Oakland Co. Attorney launches public health campaign to stop gun violence

Oakland County Attorney Karen McDonald announced Tuesday a public service campaign to address gun violence, including a toolkit of prevention tools in schools, workplaces and communities and a new foundation to lead that effort.

At a news conference at Oakland Schools, the county’s high school district, McDonald released the results of the year-long work of the Commission on Gun Violence, which she created in 2022 to address gun violence as a public health crisis in the wake of the high school attack in Oxford in November 2021

The committee includes first responders, health experts, local elected officials, faith leaders and people who have experienced gun violence. McDonald said he has developed an evidence-based, educational approach to gun violence that can be applied anywhere.

“This puts tools in the hands of everyday Michiganders. This is something we can solve,” McDonald told the gathered crowd, which included survivors of gun violence and parents of four children killed in the attack at an Oxford high school. “We can solve this problem. “It won’t be just one thing and it will take all of us.”

McDonald wrote in the report that “research and experience clearly show that there is no single curriculum, training, assessment, technological innovation, security system, tactical response, or legislative solution that will solve this problem. The prevention protocols established in this document are the beginning of the required multi-layered solution. We have collected data and research conducted by the best experts in the country.

The commission divided its work and recommendations into a 132-page report covering six areas: gun violence prevention, identifying people in crisis, threat assessment, early intervention and supporting survivors. McDonald said the foundation will urge communities, caregivers and policymakers to use the same effective strategies used to address other leading causes of child death, such as car accidents.

The District Attorney established the Commission to Address Gun Violence in September 2022 in response to the mass shooting at Oxford High School on November 30, 2021, which left four students dead and seven others injured. Her office sought and obtained convictions of three people linked to the attack – the killer and his parents.

McDonald also announced plans for the All of Us Foundation, established to prevent gun violence, and the launch of a website with curriculum designed for use in various communities, places of worship, health care facilities and communities. McDonald was joined at Tuesday’s event by Molly Darnell, a survivor of the Oxford shooting, and Deleah Sharp, a sister of a gun violence survivor and health care worker.

Darnell spoke at the event, detailing the day a student gunman fired multiple shots into the school door and struck a teacher in the shoulder, six inches from her heart. Crying, Darnell told the audience she didn’t remember who she was before the shooting that permanently changed her life.

“This tragedy, like so many others, was preventable,” Darnell said. “Gun violence is nothing new. It has reached a tipping point in our communities.”

According to the document, the prevention protocols described in the report are the beginning of the required multi-layered solution and provide “a simple, validated threat assessment protocol that almost anyone can learn to administer.”

“We collected data and research conducted by leading experts in the country. We can learn what works best in each community and then apply the most effective approaches on a broader scale,” McDonald wrote in the document. “By acting together, we can save lives now and many more lives in the future. We can answer the questions we all have about how to keep our children safe. We can turn our concerns into practical, evidence-based tools and the one thing we all want more than anything else: to keep our children safe.”

The commission includes more than 20 people, including Buck Myre, father of Tate Myre, one of the four high school students killed in the Oxford attack; Det. Lt. Tim Willis of the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office; the mother of a student killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and the father of a man killed in the 2012 Aurora Theater shooting.

The Commission outlined eight steps for implementing behavioral risk assessment and management, followed by detailed recommendations for the establishment of a multidisciplinary risk assessment team for schools, communities, workplaces and higher education institutions. The advice includes who should be a key team member, definitions of prohibited and questionable behavior, and the development of a central reporting mechanism.

In addition to Myre, Steve St. attended the announcement. Juliana, Craig Shilling and Nicole Beausoleil, parents of the Oxford victims. Shilling, whose son Justin was killed in the attack, said the key to change is the new report and its recommendations for educating the general public about preventing gun violence.

“The value of information, that it is in one place and can be communicated to people, is crucial,” he said. “I plan to use my foundation to make this happen. This is very necessary. This is a crisis situation. Education is a great way to deal with this.”

The report indicated that since OK2SAY is the only statewide reporting system and is used exclusively in schools, there is a need for a statewide reporting system that can be used across a broad spectrum of organizations, including schools, but also employers and employees, religious organizations, and entities government and private.

There are no laws requiring Michigan schools to have threat assessment training, policies, teams or guidelines – all of which are designed to identify and address behaviors before they escalate to violence.

An independent investigation by Guidepost Solutions found that such policies, which guide school staff on how to conduct threat assessments, were not in place at Oxford High School before the attack that killed four students and injured seven others.

A Guidepost investigative report published in October found that Oxford High School failed to provide sufficient training to threat assessment team members, especially school mental health specialists, many of whom were unaware of the district’s threat assessment process, which had been established many times. years before the attack. .

In K-12 public schools across the country, threat assessment policies represent a patchwork of research-based approaches to assessing and managing behavioral threats. One of the training models is the Guidelines for Comprehensive Assessment of Threats at School; another is done through the National Threat Assessment Center, which is part of the US Secret Service.

According to Everytown For Gun Safety, nine states require school threat assessment teams, and Michigan is not one of them.