Prevention is a good thing
Focusing on Violence Before It Happens
By ERICA GOODE, NYT
LOS ANGELES — In the days after the elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn., Tony Beliz and his staff at the county’s mental health department here made a series of calls.
They checked in with a 16-year-old boy with a fondness for bomb-making chemicals who, two years before, told them, “I have to get rid of the bad people in this world,” and described a “special plan” he said he would put into action in a few years.
They called the mother of another teenager — they have nicknamed him “Jared Loughner,” after the man who shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson in 2011 — who was obsessed with weapons and killing, had access to firearms and had extensively researched school shootings.
They contacted a 20-year-old who in 2010 was fantasizing about killing members of his family and carrying out a shooting at school.
The young men had been brought to the attention of the School Threat Assessment Response Team program overseen by Dr. Beliz, one of the most intensive efforts in the nation to identify the potential for school violence and take steps to prevent it. The program, an unusual collaboration involving county mental health professionals, law enforcement agencies and schools, was developed by the Los Angeles Police Department in 2007, after the shooting rampage at Virginia Tech University, and was taken countywide in 2009 by Dr. Beliz, a deputy director of the mental health department.
(More here.)
LOS ANGELES — In the days after the elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn., Tony Beliz and his staff at the county’s mental health department here made a series of calls.
They checked in with a 16-year-old boy with a fondness for bomb-making chemicals who, two years before, told them, “I have to get rid of the bad people in this world,” and described a “special plan” he said he would put into action in a few years.
They called the mother of another teenager — they have nicknamed him “Jared Loughner,” after the man who shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson in 2011 — who was obsessed with weapons and killing, had access to firearms and had extensively researched school shootings.
They contacted a 20-year-old who in 2010 was fantasizing about killing members of his family and carrying out a shooting at school.
The young men had been brought to the attention of the School Threat Assessment Response Team program overseen by Dr. Beliz, one of the most intensive efforts in the nation to identify the potential for school violence and take steps to prevent it. The program, an unusual collaboration involving county mental health professionals, law enforcement agencies and schools, was developed by the Los Angeles Police Department in 2007, after the shooting rampage at Virginia Tech University, and was taken countywide in 2009 by Dr. Beliz, a deputy director of the mental health department.
(More here.)
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