David Riedman
speaker
40 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
David Riedman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Freakonomics Radio · How to Succeed at Failing, Part 1: The Chain of Events (Update) · 9 May 2025
podcast
It's very popular for organizations to describe themselves as learning cultures. We're going to experiment and we're going to try, but school safety can't be a learning culture. Because the consequences of a failure are too serious. That is David Riedman. I'm the founder of the K-12 school shooting database, and I'm the only person that records every shooting at a school in the United States.
What happened in the middle of college is I had been a volunteer in the fire department since I was 16 years old. And when Hurricane Katrina happened, I felt that I couldn't be sitting in a classroom amid this national disaster. So I took a leave of absence and I began working as a reservist for FEMA. And I worked on disaster recovery and response on New Orleans.
And that really started my career in emergency management, which then progressed into Homeland Security and Intelligence. I worked in various roles on the contractor side in just about every capacity from science and technology, through emergency planning, through intelligence analysis. monitoring watch centers. I'm really a Homeland Security generalist.
And ultimately, that led me to the Naval Postgraduate School, where this school shooting database project started.
The database is not just a date and a link. Each incident is carefully set up with standardized continuous or categorical variables. There are more than 200 different variables about the who, what, where, when, and how, but also information about the location, about the situation, the shooter, the victims, the weapons used, and then lots of pieces that add extra context within the school day.
You know, where in the school building did it occur? During what period of the school day? Morning classes? Lunch?
Oh, easily 40 hours a week. I get about 30 Google alerts every morning at 7 a.m. And the first 90 minutes to two hours of my day are going through those Google alerts and updating the database, transferring narrative data from a news report
into relational database data that's coded in all of these ways that can easily be sorted and filtered for just about any research question is a time-consuming process and something that is not easily automatable.
I think that it's both empirical based on looking at now thousands of incidents and philosophical because... As you said, leading up to that shooting, there's this causal chain of actions. And with each one of those actions, there's either a right or a wrong decision that could be made. And one right decision is going to break that chain.
I think an incident that really highlights this is the Oxford High School shooting in November 2021. This is in Michigan, Oxford Township, Michigan? In Michigan, yes. There were four students killed there. Seven wounded. But leading up to this attack, just four days prior, the parents bought the 15-year-old shooter a gun. And he posted pictures with it online.
And then the day prior to the attack, he was caught Googling bullets. His teacher saw this and made a report of it. So everyone should have been on high alert. Students were on high alert because there were rumors circulating of a school shooting. You get to the morning of the shooting. He's taking a test. And on the test, he draws a picture of himself committing a school shooting.
And the teacher sees this test, is clearly worried, and sends him to the guidance counselor's office. The guidance counselor could have called police or asked other staff members to come in and help her. The guidance counselor did a suicide screening, but she didn't interpret the results in a way that would show that he was actively suicidal.
The parents could have checked the gun safe before they got to the counselor's office and seen the gun was gone.
Yes, Stephen. He had the gun in his backpack. And at any point, one of those adults could have looked in his backpack. His parents also could have said that he has told them that he's actively suicidal. He was telling his parents, he was sending text messages saying that he was having bad thoughts. He wanted to hurt himself. He wanted to hurt others.
The guidance counselor then could have said, you know, he probably shouldn't go back to the classroom. Why doesn't he go for a formal mental health evaluation? And lastly, the parents could have thought, there are all of these different things going on here. Why don't we just take him home? But they didn't do that.
We have no national guidance and no common playbook for how a school official is supposed to react to the threat of a school shooting. It's on people to essentially make it up when they're in these circumstances. After 9-11,
The public was engaged in preventing terrorism, and we created the See Something, Say Something program, and every citizen knew what to look out for and knew what actions to take. And from taking those actions, you would immediately get the attention of federal resources that would make sure there was an investigation. That's what we've never done in the context of school shootings.
We tell people to look for red flags, but we haven't given clear action to take. And even if that action is taken, there's nothing to make sure that that information doesn't fall through the cracks. There's a multi-billion dollar school security industry. It's based on people's assertions about what they think might be good ideas for school security. But none of it is based on empirical evidence.
Even the procedures of run, hide, fight are not rooted in any empirical study. On the softer side, I think that we have proven strategies and systems that could really be a model for this. We have a national poison control center. It has a $25 million per year budget, which is a drop in the bucket compared to the estimated $3 billion that's being spent on physical security at schools.
And with the National Poison Control Center, if you're worried that you or someone you know has ingested a poison, you can call a number from anywhere in the country and get somebody on the phone. They have expert knowledge. They're going to give you immediate actions to take. they're gonna connect you to the resources that are around you, and they're gonna help you make a plan to get there.
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