Vermont Cops Traumatize Students With Surprise Fake Mass Shooting
That's a bad surprise!
A group of 20 students touring a police station in Burlington, Vermont, as part of their forensics class were possibly scarred for life on Wednesday when the cops went and staged a fake shooting of the sort in which kids these days have grown up fearing they will die. Fun!
According to witnesses, the students were listening to a detective deliver a presentation on crime-solving when they suddenly heard screaming. Two women ran into the room, followed by a man in a ski mask with a gun. What sounded like very real gunshots rang out as kids dove for the floor and tried to text their parents.
“I’m shaking and crying because I'm like, ‘Oh my god, I'm gonna get shot,’” one student told Seven Days Vermont. “It felt so real.”
The Burlington Police Department issued a statement saying that they had obtained approval from the school ahead of time and asked if the students would be okay with a fake mass shooting.
“I think these students will be fine with this simulation,” school staff responded, according to the statement. “We will give a heads up to parents and students.”
The students and their very-pissed-off parents say that they were not, in fact, given a heads up.
The school has since apologized and has offered the students counseling.
An email from the teachers to parents said that the officers said that they had done this experiment with adults and college students with great success.
“The detectives did apologize after they realized that the reenactment did not translate well to high school students,” they wrote, though it’s hard to imagine that the issue here is that they were teenagers. I can’t say I would have reacted any differently, were I surprised by a man in a ski mask holding a gun and pretending to shoot at me. That’s a bad surprise!
The point of the simulation was to teach the kids about the unreliability of witness statements, which is a very important thing to understand. However, there are ways to demonstrate that in a way that will not need to be followed up with years of therapy. For instance, there is the very famous 1974 Loftus and Palmer experiment, in which psychologists Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer showed subjects footage of car crashes and asked certain questions about the car crashes afterwards to demonstrate how “questioning techniques easily distort memory, and information acquired after an event can merge with original memory, causing inaccurate recall or reconstructive memory.”
It is, quite frankly, entirely baffling that the police would choose to go with this fake mass shooting when such a blueprint, created by actual psychologists who knew what they were doing, already exists. No fake gunshots necessary!
The incident comes on the heels of Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak reappointing Police Chief Jon Murad, who has long been deeply unpopular with Mulvaney-Stanak’s fellow progressives. Probably because of things like threatening to arrest doctors who treat gunshot victims and being horrible to female commissioners.
I, for one, also happen to prefer the kind of Murad that eliminates scars over the kind that causes them.
Mulvaney-Stanak says that this has not made her reconsider appointing Murad, though she does hope that the whole department can "reflect on why [the demonstration] was problematic."
The police are meant to meet with the students again today to talk about the incident, which I’m sure we all hope they can do without feeling the need to greet them with a bomb scare.
PREVIOUSLY:
I was just thinking back ... Daughter Land Shark graduated BU in 2022. She had shooter drills HER WHOLE EDUCATIONAL CAREER starting with kindergarten. And then, as a student teacher in Boston, she had them again.
Those students have never known a time when they weren't being trained to avoid getting shot. Think about that for a minute.
Remember the days when kids just went to school, and didn't have to worry about dying in a hail of gunfire?
This absolutely sickens me - we are fucking entire generations of young people.
I watched the doco on the Crumbley parents last night - my conclusion is gun worship in this country is completely out of control. We are being held hostage by a sick group of rich, powerful mutherfuckers - but we could break them if we as a society could just THINK logically for one goddamn second about weapons possession in this country.
FUCK!