Training planned to improve campus security
Boston Police Department officials said yesterday that they plan to train the area's college security forces in how to confront a shooter on campus and to better educate city police about the layout of the city's campuses.
Officials from state, Cambridge, and Boston police and Mayor Thomas M. Menino met privately with representatives from 19 Boston-area colleges yesterday, a day after a student killed 32 people and himself at Virginia Tech. They focused on how they could improve security and better prepare for, or prevent, such a tragedy.
Also yesterday, 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 holding meetings to review their security.
"What happened yesterday 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 yesterday's meeting.
Boston police will provide different kinds of training, depending on whether campus police are armed, Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis said. SWAT techniques used by Boston police will be shared with trained police officers at universities where officers are armed.
Most of the institutions represented at yesterday'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.
Davis said he is "struggling with what the training's going to look like." The effort could grow in the coming days, he said, because yesterday's meeting was set up with less than 24 hours notice and some college officials from the area were unable to attend.
The commissioner said officials discussed yesterday 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 e-mail to students informing them of the initial shooting of two people that preceded the later rampage, which killed 30. That time 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.
Much of the focus will also be on prevention, he said. During the meeting, he said, a Boston University dean highlighted the importance of looking for warning signs of mental health problems.
Davis said campus officials need to look for many red flags that may be early indicators of a student heading toward a violent outburst. He said a major piece of the upcoming training will focus on teaching campus law enforcement how to recognize danger signs before it's too late to act.
The commissioner also said it is a priority to get more campuses connected to a police radio network shared by Boston area law enforcement agencies. The network charges an annual fee of about $750, but allows agencies to communicate when responding to a crisis.
UMass-Boston is not yet on the network, O'Brien said, but is looking for the money to buy equipment needed to join. He didn't say how much that equipment would cost.
James Vaznis and Megan Woolhouse of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Suzanne Smalley can be reached at ssmalley@globe.com. 
