Thursday, 4:30 PM
Officials huddle with colleges
By Suzanne Smalley, GLOBE STAFF
Boston Police Department officials said Tuesday that they plan to train the area’s college security forces how to confront a shooter on campus, and also better educate city police about the layout of the city’s campuses.
A day after a student killed 32 people, then himself, at Virginia Tech, officials from state, Cambridge, and Boston police and Mayor Thomas M. Menino held a private meeting Tuesday with representatives from 19 Boston-area colleges. They focused on how they could improve security and better prepare for, or prevent, such a tragedy.
Also Tuesday, Governor Deval Patrick asked the state’s 29 public colleges to review their security measures and emergency response plans. Security teams and officials from the colleges are meetings to review their security.
‘‘What happened Tuesday in Virginia showed us that you can’t predict what might happen and you have to be adaptable,’’ said Drew O’Brien, the deputy chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Boston, who attended the meeting at Boston police headquarters. ‘‘You can always do things better, you can always be more thorough, you can always be more cooperative.’’
Officials from public and private colleges of all sizes, including Berklee College of Music, Boston University, Boston College, and Harvard University, attended Tuesday’s meeting.
Boston police will provide different kinds of training, depending on whether campus police are armed, police Commissioner Edward F. Davis said. Boston Police SWAT techniques will be shared with trained police officers at universities where officers are armed.
The bulk of the institutions present at Tuesday’s meeting have unarmed security forces, the commissioner said. Training for unarmed security guards will focus more on how to summon Boston police quickly and work collaboratively with them, officials said.
The commissioner said officials discussed Tuesday how to better use technology to get the word out after a campus shooting. It took more than two hours for officials at Virginia Tech to send an e-mail to students informing them of the initial shooting of two people that preceded the later rampage, which killed 30. That lag has become a focal point of inquiries, with some on campus wondering if people died unnecessarily because of the delay.
But Davis said campus police also need to be careful not to react too soon.
"Giving bad information is worse than giving no information, so we want to make sure that any communication that we give out is well thought out and appropriate," Davis said.
