass shooting at the Wedgewood Baptist Church in Fort Worth and produced a profile of the mass killer with the assistance of retired profilers from the FBI.
I covered so many “critical incidents” in my reporting career that I was asked to serve on a study panel hosted by the Critical Incident Analysis Group at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. The public university was founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819.
The panel was assembled to study Threats To Symbols Of American Democracy.
It included the FBI case agent for the Columbine shootings and its high school principal.
The report prophetically predicted the future targets of the 9-11 hijackers. But that’s another story.
When it comes to mass killings, I’ve been there. I’ve looked one in the eye on Texas Death Row. It’s the episode titled “Interview With The Mass Killer Known As The Terminator.” None of it will make sense. It certainly didn’t to me. And he told me that at the beginning.
The shootings are only getting worse. Especially when children are slaughtered.
No one understands this epidemic better than Katharine Schweit who spent 20 years with the FBI as a Special Agent Executive and as a U.S. prosecutor.
In the years after the massacre of 20 school children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary in New Town, Connecticut in December of 2012, the FBI spent more than 30 million dollars teaching police how to persistently pursue efforts to neutralize a shooter even if only one officer is present.
Yet, police in Uvalde, Texas waited 78 minutes before confronting the gunman at Robb Elementary School. The Director of the Texas Department of Public Safety called it the “wrong decision, period.”
The murders reflect a disturbing pattern. Six of the nine deadliest mass shootings in the United States since 2018 were committed by men who were 21 or younger.
Who is doing this? Why are they doing it? Can we tell when it is going to happen? How do we intervene?
Do our children need to go to school in fortresses?
Katharine Schweit answers some of those questions in her book, Stop The Killing – How to End the Mass Shooting Crisis.
Katherine Schweidt
The teachers are the ones who are going to face the gun, and they are thinking about that. I've talked to dozens and dozens of teachers through the years, and every one of them-that's their biggest fear-is that they won't be able to protect the children, and they won't be able to get out of their classroom.
Robert Riggs
Catherine Schweit headed up the FBI's active shooter program, where she authored the bureau's landmark research about mass shootings and how to best respond to save lives in the wake of the massacre of children and their teachers in Uvalde, Texas. School safety weighs heavily on the minds of teachers and students' families. Hello, I'm investigative reporter Robert Riggs. In this episode of True Crime Reporter, we discuss why the number of mass shootings is spiking to the point that some parents are afraid to send their children to school. In October of 1991, I covered the mass shooting at a crowded Luby's cafeteria in Killeen, Texas. A lone gunman crashed his pickup truck through the front door of the restaurant. He got out and proceeded to murder 23 people with two semi-automatic pistols before killing himself when confronted by police. It was the mother of all mass killings in America at that time-the start of an epidemic. In September of 1999, I covered the mass shooting at the Wedgewood Baptist Church in Fort Worth, and produced a profile of the mass killer with the assistance of retired profilers from the FBI. I covered so many critical incidents in my reporting career that I was asked to serve on a study panel hosted by the Critical Incident Analysis Group at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. The public university was founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819. The panel was assembled to study threats to symbols of American democracy. It included the FBI case agent for the Columbine school shootings and its high school principal. The report prophetically predicted the future targets of the 9/11 hijackers, but that's another story. When it comes to mass killings, I've been there. I've looked one in the eye on Texas death row. It's the episode titled "Interviewed with a Mass Killer, known as the Terminator. None of it will make sense. Certainly didn't to me. And he told me that at the start of the interview. Well, the shootings are only getting worse, especially when children are slaughtered, no one understands this epidemic better than Catherine Schweit, who spent 20 years with the FBI as a special agent executive and as a U.S. prosecutor. In the years after the massacre of 20 school children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, in December of 2012, the FBI spent more than 30 million dollars teaching police how to persistently pursue efforts to neutralize a shooter, even if only one officer is present. Yet, police in Uvalde, Texas, waited 78 minutes before confronting the gunman at Robb Elementary School, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety called it the wrong decision. Period. The murders reflect a disturbing pattern. Six of the nine deadliest mass shootings in the United States since 2018 were committed by men who were 21 or younger? Who is doing this? Why are they doing it? Can we tell when it is going to happen? How do we intervene? Do our children need to go to school in fortresses? Catherine Schweid answers some of those questions in her book *Stop the Killing: How to End the Mass Shooting Crisis* Here's our conversation, Catherine. Will you define for our listeners as we start here how, in your work at the FBI, define for us the mass shooter versus the active shooter? Are they the same? Do they share the same characteristics? Let's start there.
Katherine Schweidt
That's a great place to start. So I'm glad you asked that because an active shooter is a person doing something. But when we often use the term mass shooting in in in mass media, when we're talking about it in any form of media, we're talking about an incident, so I think that's the first thing to remember: is that an active shooter is a person who's actively engaged, an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a in a crowded space, in a space where people are innocent, the innocent civilians are. So that's an active. Shooter. So when we talk about active shooters, it could be any number of people or no people killed. It's the concept that somebody is out trying to kill a bunch of people, and maybe they're a bad shot, and they maybe they wound 15 people, but they don't kill anybody. So they're not a killer. They're but they are an active shooter. So a mass shooting is very undefined, but it's it's it's undefined because there is no legal definition for it. Mass killing is three or more under federal law, but a mass shooting is just the term that you know everybody kind of uses in general in the media to talk about something bad that happened. But also researchers use that term mass shooting, and then they do research, and some might only research incidents that have two people or more killed, three people or more killed, four people or more killed. So a mass shooting is, you know, is is is is what happens.
Robert Riggs
So if we look at the Yavalli, Texas case, where all the school children and the two teachers were murdered, it starts. He's an active shooter, but at the conclusion, when you get the casualty numbers, he's a mass shooter, a mass killer.
Katherine Schweidt
Right, exactly. Right, yes. Under federal law, Investigative Assistance Act signed in January of 2013, a mass killing is three or more. So, under federal law, he's a mass killer. But and any of us would call that a mass casualty or a mass shooting incident.
Robert Riggs
I want to take you back to as your career in the FBI. You conducted what really is the landmark study on this. How did that study come about, and how did you approach it? And what were you doing before you did the study? Give our audience a little background of your experience.
Katherine Schweidt
Well, you know, I really I was in the FBI for 20 years, and before that, a prosecutor in Chicago. And when my when I was in the FBI, those first 15 years, I was doing primarily national security work, counterterrorism, counterintelligence. But when the Sandy Hook shooting happened, I was maybe in the hallway at the wrong time or the wrong place, as sometimes happens in FBI headquarters, and I was you know pulled over from the executive corridor, and they said you know we need an executive to lead this team. Can you create an active shooter program for us? Join this White House team of then Vice President Biden's office was plucking somebody from every federal agency that was relevant, and we need you to go over there and figure out what we can do, and we didn't really know what that what we can do was. But I began meeting every day with people from the Department of Education, Health and Human Services, Department of Justice, FEMA, of course, and of course DHS. So that's kind of where we started, and then the the research came as a product of that.
Robert Riggs
Let's talk about kind of the the research sample. You, how did you get it? I understand you looked at 160 incidents, and that you even reached out to some local law enforcement, including here in Texas.
Katherine Schweidt
Oh yeah, absolutely. When I started working with the people on this White House team, and you know the other federal agencies from the executive branch, really, I was the only law enforcement person in the crowd, and I think it really, I it was kind of an aha moment. Fell to me, you know, at night or on a weekend or something, that while we were busy discussing whether or not the number of mass shootings were increasing, and saying in arguing about whether or not it, you know, the media was making a sensation out of it, and the numbers weren't any worse. I realized the only one who could probably determine if the numbers were increasing, if the if the shootings were increasing, would be the FBI because we have access and we have the skill sets to do it. So what I did is I gathered together kind of a team of wonderful analysts and agents and and and I had two local law I had local law enforcement on my team a guy who had come in from California Highway Patrol and then also a guy from the Minnesota Hennepin County and they sheriff's office and they came in and helped me and what we did is we looked at every single research project we could find, reached out to our all of our offices, 56 FBI field offices, and said, "Can you go to your local departments and ask them have they had any incidents like this? Because what we wanted to do was to to pull the actual police reports, which had never been done before. All the research that had been done in the past had been done on open source data, which is really, really all that researchers and you know media has you know available to them. But we had law enforcement documents available, and law enforcement agencies were fantastic. Provided us with everything, and we were able to compile what I think is really the first you know research that really showed what we have, what we're facing in active shooters. Because I felt like there was no active shooter research. There was no research that really gave us this particular type of shooter, where he was going, what he was doing, even if it was a he. And so we picked out a handful of data points, maybe 13 or so, 12 data points. And said we're going to find these answers, and we came up with those answers for 160 of our incidents, and that gave us a lot to launch from, and a lot of researchers have used it since.
Robert Riggs
Can you kind of break that down of the findings, what you came up with, and particularly in the in school shootings?
Katherine Schweidt
Yeah, definitely. You know, I think some of the research results were kind of surprising because, for example, although school shootings get a lot of media coverage, almost half of the shootings were in places of business, so manufacturing plants, dentists' office, the hospital, but also the libraries and the movie theaters, and so really the biggest threat is in not in the schools; it's in in places of business. And the about a quarter of the incidents occurred in schools. And when we looked at the school incidents, and just you know, for for listeners, the others were in we we ticked off other areas like malls and open spaces and military facilities and government facilities, so so that there are a lesser amount, and even religious locations, because there's a lot of coverage of news coverage when something happens at a religious institution. But they really are few and far between compared to the shootings that occur in businesses, and so the schools, back to the schools, which was your question, in the school situations, we found that just a very small number occurred in elementary schools, and that the bulk of them, as you would expect, occurred in middle school or in high schools and in middle schools. The most in high schools, and the one of the surprising things for me is, you know nowadays, especially you know we're right after Uvalde, people are talking about hardening targets, but I look at it from a different perspective. There's nothing, there's never anything wrong about hardening a target, but remember this from our research that in the research, almost every high school shooter is a student at that school, almost every middle school shooter is a student at that school, so the children or the students already have access to their location. The circumstances that occur that are the most, you know, most extraordinary that we've heard about. Yvaldi is one of them. I think that the Sandy Hook shooting is another. Somebody who was just out of high school went back to shoot at a at an elementary school, but in fact, most of the school shootings are by middle school and high school students who go to school there, and that really speaks to, you know, how much do we spend on on hardening targets? How you know how hard do we make those door frames, and how much do we spend on prevention? Right? I mean, prevention has to be the key in those environments because those shooters are already inside, and and that's what we saw. Say, for instance, up at Oxford High School outside of Detroit, where I was born.
Robert Riggs
Let's let's try to talk about the profile now. I covered the Luby's cafeteria massacre here in the early '90s, in which a young man drove his pickup through the front door at lunchtime. The place was packed. Got out and just started executing people. We don't really still even know to this day the why of it. And then I covered a church shooting in Fort Worth later, and so I produced a series of reports on this, and I went to the academy group, and I bet you remember who they were. They were former behavioral science people from the FBI, based on those are our
Katherine Schweidt
guys. Yeah, they're great guys and gals. Yeah,
Robert Riggs
and one of the things, but we we talked ended up talking more about workplace shootings, or as a lot of people say, going postal, but they talked about stressors, and certainly in the church shooting here, when I brought him the information about the the shooter and how he lived and relationships and what was going on his life, you could see the stressors. Do you find that in the profile of all of these shooters, school or wherever?
Katherine Schweidt
Yeah, the stressors are there for sure, and I think the FBI research that was done a few years ago validated that the FBI behavioral, our behavioral team at FBI down at Quantico and CIRC took the information from our 160 shooters, and they went through the profiles, the material that they had for those individual shooters, and said how many? What what what do we know about them? And they identified 63, and then they kind of tore apart those 63 to look and see what they saw in terms of stressors, and they found that every single person had three to four stressors going on in their life. So when we look for one thing, and we say, "Oh, it must have been this. It could be that. But a lot of times, that one thing is really a trigger. So you might lose a job, and that's the trigger for what happens. But the stressors, the underlying stressors, are there, and those most common stressors are financial problems, problems. With partners, marital partners, or domestic partners, problems in your job, and mental health. Those are the four issues that the FBI identified as the most common stressors, and overlapping. And I think that's really important. It's overlapping.
Robert Riggs
One of the things that I saw in doing that story is that for the people that were around these fellow workers and students, there were signs. You know, they saw things, they heard things, but they never told anybody. Did your study get into that?
Katherine Schweidt
Absolutely. That same research that I was telling you about with the FBI, but also other research by Secret Service, other research, other research that's been done on individuals who are shooters and whether or not somebody knew or heard ahead of time. I'll tell you that research consistently shows that in the case of a high school shooter, 80 to 90% of the shooters leak their intent to somebody else, to one or more people, 80 to 90%-not just like a vague comment, a specific comment-and most people just discount it, right? Most people discount it. But when you talk about predicting factors, everybody who's a shooter moves on kind of a predictable pathway to violence, right? We know they have this idea. Then they plan and prepare. When they plan and prepare, that is buying the equipment, talking about it, convincing themselves they're going to do it, running surveillance, writing about it in their journal, but also buying, you know, bulletproof vests. Maybe turning themselves into the person they want to become, so maybe they stop taking medication. They shave their head. They give their belongings away because 30 to 40% of these people want to kill themselves. So there are so many outward signs that we have a tendency to kind of dismiss, and that's kind of a shame because if you think that a lot of these people are wanting to commit suicide, you could prevent your own child from committing suicide or your spouse from committing suicide if you intervened.
Robert Riggs
Do you see? You also see many of these are young males. Do you have a sense, or in the research, give you any hint as why they are so disaffected? Why they decide to to do this? And is it mental illness, or are there other things going on? Because you know, I've talked to some officers that are like the case in Tulsa recently, where the patient went in looking for the doctor because he had back pain, sort of suddenly like like a grievance killing. We're seeing in traffic. You know, you've pulled in front of me, we get out and have a gunfight.
Katherine Schweidt
Right, grievance collectors that we call them grievance collectors. So let me just go back a little bit. So in terms of age, the only demographic that's consistent about these shooters is male. 99% of them are male. The ones who they're in in the FBI's research over 21 years, I think there were 13 female shooters. Several of those came with a spouse or a domestic partner, but not all of them. The others were shooting in their own school, in their own places of business. So the average age of a shooter, when you look overall of an of this type of active shooter, is 35. Mean age 32. That makes sense when you think about how most of these occur in places of business and the grievances are often business related. I I think that I should have gotten that promotion. I'm mad at that guy who looked at me the wrong way. He took my parking spot. All those kinds of grievances that maybe are real or perceived, right? But then when you talk about somebody who is younger, we do see younger shooters who go back to the schools. They go back there because that's they're familiar with that. And when it when it comes to mental health, I would say this. And I'm not sure if I addressed everything you asked, but let me answer this about mental health. The challenge with mental health is that when people say these people all have mental health problems, a vast majority of people in the United States have some level of mental health wellness concerns over time in their lifetime. So, mental health itself and mental health care is not a predictive factor for us. Somebody who's taking medications for a mental health in mental health care is less inclined to be to go out and commit some sort of violent act. 4% of the people in the United States, if 4% of the the mass shootings in the United States are people who are have some mental health care underway, that's 96% that don't. So it's not a very predictive factor, and millions and millions of people who maybe are hesitant to get mental health care or don't want to talk about it-the mental health care that they're getting for maybe depression or anxiety because they feel like they're going to be tagged and people are going to think that they're that they're going to go out and kill people. So that's the challenge with mental health. It isn't that we don't always need better mental health care in the United States. I think that's, I think that that we do, but I think that to use it as a predictive factor is very difficult because by the time somebody gets to a point where they get to this point, of course, you know, I as as a former prosecutor, people would always say, well, how can somebody do that? My son would never do that. Well, he got to a point where he did, but it was he wasn't there before, so I don't know if that makes sense. But that's kind of how I try to explain mental health.
Robert Riggs
Are there predictive factors that are reliable?
Katherine Schweidt
There's no profile, and I think that's what people want is a checkbox of profile. And I say people want, but yeah, but you know, it just doesn't. It's because that's easy. But I think if you go back to look at what I was mentioning before about the stressors, the the predictive factors are when people have multiple stressors, and then things trigger it. And they and and truthfully, this is the United States. They have access to guns. I say that as a. I mean, I I was an Afghan for 20 years. I have a gun, and you know, I I know how to fire my firearms and and know how to use them, and and so it's not about the fact that we have guns and there are these stressors. It's a fact that we have stressors and guns are available, and so that just makes it more of a challenge in our country in terms of predictability, that's where I think things like you know maybe red flag laws, which we have right in 19 states, I think right now, people are looking for ways to see you know deal with somebody who's dealing with mental health wellness issues, and then maybe separate them temporarily from their weapons for their own safety and the safety of others around them.
Robert Riggs
Catherine, is this on the increase? What do the studies show?
Katherine Schweidt
Shootings, these types of shootings. Yes, yes, absolutely. A few weeks ago, I was having lunch with the guy who who took over my spot at the FBI, and he and where we were eating lunch, his phone went ping, and he said, "Oh, this study's released, and he said they had just that afternoon they had released the 2021 numbers for these types of shootings. So you know that research that we talked about early on. In the in the research, it was a 14 year study that we that that I co authored. And in the first seven years of the study, the average number of incidents a year was six incidents that fit into this methodology. These types of shootings and individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area. There were an average of six incidents a year. In the second seven years of the study, the second half of the study, there were 16 incidents a year, which I thought was crazy. 16 average, average of 16 incidents a year. So when I was at lunch last week and the numbers were released by the FBI in 2021, there were 61 incidents in a year.
Robert Riggs
Wow! Do we have any sense of what's driving it? Is it the pace of society? Is it you know?
Katherine Schweidt
I think you know it's going to take a while to pull the research, get some research done that gives us a little better information. But I think one thing that we have to layer on top of problems with, you know, think about financial problems. You know, we're in an economic downturn, domestic problems. We're in a volatile political world that we've been in for you know off and on for the last few years, that that makes people side one way or the other, that creates that kind of emotion. But then, you know, challenges with family and domestic partners, challenges in jobs. People are have lost their jobs. Think about what happened during the pandemic. When you overlay all of those stresses, overlay on top of all of those, a pandemic that upended everybody's world in terms of where they went to work, who they spend time with, you know, whether they were getting paid in their job, whether they could take their vacation and their time off to chill out and and chillax I think that's. Do I have any research that says that? No, but my 20 years of working, my years of looking back at 20 years on this, my 10 years of working on this pretty much full time tells me that it is the combination. I think we're just dealing with such an incredible combination of factors right now, and we have to make a conscious effort to change our ways. That otherwise we're not going to fix it.
Robert Riggs
Well, and then you know I see I've got friends I would never dream they would ever buy a gun, or even know how to shoot it, but are going out and buying them because they're afraid they're going to be executed in a restaurant.
Katherine Schweidt
It's crazy, you know. And during the pandemic, 7 million people who had never owned a gun bought a gun before. 5 million of those took a gun for the first time into a new home. Estimates are that that's 11 million more people exposed to a weapon in a home that had never been exposed to that, and you know everybody who's you know people who are listening who own guns and shoot guns regularly, they know what it takes to do that well, and somebody who buys a gun and then says. Yeah, I don't really know. I guess I'll just keep it in my purse or my bureau, and I'll just walk around with it because I'm afraid, and I'll put it in my glove box. They do not have the skills to carry that gun, and when they pull that gun out, because they want to be the good guy with a gun, they're going to get killed by a cop who thinks they're a bad guy with a gun, and that's my biggest fear about all these people who have no skills with a gun is they're going to pull out a gun, shoot at somebody. They're going to not hit the target they're wanting to hit. They're going to hit another innocent person. That's going to be two lives tragically ruined, and somebody's going to go to jail. It makes me so sad.
Robert Riggs
Well, another concern I have in before journalism, I was a staffer on a defense committee in Congress, and I got military training. I learned to shoot the M 16 and other weapons with the military, so I know the lethality and of them. But there is also that that moment of confrontation and what's going to happen with adrenaline and motor skills and stuff. That's the other concern because if you haven't been in that situation, you know you're liable to shoot innocent people. Right. That's just so. You mentioned that report that earlier that you were sitting. Was it the the day that came out, or was it the next day that in Uvalde, the Robb Elementary mass shooting. The very next day, Uvalde was the
Katherine Schweidt
very next day. Yeah, I just want to make a point about what you were just saying about the adrenaline. I I completely agree with you, and I think that people who buy a gun because they're suddenly afraid have no idea how volatile that situation is. You know, two thirds of of the firearms deaths last year were suicide, and and most of those are, the majority of suicides are, rural males in their 40s and 50s. Weapons that are suddenly just available just scare me to pieces. I mean, research shows that weapons in a house cause more deaths. And again, nothing against Second Amendment rights. I teach a class on the Second Amendment for DePaul University's College of Law. I all I know all about the Second Amendment. I'm just talking about the lethality of having a gun in the hands of somebody who doesn't know what they're doing, or a gun that can be found. A third of the guns in the United States are unsecured right now. That's crazy, crazy. So I'm sorry, you were asking me about a study, but I just felt like you. I'm so agreeing with you about the adrenaline. They have no, they have no idea what they're facing.
Robert Riggs
Well, let let me just mention unsecured guns. So we we've had cases of teens or children getting unsecured guns, but we just had an incident here in Texas. It was a prison escapee, and he found a rural cabin where there were unsecured guns, and then he took them and he found a grandfather and his four children. He killed them with it, with them,
Katherine Schweidt
right?
Robert Riggs
And I just was like, folks, at least secure the guns, you know. Just for I, it just yeah,
Katherine Schweidt
it's such a simple thing, and I think that people underestimate. You know, I know a middle school child who killed somebody at his school, and and himself, and his parents had a gun, you know, in the cereal cupboard. They didn't. It was up high. They didn't think he could see it. They didn't think he could get to it. That happens all over the place. If you don't think your kids can find your guns, you know, as an agent, my guns were locked up all the time. And when my kids were little, they tried to talk me into giving them the gun safe combinations. Oh, mom, I can shoot somebody if they come in. I'm like, no, you can't. You're just bringing another gun to the fight.
Robert Riggs
Well, I'll share a similar story with you that hope will be instructive to our listeners. My dad was a World War II veteran. All my uncles, and they brought home guns from the war. You know that they from the battlefield, and my dad had them on the top shelf of his closet. And you know, you're don't you ever touch anything up there. You know, and I'm a little kid. I can't tell you the number of times I thought I would stare and I would think about I can get a chair, I can get up there, and I so wanted to do it. And fortunately, I feared him finding out more. But that's the kind of for a child. That's the fascination that exists.
Katherine Schweidt
I think kids think that first of all, kids are invincible, and you know, children can be teased and taught and taunted by their peers in a in a nice way or a cajoling way to say, "Let's just look at it. Let's just look at it. But the cases, those those cases where you know a child is left, a child finds a gun, and I mean, I took a gun out of a in a search once as an agent. I, you know, I took a handgun out of out of a shoebox in a grandma's closet, you know, where there were kids all over the house. Any kid could have opened that shoebox up, and it was there was a handgun and a bunch of rounds, and and I just think, how could the family ever deal with that? And the trauma that they will go through if some child is killed in their own home, or somebody is killed in their own home, and it happens, it happens. It's just so easy to secure a gun.
Robert Riggs
Well, let's go back to Yavaldi and go to the actions or inactions of some of the officers. Now, the one thing I learned in covering the FBI and the studies ever since Columbine was that whoever got there first was to go in, even if you were alone, a lone officer. You were to try to go in and intervene, but 78 minutes standing in a hallway. Do you have a sense of what happened? I mean, from and and that school had had training, two rounds of training.
Katherine Schweidt
They'd had more than two rounds for sure, and they had two recently, right? And we know that they they had the training. So let me put this caveat on it. There's a lot of great law enforcement in the United States, and I'm I'm trying to be a reason, a voice of reason for law enforcement. Law enforcement can't speak up right now, and I respect that. They have to wait until the DOJ after action is done, and they're going to gather all the facts together, and then we'll really know for sure who was where, when, and what they did. But we know from the chiefs the chiefs' interviews with the Texas Tribune, I believe it was, that he arrived there with two Uvalde police officers. He was from the Uvalde school district, consolidated or independent school district, and so he was there, and he came with two Uvalde police officers. And at one point, they were at the doorway. The subject shot through the doorway, according to the chief, and they did not return fire and they did not move forward. So, from a perspective of the FBI, and not speaking for the FBI, but as a person who created, you know, whose team created the FBI's active shooter program and the training that we've provided to law enforcement over the last 10 years, it is all that training, just like all the training since Columbine. I mean that's a marker before I started working on it. So for 20 years, 20 plus years, law enforcement has been trained to go to the shooter, whether you're one officer or more, and neutralize the shooter, understanding that if you are standing in the doorway and facing a high power rifle and you have a handgun and you can't see anything tactically, it's more complicated. But when I take that and I times it by 19 people, front doors, back doors, windows, a classroom door in between the two classrooms, and 19 people and more than an hour, I think there's going to be some explaining to do.
Robert Riggs
We're going to take a break for a short message from our sponsors, and we'll be back in a moment. We're back with former FBI agent Catherine Schweit, who ran the active shooter program and the landmark study at the bureau talking about mass shootings and active shooters, and when we left off, we were talking about Uvalde, which brings to the question about what are students and and teachers, what are they supposed to do? You know, we've and I've seen that change over the years. It you know, was it time that just hide, get under your desk, but that's changed and into flee and even fight. I saw a presentation by U.S. Marshals where they talked about you know besides barricading the door, fight, hit them with a fire extinguisher to come through the door, what have you. What do you know from your work is is the appropriate response.
Katherine Schweidt
So, based on based on the actual situations that have occurred, here's what I can tell you for sure: Everybody should know how to run, how to hide, and how to fight, so you can make a decision to do one or all of those as the circumstances change. So, when it comes to schools, I think in the United States we have very persistently kind of stuck to the hide part, which is the lockdown. Some schools do teach the run part. Some high schools teach the fight part to some extent. Right? We can't teach a second grader to to fight a guy with a high power weapon, and I understand that, but you can teach the adults to do that who are in the school. So just starting, you know, backwards. Let me just say this about fight: nobody wants to fight a person who's armed. But I'll tell you, in the research that we did at the FBI, there were 160 incidents, and in 21 of those incidents, which is 13 percent, 21 of those incidents, an unarmed civilian stopped the shooter successfully. One or more unarmed civilians. So, if you think you can't defeat somebody because they have a weapon, statistics say you're wrong. So you should have the confidence to know that. You can do that. You can do that a couple, you know, a few different ways. We've had an occasional teacher kind of talk down a student who who they know, but we've also had teachers killed by trying to talk down a student. But we've had situations in multiple areas, schools and businesses, where a shooter is kind of gang rushed by an individual, or by approaching from the side, or by more than one individual, things thrown at them, and all it takes is that moment to to get that person rattled. They lose concentration on what they're doing. The gun gets knocked out of their hand. They don't have time to change the magazine, and the shooting ends. And we saw that in 13% of the cases, way more than we saw when somebody tried to raise a gun and shoot them, a gun to gun. So, so the fight part is something that nobody wants to do, but everybody should be prepared to do it, and they should think to themselves, just like you know my dad did when he was in World War II. I want to go home to my family, and and if you want to go home to your family, that's why what law enforcement's taught, and that's what law enforcement thinks is, if I have to be in a firefight, if I have to fight for my life, I'm going to go home to my family. So that's kind of the fight part. The hide part is hide part is is lockdown, and we teach that pretty well in schools in a lot of places. You know, we've done it in different ways. We've hardened some targets. We've told kids to go line up against a wall. I think the one thing that I would want people to appreciate about hide is that if you think you're behind a wall and it's a wallboard, you're not protected. The difference between cover and concealment for law enforcement, those are common terms that we use tactically. But I think civilians doesn't hurt to know that cover means they can't see you. I mean, concealment means you can't see you, right? But cover means that you might not. They might not be able to get rounds to you. If you're hiding behind a big thick tree, if you're standing crouched behind the engine block at the front of your car, if you're behind a brick wall or a cement cinder block wall, you have better protection. If you're just on the other side of a glass window, or on the other side of a drywall, or you know, fabric particle board and particle board in your office, you're not protected, but you might be protected momentarily if they can't see you. So just keep that in mind about hide. So that really just leaves run, which is probably sometimes the most controversial when it comes to schools,
Robert Riggs
well, my wife is a teacher, and I can tell you every she's talked about every classroom she's in. She's thought long and hard about the windows and where they go, and what I have to break the windows out if I have to, and what do we have in here to shove in front of the door? She's she's thought it through.
Katherine Schweidt
I love that because I think teachers are thinking that through, even if school districts and administrators and policy writers are not. The teachers are the ones who are going to face the gun, and they are thinking about that. I've talked to dozens and dozens of teachers through the years, and every one of them-that's their biggest fear-is that they won't be able to protect the children, and they won't be able to get out of their classroom.
Robert Riggs
And then, in response here in Texas, the governor has talked about hardening schools and arming people in the schools. Now I can tell you, the thought of arming scares some teachers to death, and they are like, "Please don't ask me to do that, and they're afraid about wounding another child in it or something. The responsibility from your work, what's was what's the upside or downside?
Katherine Schweidt
So remember, I said earlier that middle school students and high school students shoot up their own school,
Robert Riggs
right?
Katherine Schweidt
So I think that one of the biggest challenges that is kind of untested, but I think we would all agree. And when you talk to teachers, my daughter is a middle school teacher. They didn't get into the business to kill their students, and I think that the teachers will not raise a gun to kill their student very easily. And I think that that will mean the teacher who raises a gun is going to be killed first. So that's the part that I fear about arming teachers. It is not what they were trained to do. They're trained to nurture, and that's why they got into that business.
Robert Riggs
So, do you see an answer now? My my wife is at a private school, well funded, and they've got two off duty police officers armed. One at the door. There's only one way in, and the other's always walking. And there were actually complaints by parents about it.
Katherine Schweidt
I think that's fear. You know, I I don't want to live in a world where we have to have armed guards walking around in schools. Nobody does. But if that, you know, there has been some research done in Virginia about school resource officers because there have been just lots of conversations about should we get rid of school resource officers. There's a massive research effort done out of UVA about SROs, and most of the people. And when I say most, it's because I don't have the numbers in front of me. But in the 70 percents, the teachers and the 70 percents, the teachers and the students said they felt more, they felt safer. With an SRO in the school, even when they didn't interact with them, and I thought that was interesting because I hadn't seen that type of research before. But I think that parents, you know, my my middle school teacher, my middle school teacher, who is my youngest daughter, she's very frank. She's she is just what you'd expect a 20-some year old. She's very frank, and she says, "I say to her when I when I talk to her about this, while I while I'm saying to her, 'How are you going to get out of your classroom? She told me. She just told me last week, 'Hey, I told my principal straight up. See those? He said he came into the my classroom the other day and he said, 'Wow, your classroom has a lot of windows. And she said, "Yeah. And if there's a shooter in the building, I'm going, and so are the students, and we're leaving, no matter what the district says. And I said, "Wow, what did he say about that? And she said, "He said okay,
Robert Riggs
yeah.
Katherine Schweidt
So, so she knows that, right? She knows she's going to go. She has a plan to get her kids out of that school. But I think that when I talked to her about parents, I said, "Well, you know how do? But what about the parents? She said, "You know what? I think parents should quit putting their neuroses on their kids. The kids are smart. The kids know it's a risk. The kids can understand fear. We talk to our kids about all kinds of scary things, and so it's the parents who are worried about somebody in the school who might be protecting the school, not the kids, and so let the kids study and safely in school. If that environment, if they feel, if that district, if that city, if that county, state feels they need that in their school, then then they do. But I will say this about hardening targets: whether it's by with it should be it should be a comprehensive picture. Doesn't have to be expensive. There are lots of things that you can do to make a school safer, to make a building safer. I don't think that when you do one thing or you let somebody come in and talk you into doing millions of dollars worth of you know alterations to your building that may not. Then you might be creating a false sense of security. So sit and think about when are the police going to be there? How fast can they be there? What kind of security do we have? Do we have an announcing system? Understand that 70% of these shootings end in five minutes or less. 35% of them two minutes or less. How can we keep our people safe for two minutes? That's that's what you need to focus on, and and I like the idea that you said your school has one entrance, but remember that somebody could get into that one entrance. So you know how do you deal with that?
Robert Riggs
Yeah, let me give you another perspective of young parents, and I'm going to give it straight from my own family. My son and daughter-in-law have got two children under 20 months. They're conservative believers in the Second Amendment. She's the daughter of a DEA agent. You know, they both know how to shoot. This has terrorized them. They're like, maybe we need to homeschool. They're so. Yeah, I heard
Katherine Schweidt
that. I heard that a lot after Oxford High School. Sorry, I'm up in Detroit. Yeah, go ahead.
Robert Riggs
What do you say? There's got to be a lot. Their friends are feeling the same way.
Katherine Schweidt
Yeah. Well, you know, one thing you could tell them is children are statistically way safer in schools. United States schools are. I wish I had those numbers in front of me, but you know, as they say, send me a text and I'll find the answer, or send me an email. United States schools are way safer than they were years ago. Way safer. Schools are very, very safe in the United States. So your children are much more likely to get harmed, injured, or even killed in in home, in your their home, in somebody else's home, in this in the mall, you know, in their neighborhood. Children are very safe in United States schools. These are such rare instances, but they get, understandably, a lot of coverage. And I think it's up to parents to, to not, again, kind of a little bit like my daughter said, don't put your fear into them. Fear is, you know, as Roosevelt said, all we have to fear is fear itself?
Robert Riggs
Yes.
Katherine Schweidt
When you create such a fearful situation, then your kids feel that fear. Instead, talk to them about it. You, we have we drill for fires every year in school. Every year, we have not lost a child to a fire in the United States since the 1950s in Chicago, but we still drill to fires. And kids aren't scared about a fire drill. Why not? Because we've normalized it. We've talked to them about it. I don't love that we have to normalize and talk about a potential shooting, but it's such a rare instance. When you look at the numbers over the last 20 years, there's been a couple of shootings in elementary schools. So the kids are safe.
Robert Riggs
One other thing that, as a reporter, I saw coming out of the findings of these shootings is that you shouldn't identify the shooter. You shouldn't put their picture up. That it fuels others. And yesterday, here in a suburb of Dallas, you know, had an incident at a at summer camp at a school. But yet, and you've. You saw the shooter's picture and name everywhere.
Katherine Schweidt
I was really frustrated about that. I felt like we were right back at go when I saw those pictures continually going up because I thought we had made such great progress. We started when I was at the FBI saying, "Please don't name the shooter. The Texas departments are very-they-they were leading the way in terms of let's not name the shooter, let's not glorify them. And I'll tell you, research, independent research by universities here and outside the United States shows that's what we call a contagion factor. When you popularize the shooter in the shooter's name, within a within there's two different research projects that I that I'm aware of specifically about that contagion factor. That when we talk about a shooter and we kind of give them him his glory days, then in the next 10 days there will be three more shootings, three more shootings. And if you went back 10 days after Uvalde, you'd see that. 10 days after the Buffalo subway shooting, you'd see that. 10 days after the Buffalo, 10 days after the New York grocery store shooting, 10 days every 10 days. That's what it takes. In the two weeks afterwards, we're going to see more shootings, and part of that is because we continue to talk and show the pictures of these individuals and talk about them. and And I'll tell you my theory on why we talk a lot about the shooters. It's really hard to talk about the victims because think about those little kids and what the police officers saw when they went into that classroom, and nobody wants to talk about that. And in the first hours, the victims aren't identified. So who can the media identify a potential shooter? So they're telling the story as they get it, and and and they're telling the story as they get it. I just wish that we would revert back to stop running guys' pictures, stop saying their name a bunch of times. I'm a big advocate of saying the shooter, the shooter, the shooter, the shooter.
Robert Riggs
Sure, and then you can give the background of, but you don't have to give them their moment of glory that's going to feed others. And we do see this, you know. And when I saw that come out, I thought, okay, here we go. There'll be two more shootings,
Katherine Schweidt
right? And and and that's what we saw. You know, I have a podcast. Unfortunate, shameless plug at this moment, but I'm saying it for this reason. I have a podcast called Stop the Killing, and my co-host Sarah Ferris is from London. And so, as you can imagine, our conversations go. She is gobsmacked about what goes on in the United States, but she's learned a lot to understand that it's not as simple as what she thinks it is. And at first, she was like, "Well, I'm I'm from New Zealand. Why are you guys even have guns? And so, you know, we've we've moved beyond that now. But one of the things about having that kind of conversation is that in the podcast we talk about what we learned about a shooter, and we never name him, but we talk about here are the things that happened before. Could you have seen these things, Sarah? Would you have notified police or somebody else if you had seen these things? So we can still talk about preventative measures and tell people here's what to look for, and here's what other people saw and maybe didn't report because they, you know, thought the kid was kidding or the guy was, you know, just talking smack. So, so even on the podcast, we're able to talk about how to prevent and what what we see as predictive factors, but not name somebody. You you should. There's no reason to name somebody unless we're on unless we're looking for them.
Robert Riggs
So I want to tell our listeners the name of your podcast to stop the killing, which is also the name of your book. In your book, do you draw any? I mean, this is a so complex, but do you draw any things that we can do that we could agree on that would help mitigate this? Now,
Katherine Schweidt
you know, I like to think I do. I mean, I hope I did. What I tried to do, what I tried to set the book up to be, is an explanation of, like, the first chapter is kind of like the conversation we're having now. What are all the issues, and and what do we worry about? But then, as I move through the book, I try to say, here's who we're looking for, and what indicators we know about them, you know all the research. What what are you looking for? And then, like the next chapter is who do you report it to, and what do you tell them? Because I think that's the critical part that I find is missing. A lot of people see the signals and don't report them, or they don't know where to report them, and those are the those are the things that I that I hope people can find. And and I've had I've had a pretty positive response, pretty positive response from people who said I understand the whole situation better now, and I feel like I know better. I'm more empowered. I know what to do.
Robert Riggs
And of course, we have responses such as, well, we've got a hard. All the schools, or we've got to ban guns, seize the guns, or mental health is a problem. Do you can you give me sort of a common sense approach of some of the things that we could do in this time of polarization?
Katherine Schweidt
Yeah, I think the one thing that I think one of the most important things you can do is recognize there's not a single answer.
Robert Riggs
Right.
Katherine Schweidt
I know we all want a single answer because that would help us. But I can tell you from working on this for years that single answers won't get us there. But I'm a big fan of aggregate of marginal gains, which actually is a terminology from a you know a Olympic bike you know, biking coach who said if he if he improves his team, you know, this much and this much and this much and this much in every way, his team could win the gold. And in fact, they did win the gold because he improved a little bit on the way they got their sleep and more on their health and more on their training and you know more on the you know water that they drank, whatever those things were. That's where we are right now. We need an aggregate of marginal gains. We need a little bit of improvements in tightening the screws a little bit on people who are getting guns who shouldn't be getting them. We need better mental health access for people who are slipping between the cracks. Remember that kids may have access to threat assessment teams and to school counselors. Then they graduate from school and they just fall off the radar. Yes, nobody's there to look after them, even if they're in college. But generally, nobody's there. And then we have 35-year-olds who are shooting up their place of business because they've been collecting grievances for 10 years. We need better, more trained people in our HR departments to understand how to look for people, just like EAP. Look for people who are under stress. Provide them resources when they have mental health issues, when they have financial issues, when they have marital issues. The comfort and the confidence to know that you can have somebody to go to is sometimes the difference, and so that also you know it's what you see when you if you belong to a church, for instance, or a synagogue, and you know you know that there's a pastor you can go to or somebody who's going to give you counseling. A lot of times we have individuals who people say, oh, these guys are just loners and they don't they're they're by themselves. You know they're not 6060 70% of them have family members, live with people, have jobs. So there are people who are surrounding them, maybe aren't seeing them, and and the hard part about that is that we all take the stress on our shoulders, and we just take on more and more stress, and that's what we do as adults. We just take on the stress and we figure out how to deal with it. But if you could take the stress off of somebody by not yelling at them because they cut you off in the grocery store line, or in the gas station line, or they changed lanes, you have no idea what somebody else is going through. And so your act of kindness could be something that turns, and that may seem slight, but I'll tell you, we have had shooters we've interviewed before who said that the principal said hello to me when I came into the school that day. So I decided that was not the day to shoot up the school.
Robert Riggs
Wow,
Katherine Schweidt
that we've seen that in places of employment. You know, when you talk about workplace violence, workplace violence is an incredibly OSHA says it's a 120 billion dollar cost annually to businesses. So, for a business to give somebody two weeks severance pay, to give them respect, and to not to not kick them out, but to give them a respectful way to get out that's not embarrassing. Find give them a couple weeks to find another job. It doesn't mean you have to give them access to your IT program, but find another way to let them go softly, let them go with dignity. You know, when we did the shooting, when we did the shooting research on that initial study, in the shootings that occurred in places of manufacturing plants, laws, and things like that, the places that I call businesses where the pedestrians don't travel through-not Target, right, not Walmart, right, right-but in places where businesses just have their own employees, of the shooters that occurred, shootings that occurred, all but one shooter was from the business, and in the shootings that we studied in that 20 years, in that 14 years, five of them were fired the day of the shooting. Do a better job of that. So everybody has to, everybody has to kind of Teddy Roosevelt it here. You have to do the job you can with the tools you have where you are. That that's what you have to do. If you're if you're an HR, if you're a teacher, if you're a parent, you know don't ignore the people around you because we know that in 70% or more, parents, peers, coworkers, spouses, domestic partners are the ones who see and hear what's going on and don't necessarily report it. And then afterwards, they have to live with that.
Robert Riggs
Well, Catherine, I know you're working on another book. What can we expect still in this genre, or are you going somewhere else?
Katherine Schweidt
Oh my gosh, nobody's asked me that question. I haven't told anybody what I'm working on. Well, I'm a nosy
Robert Riggs
reporter.
Katherine Schweidt
You are a nosy reporter. I am working on a book about exhuming hundreds of dead bodies to pull the DNA out of them to identify murder victims.
Robert Riggs
Okay, you're coming back for that one. That's right down our line. So, Catherine Schweit, thank you so much. Her book again is "Stop the Killing. I'm going to put links in our show notes to where you can find her and the book and other helpful information, Catherine. Thank you so much.
Katherine Schweidt
Thank you very much for the conversation. I hope everyone is safe. Be safe.
Robert Riggs
We want to be your favorite true crime podcast, so please recommend us to your friends and leave a review wherever you listen. If you want to receive updates and bonus interviews, join our true crime community at truecrimereporter.com. If you have suggestions or know of a case that we should look into, email us at fan at truecrimereporter.com. This podcast is a trademarked and copyrighted news organization based in Dallas, Texas. You can read more about our news team at truecrimereporter.com. Thanks for listening to our journey into darkness.
Katherine Schweit | Stop the Killing
FBI Study of Active Shooter Incidents in the U.S. 2000-2013
Active Shooter Resources
Katherine Schweit | Stop the Killing Podcast
