Teachers at the Georgia high school where a shooter killed four people Wednesday pressed wearable panic buttons-in use just one week-to alert law enforcement officers that they were in danger.
Police responding to the incident might have been able to identify where the panic button user was located from maps on their cell phones of the sprawling Apalachee High campus, located about 40 miles northeast of Atlanta. The shooting suspect-a 14-year-old student at the high school-was indicted on four counts of murder and will be arraigned as an adult.
The system includes panic buttons, Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith told a news conference Wednesday.
"It alerts us to that there is an active situation at the school for whatever reason, and it was pressed," Smith said.
A school resource officer took the shooter into custody within six minutes of the first word of Wednesday's shooting, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. It was not clear whether that alert came from a panic button.
With the system, "there is no calling, there is no dispatching, they are moving directly towards that threat," said Mac Hardy of the National Association of School Resource Officers. "We can't say that lives were saved, but I would like to believe they were."
Flowers are seen at the Apalachee High School sign the day after a fatal shooting left four dead in Winder, Georgia, U.S. September 5, 2024. REUTERS/Elijah Nouvelage
Silent panic alarm systems that directly connect with law enforcement have become increasingly common in schools nationwide since the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in which 17 were killed," Hardy said, a former teacher and police officer who spent time working as a school resource officer.
Only a handful of U.S. states require or incentivize the systems, which have cost school districts millions. The type of reactive safety tactic is waiting on clear scientific evidence to guide their use, said Sonali Rajan, a professor at Columbia University and other school safety advocates.
She said that panic buttons are no replacement for a multi-layered, proactive approach that contains analyzing information online to detect threats, gun safety legislation, safe storage of firearms, and expanded access to mental health care.
"There is no one single solution," said Rajan, associate professor of health education at Columbia's Teachers College.
The panic buttons are like ID cards that work on the installed private networks at schools instead of cell signals. They are more likely to be on a staff member's person and are easy to use.
Sheriff Jud Smith said Apalachee High School had a system made by Centegix, one of a number of US companies now marketing such systems for home and workplace use. Centegix did not immediately respond to a request for comment.