It was interesting to see this unfold in real-time on social media outlets.  It appeared that the Hokie community did not want to be defined by tragedy, but at the same time, the shooting of Officer Crouse would not have garnered so much publicity if Virginia Tech was synonymous with one of the deadliest school shootings in history.  In the aftermath of the shooting, Hokies have raised over 100,000 dollars for Officer Crouse’s family, and their outpouring of emotional disdain for being labeled the snake-bit school, to me, shows that there is an infrastructure in place (largely facilitated by social media) to insulate and protect the good name of Virginia Tech the school, and Hokies, the community. This insulation can really help the healing process for individual community members in the aftermath of tragedies like the shooting of Officer Crouse.  –Laura Agnich–

Framing the Incident

• Once a community experiences a critical incident of violence, any act of violence invokes a frame consistent with the that  former incident.
• This happens at the organizational level
• And at the individual level
• With the two reinforcing a spiral of panic
• VT case:  “Gunman on the loose” frame.
  • It appears that law enforcement may have known fairly early on that the gunman was dead
    • Body matched eyewitness description
    • Police saw “suspicious person” running toward “cage parking lot.”  When they arrived shortly thereafter, the person had suffered a fatal gunshot.
    • Gun next to the body.
    • Video from police officer’s car.
• Yet the gunman on the loose frame continued
• What seems to have been driving the continued law enforcement activity and campus lockdown were reports from around campus of shots being heard and “suspicious people.”
• Police would respond to these calls, investigate, and find them to be unrelated to the incident.  For example, “shots” were heard at the Performing Arts Building.  Investigators found that it was a garbage bin being dropped by a garbage truck.  Normal events are interpreted as a continuation of the crisis.
• False reports from around campus were reified twitters from collegiate times
• Bottom line: critical incidents alter community/organizational culture as well as individual cognitive schema. Unlike 4/16, there was an immediate frame available at the organizational and individual level.
• That frame resulted in misinterpretation of everyday activities (the dumpster)
• Also created solidarity for those who were not here on 4/16…
• They also had the same frame ready to deploy.
• At some level trauma is cumulative (curvilinear?)

Media Response

The prior critical incident here has “branded” VT as a traumatized community.  Any similar incident is immediately framed as “it happened again” (an actual headline on NBC news). Similar news coverage occurred during the summer when youth visiting campus reported they saw a possible gunman.  Consider this: had a police officer been shot on the campus of any other large state university, would the story be covered on the national news?  We doubt it.  Even if it was, it would be unlikely to be covered as “breaking news.”  Since it happened here, it was considered newsworthy.

Officer shootings on college campuses are rare, of course, but they do happen.  According to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund 22 officers have been killed in the line of duty on university or college campuses since 1963.  A very similar incident as happened yesterday occurred at the University of Nevada in 1998.  Although I cannot claim we did a complete search, we have been able to find no coverage of this event in any national or major news source.

So, using the CIA model, media and the environment/context interact to alter the perceived volume of the threat (red blob).  Since the environment has been “branded” as a site of a critical incident, the previous incident is immediately used to frame the current situation.  The media quickly adopts that frame and feeds it back to the community (all glued to their media and social media devices), thereby reinforcing the frame and amplifying the perception of the current crisis’ extent.  The polity (blue rectangle; in this case the Virginia Tech administration) responds to the perception of risk based on their past experience (e.g. VT sent an email alert within minutes of the report of a shooting.  Ironically, VT officials were in D.C. testifying before a federal judge in their appeal of the Dept. of Ed. fine that was imposed on the university for not informing the community in a “timely manner” on 4/16/2007).  This response obviously influences the managing of the crisis by the bureaucracy (green triangle; in this case, the police), which further highlights to the community the “emergency nature” of the event.  For example, the police responded with overwhelming force.  Literally dozens (possibly hundreds) of officers were on campus within minutes of the reported crime.  Although the police routinely respond with force when a fellow officer is shot, I am doubtful this many police would have descended on neighborhood in a large city if an officer had been shot there.

Thus, trauma is cumulative; once traumatized, the community responds to “normal crises” in a manner that exaggerates the risk, thereby further traumatizing the community.