A country still reeling from the tragic attack on a Tumbler Ridge school seems to have narrowly averted two other ones.
Last week, police arrested a teenage girl in Nova Scotia and a teenage boy in Manitoba for allegedly planning coordinated, murderous attacks on their local high schools. Local police were alerted to the threats by the international policing agency Interpol and the American FBI.
These incidents highlight the need for boosting safety in schools, specifically by proactively engaging with high-risk youth.
One key way to do this is by implementing — or reimplementing — school resource officer (SRO) programs in schools. SRO programs are partnerships between school boards and police, where police officers are assigned to a school or group of schools.
School resource officers’ duties vary, but can include teaching about safety, investigating possible criminal activity, advising school administrators and counselling students. Officers may help respond to students who are being bullied or have mental health concerns.
As Canadian Affairs reported after the Tumbler Ridge attack, SRO programs were commonplace in Canada until the 2010s and early 2020s, when many school boards cancelled them over concerns about their impact on marginalized and racialized students.
Now, the pendulum is swinging again. Amid reports of increased violence in schools, many school boards — including ones in Edmonton, Victoria, parts of Ontario and P.E.I. — have either implemented new SRO programs or reintroduced them.
This is the right move.
While officers in schools are not a “panacea” to prevent tragedies, research shows they can help “identify and work proactively with the kinds of kids who might end up being a more serious type [of risk],” said Irwin Cohen, a criminology professor at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, B.C.
The key is that these programs be done well. Schools and police must be clear about the roles of officers in schools, while also ensuring police are properly trained for those roles. As importantly, it means ensuring the right officers are placed in schools.
“It’s got to be people who are passionate about the non-enforcement side of working with young people,” Cohen rightly noted.
Another change we would urge governments to prioritize is online harms legislation.
In last week’s editorial, we wrote about the need for legislation to address the broadbased, population-level harms that social media is causing youth.
But there is also a need for laws to address the particularly hateful online content that can radicalize youth.
As Canadian Affairs reported this week, Canada’s intelligence agency has seen a rise in youth radicalization that is often occurring online.
It’s known that online platforms’ algorithms “reward” extreme content. They also allow geographically dispersed individuals with dangerous views to form communities that validate their ideas.
On top of this, the internet and AI chatbots are vast resources that can direct disturbed individuals to lethal weapons or counsel them on how to harm themselves or others.
The latter was evident in the Tumbler Ridge shooting. After the attack, it quickly came to light that the shooter’s conversations with ChatGPT revealed an intention to commit harm.
OpenAI has said it proactively shut down the account, and that the shooter’s conversations “did not identify credible and imminent planning that met our threshold to refer the matter to law enforcement.”
Perhaps this is true. But what is clear is the companies are in the driver’s seat here. They are the ones drawing the lines around what constitutes a threat and what to do about them if identified.
Where is the government in all this? Reacting, but not regulating.
The need for thoughtful regulation in this space is obvious. Chatbot conversations and internet searches raise complex questions around privacy and what constitutes criminal intent.
We urgently require debate and legislative action that puts governments in charge of these weighty questions.
Finally, we think the Tumbler Ridge tragedy has come and gone too quickly from the headlines.
The public was told the police had returned guns to the shooter’s home after they had previously been seized. While the RCMP has said the main firearm used in the mass shooting was not previously seized by the police, the RCMP has declined to release almost any further details about the incident.
Don’t members of the public — and Tumbler Ridge residents in particular — deserve to know more? What did police know about the shooter, having made previous visits to her home over mental health concerns? Were protocols followed? If so, do we need to revise our protocols to better prioritize community safety?
We are the first to agree with experts who say new laws should not be rushed out reactively in response to an isolated incident. But tragedies — both actual and averted — should and can be a launch point for further investigation and debate.
The quiet that has followed the Tumbler Ridge shooting is disquieting. We want a loud national conversation about what went wrong, and what governments plan to do differently.
