Schools evaluate safety procedures

With yet another campus shooter taking the lives of five Northern Illinois University students late Thursday before killing himself, local colleges are forced to once again review their own safety procedures, and in the case of some schools, re-open the debate as to whether campus police should carry weapons.When campus attacks happen, they happen fast. Virginia Tech shooter Seung Hui Cho killed most of his victims in a 9-minute rampage inside a building in 2007. Thursday’s attacker, former NIU graduate student Steven Kazmierczak, concealed two weapons in a jacket and guitar case, burst into a lecture hall and shot 18 people in a matter of minutes, before taking his own life.When shots ring out, campus police are the closest to the scene, and are often forced to set up a perimeter and wait for armed local officials to respond to the call. According to State Police statistics, it can take SWAT teams up to 45 minutes to assemble and respond to a call.At Salem State College, campus police have been outfitted with weapons since 2006, as a first line of defense in a violent situation. The school was the only area institution that reported having armed campus police at an April 2007 forum hosted by District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett, and has since added a phone and text-message alert system for students in the event of an attack.The text message system, run by ConnectEd, the same company responsible for the reverse phone systems used by many public school districts in the area, including Lynn, allows students to receive messages in nine different ways if an attack is happening.The system has the capability of calling two cellular phones, two landlines, sending text messages to one phone, and alerting two email addresses if a campus attack were to take place.The system is designed to keep students in one safe place, while the armed campus police respond to the area of attack.”We have had the emergency text message system up and running in January,” said SSC Spokesman Jim Glynn. “It was actually in response to the Virginia Tech shooting. That told us that we had to communicate toward a variety of channels.”Salem State Campus Police are trained in the same police academy as municipal police officers, and also attend State Police active shooting training. According to Police Chief William Anglin, they have access to both shotguns and AR15 handguns, and wear bulletproof vests as part of their standard uniform.”We have 28 police officers all armed and trained with the exact same standards as every other department in the commonwealth,” he said. “We are also trained with the Massachusetts State Police in active shooter training. We go into the building and act out shooter scenarios, using air-light paintball-like guns. We are basically the police department for Salem State. We are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”Anglin said the department has recently added cameras to every building, along with 25 flat-screen televisions so they can broadcast in the case of an attack. The Chief said the school hopes to have every room on campus outfitted with an emergency phone device by next year.Take a trip down Route 1A to North Shore Community College, and things are not moving in the same direction. Unarmed guards roam the campus, and unlike SSC, police officers do not have police-issued vehicles with caged back seats.NSCC Spokesperson Peggy Justice said campus police attend the State Police Training Academy, but a decision to arm officers would have to come from the school’s Board of Trustees before a change can be made.The State Police do offer a program called State Police Special Tactical Operations (STOP) essentially free of charge to campus police, which NSCC officers do attend. That program offers 12 hours of classroom and mock-response drills, with the only cost coming for the price of blank ammunition – about $20.NSCC public safety officials were not available for comment Friday.While the thought of arming campus police was once contro