Looking for trouble

More and more schools are trying to spot the potential killers in their midst. But what about the innocents?

April 17, 2000
Web posted at: 12:35 p.m. EDT (1635 GMT)

The grade-school drawing looked typically innocent, at least in its style. The subjects were two stick figures, one of them wearing a loopy smile. But the teacher in San Bernardino, Calif., who found it stowed in a student's desk was alarmed by the story line. One grinning stick figure wielded a gun. The other, frowning, had just been shot.

The sketch, from the hand of an eight-year-old with a penchant for nasty temper tantrums, was drawn only days after a six-year-old in Michigan fatally shot a classmate, so school officials decided to be on the safe side. They brought the drawing to the attention of Gary Underwood, chief of police for the city's public schools, who ran the child's case through the department's new computer "threat-assessment" program, called Mosaic-2000. With a battery of 42 questions--Is the student harassed by peers? Has the student recently experienced rejection?--Mosaic purports to calculate rough odds on whether a child will turn violent.

Long used by law-enforcement and government agencies to examine threats made against their personnel, Mosaic software is now being field-tested in about 20 public school districts from Jonesboro, Ark., to Los Angeles to Salem, Ore. In its assessment of the stick-figure artist, the program suggested that the boy shared several traits with past violent offenders and guided the school to put him in counseling and under close watch. "When those kids walked into Columbine with bombs, no one was expecting it," says Underwood. "We're now on alert if this child comes into school with a bulge in his pocket."

This is the level of vigilance in the American public school a year after Columbine. On average, it may be a safer place than ever--the number of school-associated violent deaths dropped 40% from 1997 through 1999--but it feels scarier with each new well-publicized shooting and threat. In the year since the Columbine massacre, understandably nervous school officials have cycled through a series of responses, from lock-down drills to see-through knapsacks, with the impulsiveness of seventh-graders buying the boy-band CD of the moment.

Now, though, administrators are quietly shifting their sights from metal detectors to "mental detectors." Commonly known as profilers, these programs aim to detect violence-prone kids before they act by comparing them to those who have already snapped. Investigators from Columbine and Jonesboro have tutored administrators across the U.S. on the telltale signs that in their cases went tragically undetected or unheeded. The FBI, which last fall circulated a 20-point "offender profile" culled from common characteristics of school shooters, will release a report on the topic next month. And the Secret Service, at work on its own study, is interviewing school shooters to see what makes them tick--and then explode.

Along with its findings, the Secret Service plans to give schools an instructional video and a set of probative questions. In addition, numerous questionnaires and checklists are being sold by private firms or drawn up by school officials themselves. One screening test for students is titled simply "Questions for Killers."

Support for the trouble-spotting approach is growing. Proponents contend it has systematically helped nail would-be assassins and mass killers in other settings. In a new poll by Time and the Discovery Channel, 53% of parents surveyed said they approve of such measures. But their kids are leery: 60% said they disapprove, fearing such programs could be used unfairly against students not prone to violence. A growing number of critics agree, contending that there is simply no reliable way to weed out the world's Dylans and Erics from their merely cranky classmates without trampling on privacy and constitutional rights in the process. "These programs treat children as suspects, not students," says Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Front and center in the debate is the controversial Mosaic-2000 program. Its creator, Gavin de Becker, 45, a Hollywood security consultant and author of the best-selling self-help book The Gift of Fear, works out of a windowless Los Angeles office festooned with gushing thanks from the likes of Goldie Hawn, Robert Redford--and the CIA. This last client speaks to de Becker's lesser-known line of work. For the past decade he has dispensed "artificial-intuition" software to police departments, Governors and even the U.S. Supreme Court. The programs rank numerically the danger posed by celebrity stalkers, angry employees or potential assassins by comparing their actions to those of known offenders.

A similar logic drives the new schoolhouse version of Mosaic. First, a child acts in a manner considered threatening--he draws a worrisome sketch or strikes another student. Then, out of the child's presence and without his or her knowledge, school psychologists, principals or police answer a list of multiple-choice questions drafted by de Becker and a committee including law-enforcement and education officials. (Sample queries: What is the student's demeanor toward authority figures? Has there recently been media attention to school shootings or other acts of violence? What is the student's home-life situation?) If the responses seem particularly troubling, a "trigger text" immediately pops up, prompting officials to contact law-enforcement or mental-health professionals. At the end of the exercise, the program computes whether the student has "few," "several" or "some" factors in common with violent perpetrators and a detailed report is printed out.

"Schools are doing all this same stuff anyway, but they're doing it willy-nilly," says de Becker. "Mosaic will give them the participation of experts in those high-stakes decisions." Those experts, however, remain a fiercely divided bunch. While some maintain that school shootings are simply too rare for sound comparisons to be drawn, others who have studied the case histories have found that the shooters share many key traits. "There's no one set of characteristics that can be ascribed to these shooters," cautions Bryan Vossekuil, who is leading the Secret Service's ongoing study. Perhaps the agency's most interesting finding so far is that the shooters rarely made public threats. Instead, they tended to confide their intentions to a few select peers.

There are more specific challenges to Mosaic's pedigree. The U.S. Marshals Service and the L.A. police department may swear by the earlier versions of Mosaic, but many psychologists insist it has not been through a proper scholarly review. Mike Furlong, a psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, recently test-drove the Mosaic-2000 program and concluded, "This is just a private firm asking America's schools to create an open experiment." De Becker says his method is scheduled to undergo two academic evaluations.

Many civil libertarians have a more pressing concern. They fear the program will single out or profile students who are simply maladjusted but not menacing. And because schools use Mosaic to study kids without their knowledge, they may never know they are under suspicion. De Becker says Mosaic is not used for what he calls "the p word"--profiling--but rather for "threat assessment." Students, he says, are not examined unless they single themselves out by making a threat. But in today's anxious classrooms, threats are often defined broadly. Phyllis Hodges, an assistant principal at Chicago's Von Steuben High School, used the program to examine a student who was constantly picked on by peers for being effeminate. He had made disturbing comments in the past--for example, he vowed he would hurt classmates--yet his offense this time was less clear-cut. He refused to hand in a test after his teacher called time. A run of his particulars through the Mosaic program indicated there was no immediate cause for concern.

Better that result, de Becker contends, than the more haphazard approach of a school district like Granite City, Ill., which has hand-crafted its own profiling policy. Students who exhibit certain risky behaviors--cursing, mood swings, writing about "the dark side of life"--can face expulsion or worse. In December, teachers in Granite City found a note by a student promising to "settle some scores." He was read his Miranda warning, arrested by the city police and suspended for 10 days. In the meantime, teachers investigating the matter found that the note was only the concoction, as superintendent Steve Balen puts it, "of a goofy freshman having fun."

Tales like that have begun to sway some policymakers. Last week the office of California Governor Gray Davis issued a report urging schools to proceed with caution on Mosaic, and other such programs. The U.S. Education Department is backing away from the checklist of warning signs it sent to every school in the nation in 1998. In a mass mailing this week, the department declares that relying on such lists can "harm children and waste resources." Instead, it counsels teachers and parents to use the much lower-tech and more labor-intensive approach of keeping their eyes and ears alert at all times, not only for overt threats but also for troubled students who need help.

That method seemed to do the trick last week in Lake Station, Ind., where a parent's call helped school officials head off an alleged plot by three first- grade girls to kill a classmate. "The answer is not going to come from just throwing something up on the computer," says Bill Modzeleski, head of the government's school-safety programs. "It's got to come from the teachers in classrooms who really know the problem kids."

Or there's the all-of-the-above approach embraced by schools in a district like Carroll County, Md. In the past year, they have adopted 25 safety initiatives, including a "red flags" profile of their own design. "The threats are way down, and the kids are learning," reports the director of pupil services, Cynthia Little. "They've even stopped saying 'I'm going to kill you.'" But have they stopped thinking it? --With reporting by Elaine Shannon/Washington

SURVEY: YOUTH VIOLENCE

THE PERCEPTION GAP

A year after Columbine, parents and teenagers hold strikingly different views on the problem of youth violence, according to a new poll by Time and the Discovery Channel in conjunction with the National Campaign Against Youth Violence. Fewer teens feel very safe from violence in schools today (33%) than shortly after the Columbine killings a year ago (42% in a similar poll). But more parents believe that teens feel safe in school today (45%) than felt that way last year (27%). Nearly a third of teens say they have witnessed a violent situation at school, while only 8% of parents think that's the case. About half of teens in the poll say they have been insulted or threatened in the past year, but only 22% of parents believe their kids have experienced that type of situation.

While 8 in 10 parents say they have talked with their kids about ways to protect themselves from violence, only 6 in 10 kids remember having such conversations. And while about half of parents wish they could talk more with their kids about this subject, only 18% of teens want more such talks. One reason may be that most parents encourage kids to stand up for themselves, while most kids are worried about the possible violent consequences. Two-thirds of parents believe it is nearly impossible for teens to walk away from an angry confrontation without being teased, but only 37% of teens agree. Both parents and teens believe that youth violence has increased in recent years, even though school-related violent deaths have been in decline. Extensive news coverage of school shootings may account for this misperception.