Technologies designed to prevent school shootings 'create security theater,' advocate says

After every major school shooting, there’s an influx of technology on the market that’s designed to try to stop them — or mitigate them, at least. That’s according to Ken Trump (no relation to the president).

Trump is president of the consulting firm National School Safety and Security Services, and he visited Phoenix on Thursday as the keynote speaker at the Arizona School Administrators School Safety & Security Summit.

“Whether that’s now drones flying through schools or bulletproof backpacks to AI weapons scanning, there seems to be a suggestion that anything and everything that vendors can create and put out there to schools,” Trump told The Show.

But while these technologies are well intentioned, he says they can miss the point. In fact, he told The Show, as ubiquitous as it seems like school shootings have become, active shooter situations are not schools’ most common problem.

“FBI statistics just came out with 2020-2024 showing that the most common school incidents reported across the country are assaults, students who are fighting,” Trump said. “And the weapons that are used most commonly are hands, feet and other personal items. And when there are weapons in school — which, the majority of kids do not carry any weapons at all — those weapons tend to be bladed weapons: knives, box cutters and razor blades.”

There was a tragic example of that here just this week, when one student died and another was injured after a stabbing in a classroom at Maryvale High School.

The newest idea in school security tech is drones in schools, like the ones championed by Texas startup Campus Guardian Angel. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis just approved a trial of the technology in three districts in his state.

The company says the remote-operated drones can be deployed within five seconds of a silent panic button being activated. And schools from Texas to Colorado are testing them out.

The Show spoke with Trump more about this kind of technology and what he advises school leaders to do beyond tech to keep their campuses safe.

Ken Trump

Full conversation

KEN TRUMP: The drones flying through the hallways are the latest, something that we really haven't heard a lot of in the past, but the devil's in the details of implementation. And we also have to remember that while one active shooter is one too many, active shooters are low probability, high impact occurrences. They are very rare.

And on a day to day basis, schools are dealing with a whole broad continuum of safety threats — bullying, aggressive behavior, fighting, non-custodial parent issues, weather and natural disasters, different types of scenarios that have nothing to do with school shootings. So we have to put this into perspective and put the budgets into perspective that schools have.

Schools need to conduct an assessment of threats, risks and vulnerabilities. Take a look at that broad continuum of threats and day to day safety issues, along with the extreme rare potential possibility of a shooter or other type of attack. And say, what's the most common threat? Where does that fit on the continuum and where does that match with the resources we have, which are limited to deal with those issues?

And drones and flying objects and AI weapons detections often serve to create security theater. It's something that schools can point to and tell parents in the community "we've done something." We have visible, tangible things that you can see up on the walls with more cameras and target hard doors. But it oftentimes creates an emotional security blanket that may make people feel safe, but may not necessarily actually make them safe.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, that's really interesting. So you, I understand, consult on lawsuits that come often after a school shooting. What kind of common threads do you see in the complaints?

TRUMP: While the facts and merits of school lawsuits after school security incidents vary, the common thread is that they involve allegations of failures of human factors, people, policies, procedures, training, communications systems, gaps, not allegations of alleged failures of security hardware, products and technology. Now the more we introduce those things, the target hardening measures into schools, I would forecast in the future that those will start coming into litigation as well with allegations of failure and lack of fidelity of implementation.

But it still comes down to people issue, and that's where we have this disconnect. We're throwing tons of money or advocating for throwing tons of money at target hardening the physical security measures. But yet the analysis after high profile school crime and violence incident shows that we need to be focusing on human factors, the people side.

GILGER: Right. So putting it into perspective is important. But I mean school shootings can be so devastating. It's understandable that schools want to do a lot to prevent them. You're saying this has less to do with technology infrastructure, more to do with people.

In that kind of vein, what should schools be investing in?

TRUMP: Well, school security technology and hardware can be a supplement to, but not a substitute for, the human factor and shouldn't be a skewed focus of schools' approaches. The first and best line of defense is a well trained, highly alert staff and student body. The number one way we find out about weapons plots and kids who plan to cause harm to themselves and others is when a kid comes forward and tells an adult that they trust.

And that's based upon relationships with trusted adults that they can go to and tell them when they know something because the kids know best if and when something's going to happen. They also need to invest in the kids themselves, social, emotional, mental health, supports for kids on the prevention side and to train our school staff on not just emergency plans and active shooters, but what to do in day to day security incidents.

There was one case that I worked on recently, a litigation case that involved a brutal assault on a student in a hallway. And at issue were the fact that there had been multiple threats made ahead of time, screenshotted from social media and provided to the school administrator by the parent. But they were not shared with the school resource officer in the building, only later given part of the story.

They could have potentially prevented that incident in my opinion. And so you here you have the disconnects, the communication, the people. And that's just one example of where the human piece comes in and where we need to invest in our training.

GILGER: Are you seeing schools do that? Is this something that's sort of the best practices or is this something that's pretty rare?

TRUMP: Well, there are a number of dynamics going on in this field. One is that there's very intense lobbying by the security hardware and products technology industry. The school security vendors right now are fueled with marketing on steroids, fueled by money with from private equity investments and in some cases driven by lobbyists who are going to state legislators to open up funding streams for schools to get grants to buy products they sell.

So these things are coming at school administrators. And what we hear from school leaders is that they can't cut through the noise. They don't know who to believe, they don't know whose marketing scheme and scams are credible versus something you need to run from. They don't know what works and what doesn't. And they're getting a lot of these mixed messages.

And what's happening is that school emergency plans and planning is becoming so complex that we're finding school emergency plans with 80 to 120 pages then and that nobody from the custodian to the school superintendent knows what the heck's in the plans they created. And in an emergency, no one's going to go find a binder or pull up an app with hundred pages of plans as they're trying to respond to an active incident if one occurs.

So we have to focus on three areas with training school staff. Number one, situational awareness. How to be active supervision, fully mindful when you're around kids in hallways, cafeterias across the campus.

Second part is to recognize abnormalities and patterns, which educators are great at doing. That car didn't belong. There's a stranger in a hallway. There's something in the back parking lot.

And then the third part, the hardest is cognitive decision making under stress. How do we make those decisions in the split second that we don't have time to call a principal, time to look at a manual and/r time to go through a big process with the committee. But we need to act now.