Sheriff Slaughter Pitches a School Safety Plan for Montana
We hear a lot of talk about school safety at the national level, but then we never actually hear about legitimate efforts to enhance school safety- they simply use the tragedy of a school shooting to push gun control against law abiding citizens.
That's why it was so great to hear from a Montana Sheriff who is talking about an actual school safety plan. (h/t Randy Bogden for his great initial report)
Here's how I would summarize the plan coming from Cascade County Sheriff Jesse Slaughter: Having an armed guard, say a school resource officer, is great. But the downside to an armed guard is if a criminal or potential shooter knows who the good guy with a gun is, the criminal then knows who to target first. What if the potential shooter didn't know who the good guy with a gun was?
Sheriff Slaughter described his plan as being similar to the development of the Air Marshal program following the 9-11 terror attacks.
Sheriff Slaughter: What they did was they came up with a covert plan where they randomly are placed, using intelligence, using intel, which we're going to be using through our intel analysts as well- to place them on certain flights they feel are higher risks, or sometimes just randomly, to keep to keep the enemy's guessing basically. And that's exactly what we're going to do. We're going to have a program where we are going to use intel, and we're going to place these covert, armed- special services officers is what they'll be- in various schools throughout the county. The school will know but the general public won't really know what school they're at on any given day. We're also going to layer those and complement them with our school resource officers.
Here's the full audio with Sheriff Slaughter from a recent statewide radio interview on "Montana Talks with Aaron Flint."