The recent shooting at Northern Illinois University could leave professors, faculty and staff members uncertain of how to prevent or handle a crisis situation. Such is the case for Marcia Prior-Miller, associate professor of journalism and mass communication.

“It was over the weekend, as I watched the continuing coverage of the DeKalb shootings, that I found myself thinking for the first time, ‘would I know how to deal with this if this were to happen in my own classroom?'” she said. “And the answer to myself was ‘no.'”

Iowa State has a threat assessment program in place to train faculty and staff to deal with critical situations.

Cmdr. Gene Deisinger of the ISU Police has been heading up a Critical Incident Response Team in training faculty and staff about how to diagnose, report and handle persons at risk of harming themselves or others since 1994. The main thrust of the voluntary training courses, he said, is not teaching physical self-defense or how to handle violent situations, but to help people become aware of those who may need help in their lives before they may hurt others.

Although Prior-Miller said she has not taken part in the sessions, recent events have made her more aware of her surroundings in the classroom setting. She said crisis prevention training would be ideal for her, since training for “tornados and fire” are the norm. Perhaps training crisis training should become the norm as well, she said.

“If there were a crisis, how would I deal with it? How would my students deal with it?” she said. “I had a new sense of needing to be aware of how to deal if this kind of thing were to happen. I probably need to have some kind of training.”

Deisinger said the demand for these sessions has peaks and valleys, and it is not unusual for the demand to spike after a high-profile incident. He also said the probability of “getting struck by lighting” is greater than the probability of a mass homicide on the scale of the shootings at NIU and Virginia Tech happening on a college campus, which is why these training sessions focus on early prevention of persons at risk of harming themselves or others.

“We have had training sessions available for faculty and staff for early identification of persons at risk,” he said. “We want to identify people who maybe at risk of harming others, harming themselves, show greatly diminished ability to take care of themselves or pose a significant disruption to the learning, living or work environment.”

The sessions also involve some defense techniques to be used in a crisis situation, such as verbal defusion and de-escalation. For facing an imminent threat, duck-and-cover and evacuation techniques are taught. Personal safety should take precedent in a crisis situation, he said.

Deisinger said the classes are not about profiling those who may be homicidal or self-harmful, but to teach how to report students who exhibit some exemplars of risk or to identify certain contexts that create problems. He said ISU Police maintains a centralized reporting mechanism for early identification and prevention. The centralized mechanism allows similar behaviors to be correlated across departments so a pattern of behaviors may be discerned, an individual treated and a crisis prevented.

“If there’s no one place for all that to come forward, then you have an incomplete picture about what’s going on [with a student],” he said. “Under the university’s Violence Free Campus Policy, ISU Police is the centralized reporting department. This program is not new to Iowa State.”

The police do not usually approach students under suspicion. Rather, a professor or a friend will be the first line of defense and, from there, counseling resources will be used to help the student, he said. Situations stemming from misunderstandings or harassment may be defused by this procedure as well. Prevention is the main tool used taught in the classes and put into practice, he said.

Deisinger said that prevention, although it is the best tool, may prove useless against someone who shows no signs of becoming homicidal.