Law enforcement and schools seek new ways to protect from mass shootings

DES MOINES, Iowa — Polk County Emergency Management held a lunch and learn Tuesday. While that might sound like a light-hearted gathering, the topic was serious. The gathering was to learn more about what is going on to protect schools, churches, and other large gatherings from mass shooting events.

At the Iowa Department of Public Safety Joseph Willoughby, a Criminal Intelligence Analyst with the Division of Intelligence and Fusion Center is working on ways to share information on any possible shootings. They’ve created an app called Safe and Sound, as a way to help people report any tips of a possible shooting.

“You can upload video videos and photos if it’s a social media thread or if there’s threats being communicated on there, we try to gather the URLs,” said Willoughby.

Willoughby said the state is working on the problem of swatting, fake 911 calls, which often come from out of state. Reports of threats made by air-dropping posts or photos can be taken more seriously because the people need to be nearby. They look at posts to see if a specific school or person is named. Often threats can be generic in nature, designed to cause panic, without giving real information.

At Des Moines Public Schools a task force of professional educators and law enforcement meet each Friday to keep on the same page about dealing with any possible threats.

“It really is a very diverse group of people we meet every Friday and it’s everywhere from the education side to the law-enforcement side everything between,” said Doug Richardson, Safety Specialist with Des Moines Public Schools. “Really, it kind of reinforces that community effort, if we’re going to get ahead of this thing or these things, that we’re dealing with. it’s going to take everybody not one simple little group.”

The Safe and Sound app saw a lot of tips after the school shooting in Perry in January.

“The week after Perry we saw quite a fall out in reporting not just through Safe and Sound, but what we saw throughout the state that was reported to us,” said Willoughby. “You know we had 17 tips just in the week after, on Safe and Sound, and then we had a little over a dozen, what I call, copycat threats in the week after Perry, where there’s a lot of social media threats going around.”

“We get these (threats) a lot I think we had two or three, just yesterday,” said Richardson. “They are coming from all over the place, all over the United States, they just get randomly sent to somebody on a Snapchat page, whatever next thing you know, it’s in our backyard.”

Des Moines and other schools also have a new radio system that enables communication with all branches of law enforcement. Des Moines Schools are considering installing the radios on school buses. That’s not just for to and from school, but also extra-curricular trips. On any given weekend, Des Moines would have some 20 busses scattered across the state. If something unplanned would happen, drivers would have a line of communication.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to who13.com.