Back To School Safety Check: Preventing Another School Shooting.
While many schools this time of year prepare for the return of K-12 students, many schools are unaware or give little thought to the concern of the fear of the police and how this may impact their school’s public safety. No one wants to witness or hear about another school shooting or gruesome violence in a public school. The fact of the matter is the fear of the police places a big wedge between students and safety officers, which leaves public safety threats unreported. This, in turn, makes it nearly impossible for safety officers to do their job well without the willingness of students to communicate or share information.
How Can Schools Address This Concern?
Anonymous crime reporting programs which promise to keep the reporter’s identity completely anonymous may incentivize students to speak up. This can be achieved through several mechanisms. One way to achieve a third-party anonymous crime reporting program is to contact Crime Stoppers USA and find a local program nearest your school. Typically, these programs have a website you can share with your students and staff; however, you likely will not receive a copy of the anonymous crime report. This method is free, but the drawback is less control. This means your school safety officer would have to wait until they obtain any knowledge concerning a threat, as the report would have to go through local police before it reaches the school’s safety officer resulting in lost response time.
Another solution is an internal anonymous crime reporting program through a third-party service which can give the school some control over the reports. Typically, this would allow the program administrator to receive a copy of each crime report without seeing the reporter’s identifying information. These can be promptly forwarded or sent directly to the school safety officer. Time-sensitive information is essential to law enforcement officials as they must respond rapidly to a threat or potential threat. This type of program is not free and would have to be approved and budgeted by the school board before enforcement. We offer a free resource you can implement today. Linking to our “Report Crime Now” widget-links offers a valuable resource with minimum effort and no additional budgeting from your board.
Select Anonymous Crime Reporting Programs Offer A Simple Low-Cost Solution for Your School
Anonymity protection is essential to people with capiophobia, which means reporting directly to a police officer will likely not happen. Anonymous crime reporting programs offer solutions to people with capiophobia, including students, staff, migrants, and the general public.
Things to Consider When Choosing an Anonymous Crime Reporting Program for Your School
Trust is necessary for a person living with capiophobia to come forward to report a crime or potential threat. Anonymity protection is essential and thus should be the focus when selecting an anonymous crime reporting program for your students or staff members. While many programs claim to offer anonymous crime reporting, they lack two essential components that give away the reporter’s identity. IP addresses and phone numbers link a reporter to their identity, which takes out the protection a capiophobe needs. Not only will this hinder the reporter from any cooperative assistance in the future, but it would rapidly place mistrust in the resource offered to students and the public. To learn more about our No More School Shootings initiative, please visit www.nomoreschoolshootings.org
Our capiophobia awareness and prevention program aims to educate the public about the fear of the police and promote a higher willingness to report potential threats or crimes accordingly. Public schools become aware of the phobia by educating student’s, staff and parents about capiophobia. A deeper understanding of the phobia can break the capiophobia sufferer’s resistance to reporting a crime or knowledge of a threat when needed.
Public schools can offer a free valuable resource to their school safety program by using all or parts of our Capiophobia Awareness and Prevention Program and adding the free anonymous crime reporting widget link (located in step 3 of the program) to your internal or external public school resource website. Adding the widget-links to your external website can also make it easier for people living with capiophobia to report a threat or a crime while taking full advantage of their anonymity protection.
Report Crimes In Your School, Church, Workplace, or Neighborhood Anonymously.
You can make a difference by reporting suspicious criminal activity to your local authority. Suppose you are afraid of the police or law enforcement and don’t want to report a crime directly to your local police authority. In that case, you can report suspicious criminal activity safely using any of our domestic or international privately owned anonymous crime reporting resources below.
Reporting anonymous crimes often leads to a more honest report of the crime from people living with capiophobia because they are not interacting directly with law enforcement, the trigger of the phobia itself.
Written By Mihaela Dorca on 07/29/2023. Copyright 2023. All Rights Reserved—last edited 8/04/2023.